(Lepanto Institute) — When the Association of United States Catholic Priests (AUSCP) gathered in San Antonio for its 2025 Assembly, it selected Father Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, as retreat master. Lepanto Institute reported on that decision in June, noting that the organization chose Rolheiser for his record of eroticized mysticism, doctrinal ambiguity, and soft-focus spirituality, making him the perfect voice for a group devoted to undermining Catholic teaching under the guise of spiritual language. Lepanto Institute further provided a recording of part of a meeting at that Assembly where priests openly discussed with Rolheiser everything from masturbation to same-sex “marriage” and gender dysphoria.
Now Rolheiser’s influence is once again on display. In a recent interview, celebrity pro-LGBT priest Fr. James Martin introduced him as “one of my favorite all-time spiritual authors” and praised his book Sacred Fire as a guide he returns to every year. This was not casual appreciation. Martin framed Rolheiser as one of his spiritual masters, a voice he reads annually, a guide for his own Jesuit vocation.
The AUSCP platforms Rolheiser because he spiritualizes dissent. Martin promotes him because he supplies the theology Martin needs to dress activism in mystical garb. The activist priest and the erotic mystic are not separate currents in the Church today. They are one stream, flowing together, and Martin himself points to Rolheiser as the deeper source from which his own program imbibes.
Spirituality without doctrine
Rolheiser wasted no time showing why the AUSCP and Martin find him so useful. When asked to define spirituality, he compared it to a game of soccer.
In his view, theology is like the rules of the game. They’re necessary boundaries you must acknowledge, but you don’t really dwell on them. Spirituality is the playing itself, the living, the improvisation. It’s the movement on the field that truly counts. According to this definition, the heart of Christian life isn’t doctrine, but experience. The rules may be useful, but they fade into the background once the whistle blows. This makes doctrine not the substance of faith but merely the scenery around it.
The move is subtle but devastating. Doctrine becomes external, a set of sidelines one might nod toward but need not dwell on. The “real game” is improvisational, centered on feeling and self-expression. Theology is reduced to a kind of white noise in the background, while “discipleship” becomes whatever a person happens to call prayerful.
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This is precisely what Pope St. Pius X identified in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. He warned these types “exercise all their ingenuity in diminishing the force and falsifying the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight” (§42). Once theology is stripped of binding authority, subjective experience becomes the new rule of faith. Pride, he explained, is the root of this error — the pride that “leads them to hold themselves up as the rule for all” and to demand a compromise between authority and liberty (§40).
Rolheiser’s soccer analogy is exactly that compromise. He pays lip service to doctrine as necessary boundaries, but elevates lived experience as the true essence of the spiritual life. This is pride masquerading as pastoral wisdom: the self sets itself above the deposit of faith, deciding how much weight truth deserves in the practice of Catholic life.
Catholic tradition knows nothing of this divorce. The Catechism describes Christian spirituality as “life in the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1699), and the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (Jn 14:17). Spirituality cannot be severed from theology, as it is revealed truth that gives content and direction to prayer. Rolheiser instead presents doctrine as the lifeless rulebook while spirituality is the exciting match, precisely the “spirit of novelty” that Pius X taught leads souls astray.
This is why Rolheiser appeals to Martin and the AUSCP. Martin’s activism requires a spirituality that feels rich but demands no doctrinal clarity. The AUSCP’s assemblies thrive on sentiment divorced from truth because it allows dissenters to remain comfortably “Catholic” while rejecting Catholic teaching. Rolheiser gives both what they need: a framework where rules are acknowledged but marginalized, while subjective experience reigns.
Chastity and celibacy reimagined
The same reductionism appears when Rolheiser turns to chastity and celibacy. Asked to define chastity, he does not speak of purity of heart or the successful integration of sexuality within the person, as the Catechism teaches (CCC 2337). Instead, he calls chastity “reverence,” a kind of respectful patience. He even suggests that the Me Too movement was, in its own way, a campaign for chastity. The virtue for him becomes a political slogan.
When asked about celibacy, Rolheiser leaned on Thomas Merton, who once called it “hell” — “a loneliness that God Himself condemned.” Rolheiser agreed, saying celibacy is “meant to be painful” and that the pain is somehow fruitful. He then added another layer, claiming that his own celibacy puts him in solidarity with “the poorest of the poor.” He explained that all the books ever written on celibacy do nothing to help one “go to bed alone at night,” but that this loneliness is a form of poverty which connects priests and religious with the millions of men and women who likewise “don’t have anybody.”
This is not Catholic theology.
First, Scripture never states that God condemns celibacy. In the Old Testament, God states, “it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18), pointing to man’s natural end in marriage and communion. In the New Testament, Jesus explicitly elevates celibacy as a supernatural calling by way of counsel: “For there are eunuchs, who were born so from their mother’s womb: and there are eunuchs, who were made so by men: and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. He that can take, let him take it” (Mt 19:12). Far from condemning it, the Lord proposes celibacy as a higher vocation, a deliberate forfeiture of the natural good of marriage for the supernatural good of undivided devotion to God. Saint Paul expounds upon this higher vocation clearly in 1 Corinthians 7.
In a word, celibacy is not a pathology. It is not misery sanctified. It is a gift and a sign for the Church and before the world, pointing to the life to come: “For in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven,” (Mt 22:30).
Second, celibacy is not directly related to poverty. Many poor people are not celibate, and many celibates are not materially poor. To conflate the two is to muddle both realities. Christ did not praise celibacy as an imitation of economic hardship, but as a radical consecration for the sake of the Kingdom. Rolheiser’s attempt to recast it as “solidarity with the poor” collapses a supernatural vocation into an unusual sociological coping strategy — a way of making sense of loneliness by comparing it to someone else’s misery.
Third, no one is forced into celibacy. Rolheiser, Merton, and every priest who complains about the “burden” of celibacy chose it freely. To lament it afterward is to accuse God of demanding a misery He never imposed. God does not call men to be bitter bachelors. He calls them to be joyful witnesses to the Kingdom, free to love as God loves with an undivided heart.
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What’s most telling is that Rolheiser would use Merton’s bleak verdict on celibacy as a launching pad for his own. Merton, far from a paragon of monastic fidelity, carried on an affair with a nineteen‑year‑old nurse while in his fifties, sneaking around his abbot. He also struggled for decades with alcohol dependence, from his indulgent prep‑school and college days (describing “quite a big bar bill” at seventeen and “going down to Washington… drunk, too, I might add”) to the lingering sense of spiritual deadness he confessed in his journals. In those same journals, he tried to spiritualize his lust, blurring the line between eros and sanctity rather than crucifying it in repentance. No tears of contrition followed in any of his known writings, unlike Augustine, who wept over his sins, or Mary of Egypt, who turned from prostitution to sanctity. Rolheiser picks up on the same pattern: celibacy becomes loneliness, chastity a mere courtesy, and vocation a pathology, rather than a participation in grace.
Here again we see the pattern Pope Pius X described in Pascendi: the sacrilegious falsification of the Church’s teaching by reducing supernatural realities to psychological categories. Celibacy becomes not a counsel of perfection but a problem to manage. Chastity is no longer purity but “reverence.” Both are drained of grace and filled with sentiment. And here again is why Martin treasures Rolheiser.
Martin has long portrayed Catholic teaching on sexuality as harsh, isolating, and unworkable, tacitly promoting almost every sexual perversion under the sun. Rolheiser gives Martin the vocabulary to frame his dissent with a spiritual aura. Together, they transform chastity into a mere courtesy and celibacy into an unnatural self-inflicted wound, rather than a virtue opposing one of the deadly sins and an evangelical counsel rooted in the Cross and looking toward the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Prayer redefined
Rolheiser presses the same theme when he speaks of prayer. He tells the story of Carlo Carretto, the Italian monk who spent twenty-four years in the desert, only to say later that his mother, who raised eleven children, was “more contemplative” than he was. From this, Rolheiser concludes that prayer can be as ordinary as life itself: raising kids, doing chores, and enduring the day. He even titled one of his books Domestic Monastery to make the point.
On the surface, this sounds comforting, even inspiring. Who wouldn’t want to hear that daily frustrations already count as contemplative prayer? But it is a distortion of Catholic teaching. The Church has never taught that ordinary duties by themselves constitute prayer. They can be sanctified only when consciously offered to God. It is not “my work is my prayer,” but “my work becomes prayer when I unite it to Christ.” Without that supernatural orientation, the daily grind remains just that — a grind.
St. Benedict taught that it is prayer which orders life, not life which defines prayer. The monk leaves his work unfinished when the bell rings, not because the work itself is a form of prayer, but because worship takes precedence. Rolheiser inverts the principle. The chores themselves become the bell. Prayer is lowered to the level of routine, rather than routine being elevated by prayer.
The same psychologizing appears when Rolheiser discusses suffering. He suggests that those experiencing depression may be better off avoiding prayer because it risks deepening their obsession. Instead, he recommends “distraction,” warning that time in the chapel may simply cause one to “marinate” in darkness. Once again, prayer becomes optional therapy, a tool to be used if it helps, set aside if it does not.
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Catholic tradition could not be clearer. In suffering, the Christian is invited to unite his wounds to Christ (Col 1:24; CCC 1505). The Psalms are filled with laments that become hope precisely because they are directed to God. Christ Himself prayed in agony at Gethsemane, not to distract Himself, but to conform His will to the Father. Rolheiser’s advice strips prayer of this supernatural character and reduces it to a kind of mood enhancer.
The saints confirm the opposite truth. St. Thérèse of Lisieux sanctified the ordinary by offering every act in love to Christ. Rolheiser erases the distinction and tells his audience their life is already contemplative, their distractions already sacred. It is not life raised by prayer, but prayer collapsed into therapy.
This is why Martin delights in it. By lowering the bar, Rolheiser provides cover for a spirituality that demands nothing and affirms everything. The AUSCP embraces the same message: Eucharistic adoration, confession, and the Rosary fade into the background, while “lived experience” takes center stage. What results is not Catholic spirituality, but therapeutic validation, devoid of the cross, and without that fountain of living water Christ alone gives, which springs up into life everlasting (cf. Jn 4:14).
Conclusion
The interview closed with a question about masculinity, and Rolheiser’s answer was as revealing as the rest. He made no mention of fatherhood, headship, or the Catholic tradition. Instead, he praised the mythopoetic men’s movement of Robert Bly and James Hillman — a wave of self-help groups, workshops, and retreats popular in the 1980s and 1990s — which claimed to put men “in touch with their true masculine soul.” In Rolheiser’s view, when men are “macho” or “toxic,” it is simply because they are “not true men.”
It all sounds harmless, but Christ, though mentioned performatively here and there throughout the interview, is effectively absent, while St. Joseph, the saints, and the virtues are nowhere in sight. Masculinity is not defined by sacrificial love in imitation of Christ, but by secular psychology and archetypes. This is the very substitution Pope Pius X warned against in Pascendi: novelty replacing tradition, psychology replacing theology, and sentiment replacing truth.
Placed together, the pattern is unmistakable. Rolheiser redefines spirituality as experience, prayer as a daily routine, suffering as a distraction, chastity as courtesy, celibacy as loneliness, and masculinity as myth. Martin amplifies it for his audience, hailing Rolheiser as one of his spiritual masters. The AUSCP platforms him because his soft-focus mysticism makes rebellion feel prayerful. Martin promotes him because his pseudo-theology lends a veneer of sanctity to activism.
Even their shared admiration for Thomas Merton fits the pattern. Merton, who scandalized his vocation with an affair with a nineteen-year-old nurse while in his fifties, tried to spiritualize his lust rather than repent. Rolheiser does the same in theory, presenting eros as the engine of sanctity and longing as the core of spirituality. By contrast, the saints preached the grace of God, repentance, and penance.
Here lies the true contrast. Where Catholic tradition insists on truth and sacrifice, Rolheiser and Martin offer therapy and affirmation. Where the saints bore the Cross, they prescribe distraction. Where doctrine gives form to prayer, they dissolve it into sentiment. The result is a spirituality that feels profound but empties the faith of substance; it is a species of Modernism in its most seductive form.
To celebrate Rolheiser, as Martin does, is to invite souls into the very current that St. Pius X warned against in Pascendi Dominici Gregis — a mortal stream that is alien to Scripture and foreign to Tradition. Faithful Catholics must recognize the pattern, reject the therapeutic, pseudo-mystical sentimentality, and believe “with divine and Catholic faith all those things contained in the word of God, written or handed on, that is, in the one deposit of faith entrusted to the Church,” (Can. 750). In this way, grace sanctifies longing, truth orders desire, and prayer unites the soul to Christ crucified.
Reprinted with permission from the Lepanto Institute.
