Editor’s note: This essay is an edited version of the homily delivered by Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J., at the funeral of Roger D. Haight, S.J., at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York on June 25, 2025.
“Peace be with you,” were Jesus’ first words to his disciples.
“Peace be with you,” were also Pope Leo XIV’s first words from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square after he was elected pope.
So too did Roger Haight, as he approached a death he had known for some time was coming, assure several of us that he was now at peace.
Roger, the least dogmatic of friends, spoke with a simple clarity that all but instructed you to follow suit. His teaching style was to guide you to see the benefits of peacefulness. But here he was, though short of breath: by example telling you what to do!
They are instructions hard to follow because the loss is so great. “Bereft” is how we feel. For over half a century, he had been contributing to theology and to the life and well-being of the church and God’s people and to a growing community of friends. Well before “public theology” became a watchword, he had set about rethinking the language of faith in the contemporary world—all with typical understatement and modesty.
Where to start with his profile? Perhaps the wry humor with which he spoke of “achieving the rank of private” at Xavier High School, or confessing his surprise, on graduating in 1954, that the Jesuits accepted him to their novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, where the socius to the master of novices told him one day, ”The Holy Spirit works in strange ways.”
Or the quiet generosity with which he volunteered to go the Philippines and study scholastic philosophy for three years before another three years of teaching (and coaching) “regency” at the Ateneo de Davao (1961-64). “They were three very good years,” he wrote later. And who knew that he directed the annual school play?
Roger then returned to the United States to begin his study of theology at Woodstock College in Maryland, where we were lucky to meet. After ordination to the priesthood in 1967, he was a star student at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, earning his doctorate in theology there in 1973. (In 2005, he was their alumnus of the year.)
But I remember a magical day in May 1978, when he and Anne Carr, B.V.M., and I drove from Chicago. Roger and Anne had become great friends at the University of Chicago, where she was on the faculty and was serving as associate dean and he was teaching at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. I was there on sabbatical. On that May day, we drove to Holland, Mich., for their annual Tulip Time Festival.
We arrived just in time for the grand Volksparade: It included high school bands from all the state, with ruddy-faced boys and radiant girls playing drums and tubas and clarinets and bugles gloriously. And then we went to the acres of tulip fields, full of the chalice-shaped flowers in ruby red, golden yellow and ivory white, cradled in their brilliant green leaves. It was hard to leave them and begin the journey home, stopping on the way for dinner.
I have come to realize that it was all an experience of transfiguration, experiencing God’s beautiful earth as it was meant to be. And that it then had a coda, when 20 years later, after Anne died, Roger excused himself from a group of us at her wake, saying, “I want to go and ask Anne to pray for me.”
Roger’s indefatigable, enterprising generosity, coupled with his sense of a global church, led him to teach for extended periods of time at graduate schools of theology in Manila—leaving there was the hardest decision of his life, he told me once—then Chicago; Toronto; Cambridge, Mass.; and, since 2004, Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He served also as a visiting professor in Pune, India; Lima, Peru; Nairobi, Kenya; and Centre Sèvres in Paris. Four different continents!
Major publications in the first decade of his career included several foundational books: The Experience and Language of Grace (1979); An Alternative Vision: An Interpretation of Liberation Theology (1985); and The Dynamics of Theology (1990).
His best-known book, Jesus Symbol of God, a study in Christology, attracted attention worldwide—including in Rome, where it caused, in Roger’s words, a “dust-up.” It was awarded the Catholic Publishing Association’s First Prize for Theology in 1999 and was much admired by Edward Schillebeeckx. The book—and Roger’s response to the “dust-up”—occasioned further responses by those who knew him.
It “opened up my theological worldview,” Lisa Sowle Cahill told me. Kristin Heyer remembers in an ecclesiology seminar in the early 2000s that a student expressed outrage at how the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith had treated Roger, and he gave by contrast a seemingly serene response and said, “You can’t let them get in here,” gesturing at his heart. M. Shawn Copeland spoke of his apophatic spiritual practice, and how “acceptance of silencing leads to poverty of spirit, humble embrace of our authentic being, proper self-love, and exposes the brutal limits of human finitude, life without guarantees or protections.”
Frank Clooney, S.J., has sagaciously said that he was always edified by Roger’s behavior when investigated, fired, silenced by the C.D.F.: no turn to the media, no angry denunciations, but nevertheless a steadfast refusal to give in to the pressure. He had written the best book he could, and could not, would not, back down. It showed a mix of humility and strength we should all strive for. “He found new ways,” Frank said, “to think and write and flourish for the next decades of his good life.”
In those next decades he turned to more historically centered publications, including three volumes of Christian Community in History (2004-8) as well as The Future of Christology (2003). He focused then on more contemporary versions of what was at once partly fundamental and partly interconfessional theology: Christian Spirituality for Seekers: Reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (2012) and Spirituality Seeking Theology (2014). In 2015, with his colleague at Union Theological Seminary, Paul Knitter, he published Jesus and Buddha: Friends in Conversation. The next year, he published Spiritual and Religious: Explorations for Seekers.
There was still more to come from his prolific pen: Faith and Evolution: A Grace-Filled Naturalism (2019) and then The Nature of Theology: Challenges, Frameworks, Basic Beliefs (2022), reprising and renewing themes from earlier years. In his new residence at Murray-Weigel Hall, he finally published Facing Race: The Gospel in an Ignatian Key (2024).
But that’s bibliography. It’s the man we mourn, the friend who signed his emails “Onward and Upward.” For those of us in the Catholic Theological Society of America, he gave the Presidential Address for our 50th anniversary in 1995 and then the homily for the virtual celebration of our 75th anniversary in 2020. The John Courtney Murray Award for Distinguished Theological Achievement was his in 2023.
But as Daniel Minch has written: “Most of all, he was kind.” Henry James once said that the most important thing in life was to be kind. And the second most important thing is to be kind. And the third most important thing is to be kind.
Dick Clifford, S.J., remembers how he and Roger were “at one in our devotion to ‘Hill Street Blues’.” Otto Hentz, S.J.., comments that “Roger played life the way he played poker: calm but adventurous, cool but determined, focused but good-humored.” And the Community for Bread and Justice, the liturgical community in N.J., counted on him to officiate at their liturgies for the last 16 years.
Tom Esselman, C.M., wrote the following to me:
Roger was a superb theologian, writer, professor and mentor. As my dissertation director he challenged me to think critically and develop a theological habit that has remained with me throughout my ministry. I am grateful beyond words for this good and thoughtful man—and for the many ways he continued to support his colleagues and students over the years. His passing is a great loss but his legacy and faith will live on.
Yes, his legacy and his faith.
For me, it was very personal. On the day that I turned in my dissertation to the dean’s office at the University of Muenster, I went directly to the train station and took the first train to Paris. (I hoped it was the train for Paris; I had no idea what I was really doing.) Once in the City of Light, I went to the residence where Roger was living with a community of diocesan priests while he finished his dissertation on French Modernism. Busy as he was, he “rehabilitated” me for a week and helped me regain my footing—with him as a joyous flaneur.
Yes, and if he died as a matter of fact on Juneteenth, the next day he published an article in America titled “Reimagining the Church.” Of course.
But it went deeper still. Teacher that he above all was, he told us in his last days: “I’ve had a full and fruitful life, a very satisfying life. It’s time. I’m at peace.” I was reminded of the words of Karl Rahner, who held that the greatest challenge for each of us is truly to accept our life. In doing just that, Roger Haight saw the day of his death “as a moment when he would surrender to an unknown future, the incomprehensible God.”
Roger, about to die, taught us that he was “dying into the incomprehensible mystery of God.”
Now he has not ended, but rather completed, his life. Now may he be, as Psalm 8 says, “crowned with glory and honor.” May he be enfolded in Christ, “the Morning Star who never sets, and who, coming back from death’s dominion, sheds his peaceful light on all the world.”
A great loss, dear friends. Yes. But still more: our incomparable friend’s witness that eternal peace awaits us all.
