Fr. Ronald Roberson, CSP, a leading expert and dialogue partner in Christian ecumenism, died January 19, at the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Fr. Roberson, 74, had been a member of the Paulist Fathers for 52 years and a priest for 47 years.
In August, 2023, he retired as associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, after 28 years working in that office.
Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and reared as a Methodist, Fr. Roberson became a Catholic after attending a Search retreat while studying political science at the University of Kansas. He began studies for the priesthood soon after.
“My eyes were opened to the light of Christian love and simultaneously to the beauty of the Catholic tradition,” he later wrote, according to the Paulist Fathers.
After ordination in 1977, he served in pastoral ministry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and then, in 1982, he began graduate studies at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. For his doctoral degree, which he earned in 1988, his thesis was on contemporary Romanian Orthodox ecclesiology.
From 1988 to 1992, he was a staff member at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, where he worked in relations with the Orthodox Christian Churches.
At the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, Fr. Roberson staffed dialogues on the national level with the Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Polish National Catholic, and Episcopal Churches, as well as the ecumenical initiative “Christian Churches Together in the USA.”
Trend toward unity
In 2005, he was named a Catholic member of the international dialogue between the Catholic Church and the six Oriental Orthodox Churches – the Eritrean Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India.
Describing this work in a 2018 interview, Fr. Roberson said it’s important to take the long view.
“It’s always steps forward and steps back,” he said. “The trend has been toward greater unity … Christians more and more are emphasizing what we have in common.”
Fr. Roberson’s book The Eastern Christian Churches is available for free on the website of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.
