Father Robert Spitzer's recent commentary in the National Catholic Register establishes that generative AI is not intrinsically evil but demands prudential restraint. For Catholic Christian clinicians, that framing opens a precise question: where does legitimate use end and clinical abdication begin? The answer turns on what therapy actually requires of a human person.
A new biography of Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevičius, SJ, recounts how a Jesuit priest edited an underground Catholic publication in Soviet Lithuania and survived six years in a strict-regime labor camp without surrendering his interior freedom. The account raises a question that extends well beyond Cold War history: what does it reveal about a person that no administrative coercion could dissolve his sense of purpose?
On August 10, 2026, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy, joining nine other states and the District of Columbia in removing all gestational limits. The celebration that followed raises a question the political commentary mostly sidesteps: does genuine human suffering justify any means taken to relieve it? Catholic Christian anthropology supplies a precise answer.
Child-Centered Play Therapy identifies a basic human need: every person requires at least one place where they can bring anger, sadness, and frustration and still be accepted. A priest whose prayer life and fraternal bonds cannot fill that role faces a structural crisis, not merely a personal failing — one that drives unmet needs toward unhealthy outlets.
A.A. Milne published the first Winnie-the-Pooh stories in October 1926, and a century later global publishers and readers are marking the anniversary. What keeps adults returning is something subtler than nostalgia: Milne wrote into the Wood itself an experience of being fully known and welcomed anyway.
A McGrath Institute report finds that 22% of U.S. bishops would ordain men with deeply rooted homosexual tendencies, a rate far above that of seminary rectors, formation directors, and vocation directors. The gap is not merely statistical — it reveals a broken chain of accountability in priestly formation that the 2005 Vatican Instruction was designed to prevent.
Armed gangs now control a substantial portion of Port-au-Prince, and the Church has become a deliberate target. Bishop Joseph Gontrand Décoste of Jérémie describes what remains when every forecast fails: not optimism, but hope — a posture that operates without safety and without denial of suffering. What Haiti's Catholic communities are doing right now clarifies a distinction that Catholic mental health and faith formation can no longer afford to blur.
Father Mike Schmitz, whose Bible in a Year podcast has reached one billion downloads, recently described a formation crisis in which he concluded the Church was wrong and he was right. His account of that reversal — and the unexpected joy it produced — maps a moral architecture that Catholic mental health and faith formation practitioners recognize as genuinely therapeutic. Presence + examines what that structure actually is.
Father Charles Sikorsky announced on August 12th that Divine Mercy University will move to the Catholic University of America campus in the summer of 2027. The relocation centers on O'Boyle Hall, currently home to Catholic University's school of psychology, which is now under renovation. The move builds on an existing clinical partnership between the two institutions.
Father Robert Spitzer's recent commentary in the National Catholic Register establishes that generative AI is not intrinsically evil but demands prudential restraint. For Catholic Christian clinicians, that framing opens a precise question: where does legitimate use end and clinical abdication begin? The answer turns on what therapy actually requires of a human person.
A new biography of Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevičius, SJ, recounts how a Jesuit priest edited an underground Catholic publication in Soviet Lithuania and survived six years in a strict-regime labor camp without surrendering his interior freedom. The account raises a question that extends well beyond Cold War history: what does it reveal about a person that no administrative coercion could dissolve his sense of purpose?
On August 10, 2026, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy, joining nine other states and the District of Columbia in removing all gestational limits. The celebration that followed raises a question the political commentary mostly sidesteps: does genuine human suffering justify any means taken to relieve it? Catholic Christian anthropology supplies a precise answer.
Child-Centered Play Therapy identifies a basic human need: every person requires at least one place where they can bring anger, sadness, and frustration and still be accepted. A priest whose prayer life and fraternal bonds cannot fill that role faces a structural crisis, not merely a personal failing — one that drives unmet needs toward unhealthy outlets.
A.A. Milne published the first Winnie-the-Pooh stories in October 1926, and a century later global publishers and readers are marking the anniversary. What keeps adults returning is something subtler than nostalgia: Milne wrote into the Wood itself an experience of being fully known and welcomed anyway.
Psychology calls it healing; Micah calls it returning to God. A recent commentary in the National Catholic Register on the prophet Micah's distillation of the Christian life opens a serious question about whether therapeutic healing that stops short of repentance can restore a person fully. The answer has direct consequences for Catholic mental health practice.
A parents' network in Hamburg documented 20 contradictions between their diocese's sex-education framework and Vatican teaching, sent the analysis to Rome, and received a formal response. The episode reframes who does the work of defending orthodoxy — and what that means for Catholic education today.
On August 22, 2026, Pope Leo XIV stood before pilgrims in the Basilica of San Marino and told young people that 'we only find authentic freedom in Jesus Christ.' The claim cuts against the modern assumption that freedom means the unimpeded execution of one's own will. The Christian tradition has long argued the opposite: that the self oriented toward God discovers a capacity for action that the self folded in on itself cannot reach.
McKenna West, a cardiac nurse and surrogate mother, gave birth to a boy she named Gabriel on August 12, 2026, after traveling to Texas to escape a demand that she abort him. The contracting biological parents are now suing her for $100,000. The case presses a question Catholic Christian anthropology answers plainly: the good of a person cannot be reduced to the preferences of those who commissioned that person's life.
Ninety-four percent of Cubans now live in extreme poverty, and eight out of 10 have skipped meals during the day. Cuban writer and Catholic layman Osvaldo Gallardo describes not only physical destitution but a collapse of meaning itself. Christian hope, rightly understood, answers that collapse not with passive waiting but with witness, advocacy, and material solidarity.