Today's Page · Saturday, July 25, 2026

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prudence foresight
The Psychology of Prohibition: France Bans Social Media for Teens Under 15
France's parliament passed a law on July 21 banning children under 15 from accessing social media, making it the first EU member state to enshrine such a restriction in national legislation. The vote — 243 to 2 in the Senate — positions France alongside Australia as one of the few countries willing to test whether legal prohibition can do what parental guidance and platform self-regulation have not. The psychology of prohibition, however, raises a harder question: when a morally neutral but potentially harmful activity is banned, does the ban change the behavior, or only the terrain on which it plays out?
redeemed
Sigrid Undset's Relatable Holiness: What Her Conversion Reveals About the Interior Life
A cause for canonization is now underway for Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian Nobel laureate who entered the Catholic Church at 42 and spent the rest of her life writing what she had already begun to live. Her fiction's moral architecture — persons made for transcendence, drawn into sin, slowly re-ordered through suffering — maps the same anthropological terrain that serious Catholic formation has always occupied.
fulfilled vocation
Switzerland Tells Its Priests They Are Not Essential. The Pastoral Record Says Otherwise.
Since June 1, 2026, Switzerland no longer exempts priests and monks from compulsory military service, on the explicit premise that religious ministry is no longer essential to civilian life. Nine clergy have already been called up. The reasoning behind the law matters more than the law itself.
justice worship
A Dominican Friar to Lead Colombia's National Training Service
Colombia's president-elect has appointed Ricardo Torres Castro, a Dominican friar with degrees in philosophy, theology, and business administration, to direct SENA, the country's vast public vocational training institution. The appointment revives a question older than the republic: what kind of person is actually qualified to govern an institution whose purpose is the welfare of the poor? Plato and Aquinas both argued the answer has less to do with credentials than with the prior orientation of the will.
charity
A Housing Bill, Catholic Charities, and the Preconditions of Human Flourishing
The U.S. House has passed a housing bill backed by Catholic Charities USA. The organization's support is not incidental to its mission — it is the mission expressed in legislative form, grounded in a Catholic anthropology that refuses to separate material conditions from psychological and spiritual wellbeing.

The Priest, Exorcist, and Celebrity: Has Curiosity Brought Out the Best in Spiritual Healing or Gotten the Best of Us?

Priests who perform exorcisms now command audiences in the millions, and Church leaders are openly debating whether that visibility serves the faithful or distorts the ministry. The more precise question is epistemological: what kind of knowing does an audience acquire when spectacle substitutes for formation? The Catholic tradition answers that question with tools sharper than media policy.

Jul 23, 2026 · 6 min read

Featured

"The Most Important Book I Ever Wrote Was My Marriage": Peter Kreeft on Grief and a Finished Life

At 89, philosopher Peter Kreeft describes riding home from the nursing home where his wife of 63 years had just died, weeping — and then breaking into wild laughter. He called the marriage a triumph. This article draws out what he means and why it holds.

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fulfilled vocation

Ordination Is Not a Remedy: The Ongoing Work of Accompaniment and Discernment

A University of Notre Dame study calls for stronger psychological screening and ongoing support in U.S. seminary formation, prioritizing vocational quality over filling vacant parishes. The argument from Catholic anthropology runs deeper than logistics: a man cannot give himself freely in celibate love if the psychological conditions for freedom have not been built. Excluding or deferring a struggling candidate is an act of mercy, not administrative efficiency.

redeemed

What Latin American Youth Are Really Hungry For — and Why Sicar Feeds It

The Sicar retreat, founded in Mexico by Mother María Elena Martínez, has spread across five Latin American countries and draws thousands of young adults each year. Its growth raises a question worth taking seriously: what need is it actually meeting? The answer runs deeper than evangelization programming — it touches the structural conditions under which young people can form an identity at all.

fulfilled vocation

Monks Live Longer: What a 16,600-Person Study Reveals About the Neuroscience of Monastic Life

The German-Austrian Monastery Study, tracking 9,569 nuns and 7,022 monks from 16 monasteries across more than a century of data, found that men in religious life live substantially longer than men in the general population — and that the sex-based longevity gap of 4.45 years nearly disappears inside the cloister. The neurological mechanisms behind that outcome, and what they mean for lay Catholic Christian life, are the subject of this article.

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Searching for Bliss, Meaning, and the Divine: What Trending Queries Reveal About Spiritual Hunger — June 29, 2026

Reddit's highest-engagement threads this week are cries of spiritual emergency: users asking whether life has inherent meaning, seeking non-bleak frameworks, and reporting bodily alienation and depression. Clinicians should expect presentations of existential vacuum, identity diffusion, and embodied distress clothed in spiritual language. The CCMMP's Created, Rational, and Volitional premises — alongside Augustine's anthropology — offer a native framework for meeting these clients.

Top stories

The Psychology of Prohibition: France Bans Social Media for Teens Under 15

Sigrid Undset's Relatable Holiness: What Her Conversion Reveals About the Interior Life

Switzerland Tells Its Priests They Are Not Essential. The Pastoral Record Says Otherwise.

A Dominican Friar to Lead Colombia's National Training Service

A Housing Bill, Catholic Charities, and the Preconditions of Human Flourishing

The Priest, Exorcist, and Celebrity: Has Curiosity Brought Out the Best in Spiritual Healing or Gotten the Best of Us?

More to read

Pope Leo XIV calls sport 'medicine for body and spirit'

The Contemplative Life as Psychological Witness: What Cloistered Prayer Tells Us About Human Flourishing

The Joy That Survives Everything: What St. Francis Teaches Us About Resilience and the Human Person

Top stories

The Psychology of Prohibition: France Bans Social Media for Teens Under 15

Sigrid Undset's Relatable Holiness: What Her Conversion Reveals About the Interior Life

Switzerland Tells Its Priests They Are Not Essential. The Pastoral Record Says Otherwise.

A Dominican Friar to Lead Colombia's National Training Service

A Housing Bill, Catholic Charities, and the Preconditions of Human Flourishing

Featured

"The Most Important Book I Ever Wrote Was My Marriage": Peter Kreeft on Grief and a Finished Life

Book reviews

DIARY OF ST. FAUSTINA - BURGUNDY LEATHER EDITION

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late

SHIFT YOUR LIFE: Let Go of Survival Mode, Seize Your Moment, and Build the Future You Were Created For

UMMA: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom & 100 Family Recipes

Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm

More from today

Ordination Is Not a Remedy: The Ongoing Work of Accompaniment and Discernment

What Latin American Youth Are Really Hungry For — and Why Sicar Feeds It

Monks Live Longer: What a 16,600-Person Study Reveals About the Neuroscience of Monastic Life

Trending Now

Searching for Bliss, Meaning, and the Divine: What Trending Queries Reveal About Spiritual Hunger — June 29, 2026

Blood Pressure Recalls, Mortality Salience, and the Body We Inhabit — June 23, 2026

Between Waking and Dreaming: Consciousness, Loss, and the Search for Inner Ground — June 19, 2026

The Inner Life Under Economic Pressure: Anxiety, Self-Regulation, and the Search for Stability — June 18, 2026