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.
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.
Pope Leo XIV's 2026 encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* declares it 'not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.' The argument is not merely technical but anthropological: autonomous weapons complete a long trajectory of moral distancing that removes the human will from the moment of execution entirely. The Catholic tradition insists that a conscience, not an algorithm, must bear the weight of lethal force.
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 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.
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.
On July 26, two men at a maximum-security penitentiary in Campo Grande, Brazil received baptism, Eucharist, and confirmation after two years of catechesis. Their story opens a practical question: what does Matthew 25's mandate to visit the imprisoned require, and how can Catholics support both prison ministry and the difficult transition back to public life?
A study published in Developmental Science by Leonard Konstantin Kulisch, Ana Lorena Domínguez Rojas, Silvia Schneider, and Babett Voigt tracked anxiety disorder rates across 70 countries over three decades and found that where religious faith declined as a childrearing value, youth anxiety rose. The protective effect operates at the level of the community, not the individual household. For Catholic Christian families, the data confirms what a sound anthropology of the person already predicted.
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.
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.
Pope Leo XIV's 2026 encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* declares it 'not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.' The argument is not merely technical but anthropological: autonomous weapons complete a long trajectory of moral distancing that removes the human will from the moment of execution entirely. The Catholic tradition insists that a conscience, not an algorithm, must bear the weight of lethal force.
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.
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.