Governing from the Knees: What De la Espriella's Pilgrimage Teaches the Catholic Clinician

On June 26, 2026, Abelardo de la Espriella, president-elect of Colombia, traveled to the shrine of El Morro and consecrated his life, his public service, and the nation to the Virgin Mary. He then drove to La Guajira to pray for healthcare workers and the sick at the cathedral shrine of Our Lady of the Remedies, continued to the minor basilica of the Lord of Miracles in Sucre to pray for Colombia's security forces and every Colombian family, and concluded that first day at the shrine of St. Peter Claver in Cartagena, giving thanks and asking 'that we never lose sight of the most vulnerable, so that justice, solidarity, and dignity may reach every corner of the nation.' He called the journey 'the pilgrimage of hope for the miracle homeland.'[^1]

None of this was a campaign event. The Redemptorist missionary community administering the Lord of Miracles basilica issued a statement clarifying that the shrine had not endorsed any candidate and that de la Espriella's visit was personal, 'motivated by his prayer and devotion, just like that of any other pilgrim or member of the faithful.'[^1] He came as a believer, not a candidate. The distinction is the point.

For Catholic mental health professionals, de la Espriella's example poses a direct question. The clinician also occupies a position of sustained responsibility toward vulnerable people. The clinician also faces the risk of compartmentalizing faith into private hours while functioning as a secular technician during work. What would it look like to bring faith into that professional life, not as a violation of therapeutic neutrality, but as the interior architecture that makes sustained, virtuous care possible?

Five practices from de la Espriella's witness offer a starting point.

Name the people you serve before you serve them

At each shrine, de la Espriella named a specific group: the sick, the armed forces, the vulnerable, Colombian families. He did not pray generically for 'Colombia.' He individuated his intercession before he ever took office.[^1]

The clinician can do the same. Before a session, before a staffing meeting, before a difficult clinical decision, a brief, specific act of prayer that names the person in front of you — their suffering, their family, their particular struggle — is not a pious addition to the work. It is a formation of attention. It orients the practitioner toward the concrete human being rather than the diagnostic category. Thomas Aquinas held that prudence requires accurate perception of particulars; naming a person before God is one way to practice that perception.

Receive grief as formation rather than obstacle

De la Espriella has said publicly that the death of a loved one during the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed his embrace of the Catholic faith.[^1] The loss did not disqualify him from leadership; it formed the interior resources that now sustain it. His pilgrimage was an act of someone who has learned to carry weight without denial.

Clinicians encounter secondary traumatic stress, moral injury, and their own losses. The Catholic tradition does not ask the clinician to be invulnerable. It asks for the same thing de la Espriella demonstrated: the willingness to bring suffering into a relationship with God rather than manage it alone. A clinician who has made that integration is better equipped to accompany a client through theirs, not because the clinician has all the answers, but because they know the territory.

Bring your body into the practice of entrusting

De la Espriella did not post a prayer on social media and continue with his schedule. He traveled Colombia's geography, stood before specific images, and moved through physical space as an act of surrender. Catholic anthropology holds that the body participates in spiritual reality — the human person is not a mind that happens to have a body, but a unity in which both dimensions constitute the person.

For the clinician, this means the practices that form interior steadiness need to be embodied, not merely cognitive. Regular Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary, even a brief pause at the threshold of a clinic room — these engage the body in the act of entrusting. The Aparecida Document captures what happens when embodied piety is genuine: 'at shrines many pilgrims make decisions that mark their lives,' and this popular piety 'delicately permeates the personal existence of each believer.'[^3] Somatic psychology confirms what the tradition has known: posture, breath, and physical location participate in the formation of psychological states, not only their expression. A clinician who kneels before the workday is not performing religiosity; they are forming the habitual disposition — what Aquinas called habitus — that will carry them through the afternoon's most difficult session.

Maintain integrity between the private person and the public professional

The Redemptorist clarification was necessary because sacred space can be misused for political advantage. That de la Espriella accepted the clarification without public complaint — and continued the pilgrimage on the same terms — is itself a form of witness. He did not instrumentalize the shrine. The faith was real before the election, and it remained real after it.[^1]

For the clinician, integrity between private faith and professional conduct is not an optional add-on. As Haslam observes in his leadership work, 'failing to confront people quickly about small issues is a guarantee that they will become big issues.'[^2] The same logic applies internally. Small compromises of professional integrity — seeing a client as a billing unit, cutting short a difficult conversation, performing therapeutic presence without actual attention — accumulate. The clinician whose faith is genuinely operative in private life has a resource against that drift: regular examination of conscience, the sacrament of confession, and the accountability that comes from living inside a community of moral seriousness.

Practice hope as a theological virtue, not a motivational posture

De la Espriella wrote that he would continue 'with the conviction that, when a people places its destiny in God's hands, it always finds hope.'[^1] In Catholic theological tradition, hope is not optimism about outcomes. It is a stable orientation of the will toward a good that is real, promised, and not yet fully visible — a virtue infused at baptism and sustained through prayer and the sacraments.

Clinicians in Catholic settings often work with populations for whom secular optimism offers little: the chronically ill, the grieving, the person trapped in patterns they cannot break by willpower alone. What these clients need is not a therapist who can project confident outcomes, but one who can hold genuine hope in the theological sense — the quiet certainty that the person before them is held by a God who is trustworthy, regardless of the session's immediate results. That kind of hope cannot be faked and cannot be generated professionally. It is formed through the same practices de la Espriella enacted publicly: prayer, pilgrimage, entrusting.

Faith and professional excellence are not competitors. De la Espriella's pilgrimage before power was not a retreat from responsibility but its foundation. For the Catholic clinician, the same logic holds. The formation that happens in prayer, at shrines, on knees, in grief well-received and in joy well-offered, is precisely what makes the professional encounter with suffering coherent and sustainable. The question is not whether to integrate faith and work, but whether to do so with the same explicitness and seriousness that Colombia's president-elect brought to the threshold of governing 50 million people.

References

[^1]: Eduardo Berdejo, 'President-elect De la Espriella of Colombia visits Catholic shrines to pray for the nation,' EWTN News, June 29, 2026.

[^2]: Nathaniel Haslam, The Source and Summit of Leadership, p. 149: 'Failing to confront people quickly about small issues is a guarantee that they will become big issues.'

[^3]: Aparecida Document, V General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (2007), no. 261: 'At shrines many pilgrims make decisions that mark their lives. Popular piety delicately permeates the personal existence of each believer.'