Where Science Meets Faith: Catholic Scientists Convene to Explore Human Sexuality and the Cosmos

The Society of Catholic Scientists is gathering near Chicago this June to tackle two of the most profound questions facing human understanding: the nature of human sexuality and the future of the universe. Scheduled for June 5 through 7 at Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, the 2026 annual conference brings together researchers, theologians, and practitioners prepared to hold both empirical rigor and metaphysical depth in productive tension. For those working in Catholic mental health, positive psychology, and faith-integrated wellness, this gathering carries a significance that extends well beyond the lecture hall.

Reported by the National Catholic Register, the conference signals something that deserves careful attention: the Catholic intellectual tradition is not retreating from the hard sciences. It is pressing further in.

The Convergence That Has Always Been Possible

There is a familiar caricature in popular discourse — science and religion as perpetual adversaries, each claiming territory the other cannot enter. That narrative, however, has always struggled against the historical record. Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian friar. Georges Lemaître, the priest-physicist, proposed what became the Big Bang theory. The Society of Catholic Scientists, founded in 2016 by physicist Stephen Barr, represents a generation of researchers who have simply refused the false choice.

The 2026 conference topics — human sexuality and the future of the universe — are not random. Together, they span the intimate and the cosmic, the deeply personal and the grandly impersonal. That range is itself instructive. A framework serious about the human person cannot afford to be selective. It must be willing to ask what a person is, in full, from the biology of embodied identity to the eschatological horizon against which any life is ultimately understood.

This is precisely the territory that the Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person has always occupied.

Human Sexuality as a Scientific and Anthropological Question

Few subjects in contemporary discourse generate more heat and less light than human sexuality. The cultural pressure to treat it as a purely social construct, or conversely as a simple biological binary with no psychological complexity, leaves clinicians, educators, and pastoral workers without the conceptual tools they need. The Society of Catholic Scientists' decision to foreground this topic reflects a growing recognition that the question requires more than ideology — it requires science.

From the standpoint of Catholic mental health, the treatment of human sexuality is inseparable from the treatment of the whole person. The Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person holds that the human being is a unity of body, soul, intellect, will, and relational capacity — none of these dimensions reducible to another. When a person presents in a clinical or pastoral context with questions about identity, embodiment, or sexual integration, the most useful response is not a slogan. It is a framework sophisticated enough to honor the biological, the psychological, and the spiritual dimensions simultaneously.

Research in positive psychology increasingly supports what that model has long maintained: identity coherence, understood as a stable, integrated sense of who one is across different domains of life, is a robust predictor of psychological wellbeing. Studies in the field of self-determination theory, for instance, consistently show that when individuals experience their values, their bodies, and their relational choices as aligned, reported flourishing increases substantially. The Catholic tradition does not simply assert this alignment as a moral preference. It proposes it as a description of what the human person is built for.

Catholic scientists entering this conversation are not attempting to impose doctrine on data. They are doing something more intellectually serious: bringing a comprehensive anthropology to bear on questions that reductive frameworks have not fully answered.

The Future of the Universe and the Horizon of Hope

The second major theme of the conference, the future of the universe, might seem at first glance remote from the concerns of mental health and pastoral care. The connection, however, is closer than it appears.

One of the less examined findings in clinical psychology is the relationship between what researchers call temporal orientation — the way a person situates themselves in time — and their capacity for resilience. Individuals who hold a coherent narrative about the past, present, and future, including a meaningful account of where history is ultimately headed, show greater psychological stability under stress. This is not a small effect. Studies on narrative identity conducted by researchers such as Dan McAdams at Northwestern University have shown that the capacity to locate personal suffering within a larger, purposeful story is among the most significant factors in post-traumatic growth.

For Catholic thought, the future of the universe is not an abstraction. It is eschatology — the theological account of where all things are going. The resurrection of the body, the renewal of creation, the final reconciliation of all things: these are claims with direct psychological implications. A person who understands their life as embedded in a story that ends in justice and fulfillment approaches suffering differently than one who understands their life as a brief interruption of nothingness.

Catholic scientists engaging cosmology are, in this sense, doing anthropology. They are clarifying the outer boundaries of the human story, which is also the inner structure of human hope.

The Therapeutic Alliance and the Importance of Shared Frameworks

The therapeutic alliance — the quality of the working relationship between a clinician and the person they serve — is one of the most consistent predictors of positive outcomes across psychotherapy research. A substantial body of evidence, including large-scale meta-analyses published in journals such as Psychotherapy, places the alliance among the top factors associated with treatment effectiveness, often exceeding the specific technique employed.

One underexplored dimension of the alliance is what might be called worldview congruence: the degree to which therapist and client share a fundamental understanding of what the human person is, what healing means, and what a good life looks like. For Catholic clients, this congruence is not peripheral. It is often central to whether the therapeutic relationship feels safe enough to do serious work.

When Catholic scientists, theologians, and mental health practitioners gather at a conference like the one at Mundelein, they are building the conceptual infrastructure that makes genuine worldview-congruent care possible. They are not producing pastoral platitudes. They are producing peer-reviewed arguments, methodological refinements, and integrative frameworks that practitioners can actually use.

Presence + exists precisely within this current. The Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person is not a devotional supplement to secular psychology. It is a substantive intellectual tradition with its own account of human motivation, relational capacity, suffering, and flourishing. Conferences like the Society of Catholic Scientists' annual meeting strengthen that tradition and advance its credibility in the broader scientific conversation.

What Institutional Momentum Tells Us About the Field

The growth of the Society of Catholic Scientists since its founding a decade ago reflects something real about where intellectual culture is moving. There is a recognized appetite, among both researchers and clinicians, for frameworks that can hold together what strictly materialist accounts of the person tend to sever: body and soul, reason and love, scientific description and moral meaning.

The choice of Mundelein Seminary as a venue is itself meaningful. Mundelein sits within one of the largest and most historically significant Catholic academic ecosystems in the United States. Hosting a scientific conference there is a quiet statement about the relationship between faith formation and intellectual inquiry — not rivals, but natural partners in the pursuit of understanding.

For practitioners and researchers in Catholic mental health, positive psychology, and faith-integrated wellness, the questions on the table at this conference are not speculative curiosities. They are operational. What does the science of human sexuality actually tell us about identity and flourishing? What does cosmological reflection contribute to a person's capacity for hope? How do these answers shape the way care is offered to real people in real distress?

These are the questions that define the field.

The Road Forward

The gathering at Mundelein this June is one data point in a larger trajectory. The sciences of the person are not finished. The integration of Catholic anthropology with contemporary research in psychology, neuroscience, cosmology, and philosophy of mind is a project still very much in progress — and the progress is visible.

Presence + follows this trajectory closely because the stakes are concrete. Every clinician who lacks a coherent framework for the human person is a clinician who will eventually reach the limits of technique. Every person seeking care who cannot find a practitioner capable of honoring the full depth of their humanity is a person underserved.

The Society of Catholic Scientists is doing work that matters, not only in the laboratory or the lecture hall, but in the consulting room, the hospital ward, and the pastoral office. When Catholic scientists gather to ask what human sexuality means, and where the universe is ultimately going, they are asking what it means to be human — which is, finally, the question that all serious care must answer.

Source: National Catholic Register, reporting on the 2026 annual conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, scheduled June 5–7 at Mundelein Seminary, Illinois.