The Lens You See Through: What a Bishop Learned About Faith and the Human Person at Divine Mercy University

A religious sister once told Bishop Keith Chylinski she was going to pray for him when she learned he was going to study psychology. "I'm going to pray for you," she said, "so that you don't lose your faith."

Chylinski recounted that exchange in his address at the 2026 Divine Mercy University commencement, where he received the institution's Distinguished Alumni Award. The sister's concern was not unfounded. Psychology has historically presented itself, in his words, "almost as if it were another religion" — a rival account of the human person, complete with its own anthropology, its own telos, its own language of healing. Her prayer was a serious pastoral hedge against a serious intellectual hazard.

What makes Chylinski's testimony worth sitting with is not the happy ending — faith increased rather than lost — but the reason he gives for it. The increase came, he argues, not in spite of rigorous psychological training but through it. Specifically, it came through "this beautiful meta-model" that taught him "so much about the human person and God's design for what flourishing is really supposed to be."

That meta-model is the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person developed by Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Titus — scholars Chylinski named directly and with evident gratitude in his remarks. The CCMMP is not a devotional supplement to secular psychology. It is an integrative anthropological framework grounded in Thomistic realism that asks psychology's own questions — about motivation, habit, development, suffering, and healing — and answers them within a coherent account of the human person as created, fallen, and redeemed. The sister's worry assumed a zero-sum contest between faith and psychology. The CCMMP is a wager that no such contest exists when the psychology is built on the right foundation.

The lens problem in clinical practice

Chylinski did not dwell on the theoretical architecture of that wager. He moved quickly to its practical consequence, and in doing so named something that clinical training programs rarely address as directly: the counselor's operating anthropology shapes every clinical decision before a single intervention is chosen.

"One of the most important things a clinician or counselor can learn," he told the graduating class, "is the lens through which he or she sees the person sitting in front of them — because that lens is going to guide everything. It is going to guide your counsel and the advice you give."

The lens is not neutral. A strictly behaviorist lens sees a person who can be conditioned. A Freudian lens sees a person driven by instinctual forces that must be managed. A purely humanistic lens sees a person whose authentic self simply needs permission to emerge. Each lens generates its own clinical logic, its own goals, and its own definition of recovery. A counselor does not choose a lens the way one picks a therapeutic technique from a menu; the lens is prior to technique, prior to diagnosis, prior to even the first question asked in a first session.

For Aquinas, this is not a novel problem. The passions, habits, and cognitive acts of the person are always already ordered toward some apprehended good, and the practical intellect operates within that ordering. The counselor's practical intellect is no different. If the good she apprehends is wholeness understood as symptom reduction, she counsels toward that. If the good she apprehends is human flourishing in the full sense — what Chylinski calls "God's design for what flourishing is really supposed to be" — the clinical work changes in texture and in direction.

This is why the CCMMP begins, structurally, with the question of human nature rather than with pathology. Vitz, Nordling, and Titus argue that a fully adequate psychology cannot be clinically prior to a philosophy of the person. Diagnosis and treatment are downstream of anthropology. Chylinski's formation at IPS gave him, before anything else, a coherent account of who is sitting across from him in the counseling room.

From self-awareness to self-acceptance to self-gift

The most clinically specific moment in Chylinski's address comes when he describes his eleven years of seminary work, eight of which involved overseeing counseling services and human formation. He names a three-part developmental arc that the field of human formation has long recognized: "from self-awareness to self-acceptance to self-gift — all in the light of our relationship with the Lord."

This sequence maps onto the CCMMP's account of virtue formation in the redeemed person. Self-awareness corresponds to what Aquinas calls the work of the cogitative sense and the practical intellect: the person must be able to perceive his own affective states, disordered desires, and habitual patterns before he can act on them. Benjamin Suazo's work on the cogitative sense is relevant here — it is the interior sense faculty that mediates between sensory experience and rational judgment, and its proper formation is a precondition for the kind of self-knowledge the arc begins with.

Self-acceptance does not mean complacency about sin or disorder. It means the appropriation of one's actual condition — created in dignity, genuinely fallen, genuinely capable of redemption — without the distorting defenses of denial or despair. The CCMMP's premise that the human person exists in all three states simultaneously (created, fallen, redeemed) is what makes honest self-acceptance possible. A person who sees only his fallenness tends toward shame and paralysis. A person who sees only his creational dignity tends toward a voluntarism that cannot account for the experience of concupiscence. The full anthropological picture makes a mature self-acceptance coherent.

Self-gift is the Christological terminus of the arc. John Paul II's Theology of the Body argues that the human person is constituted as a subject capable of self-donation — that the deepest anthropological truth of the body is its capacity to become a gift. Seminary formation understood in these terms is not merely character development; it is the ordered preparation of a man to give himself, in a specific and irreversible way, to God and to the Church. Chylinski's eight years overseeing that formation were, by his own account, grounded in what he learned at IPS.

A mustard seed and what it costs

Chylinski's image for the institution's founding is the mustard seed: a small faculty group meeting in a Marriott Hotel ballroom, stepping out "in trusting faith to follow the Lord in this noble adventure." He names the people who were there: Sweeney, Nordling, Vitz, Mer, Titus, Scrofani.

The image is apt not only as a compliment. The mustard seed parable is specifically about hiddenness preceding fruitfulness, and about a growth that cannot be engineered from outside. The early IPS faculty were not building a university brand. They were trying to answer a specific question: can psychology be practiced within a Catholic anthropology without sacrificing either its scientific rigor or its theological integrity? That question has ecclesial stakes — it bears on how the Church forms priests, accompanies the suffering, and offers healing in a culture that has largely outsourced the care of souls to secular institutions.

Dr. Christina Lynch, the first recipient of IPS's Doctor of Clinical Psychology degree and a founding board member of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association, represents one kind of fruit from that seed. [^2] Father Charles Sikorski, who has developed DMU into a graduate institution specifically dedicated to faith-integrated psychological training, represents another. [^1] Chylinski, now serving as auxiliary bishop with an explicit intention to be "an even better ambassador for the importance of good mental health care within the context of our faith," is a third.

These are not merely success stories. They are evidence for a thesis — that the integration of Catholic anthropology and rigorous clinical training is generative, not reductive; that the lens the CCMMP provides does not narrow the counselor's field of vision but expands it.

What the sister's prayer got wrong, and right

The religious sister who prayed for Chylinski's faith was operating on an understandable assumption: that psychology, as it is typically practiced and taught, carries an implicit anthropology that competes with the faith. She was not wrong about that. The history of twentieth-century psychology includes significant examples of reductive materialism, therapeutic anti-clericalism, and the elevation of self-actualization to a quasi-salvific role. Her prayer was warranted.

What she could not have anticipated — and what Chylinski's testimony makes vivid — is that the problem she identified has a solution that is not merely defensive. It is not enough to study secular psychology while maintaining one's faith in a separate compartment. The CCMMP proposes something more ambitious: a psychology whose concepts, methods, and goals are shaped from within by a coherent account of the human person as made for God.

That ambition is what animated the mustard seed gathering in the Marriott. It is what Chylinski absorbed and carried into a seminary for eleven years. And it is what he left with the 2026 graduates as a charge: not merely to practice competent therapy, but to see the person across the room clearly, through a lens that takes seriously both the dignity of the created person and the reality of what grace can do.

Pope Benedict XVI's words, with which Chylinski closed, are not incidental: "Faith in the resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being." In a clinical room, that conviction is not a pious add-on. It is the foundation of hope — and hope, Aquinas insists, is not an emotion but a theological virtue, an ordered movement of the will toward an attainable good. The counselor who holds that conviction and knows how to work within it offers something no secular program, however excellent, can fully replicate.

The sister's prayer was answered. The seed has grown.

References

[^1]: Father Charles Sikorski, LC, is president of Divine Mercy University, a graduate institution integrating Catholic anthropology with psychology and counseling education. [^1]

[^2]: Dr. Christina P. Lynch earned the first Doctor of Clinical Psychology degree from IPS at Divine Mercy University and is a founding board member and past president of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. [^2]