Justice in the body of Christ: what 'That They May Be One' asks of Catholic mental health

Justice, in the Thomistic account, is the steady will to give each person what they are owed. Applied to the body of Christ, it asks something harder than doctrinal courtesy: it asks that Christians recognize one another as persons, not as positions. The documentary That They May Be One, opening in theaters nationwide May 19 and 20, puts that demand on screen with unusual directness.

The film was produced by Adriana Gonzalez, whose stated impetus was a 2020 talk by Catholic biblical scholar Mary Healy. It blends documentary interviews with Father Mathias Thelen, Pastor James Ward, evangelist Francis Chan, and Healy herself, with dramatic reenactments of key moments in the history of Christian division and reunion. What makes the project notable from a Catholic anthropological standpoint is not the ecumenical sentiment alone, but the specific claim the filmmakers press: that division among Christians is a scandal that blocks the world's path to faith.

What division actually costs

The theological grounding for that claim is not sentimental. John Paul II[^1], in Ut Unum Sint, drew directly on the Second Vatican Council's recognition that Christian division 'constitutes a scandal' and obstructs the credibility of the Gospel itself[^2]. The prayer of Christ in John 17:21 -- 'that they all may be one... so that the world may believe' -- binds unity to mission in a logical sequence: the world's capacity to receive the proclamation depends, in part, on the witness of those doing the proclaiming.

For a Catholic mental health framework like the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP), developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, this is not a peripheral ecclesial concern. The CCMMP locates the human person within a Created-Fallen-Redeemed arc, and one of its central premises is that the person is constituted by relation. Fractured relation -- whether in a marriage, a family, a friendship, or a communion of churches -- produces a specific kind of suffering. Division is experienced first in the body and the emotions before it is named theologically.

Gonzalez noted in her EWTN interview that she felt compelled to make the film partly because contemporary society shows 'greater division, greater animosity.' That observation maps directly onto what clinical researchers working from attachment theory have identified as the physiological cost of social fragmentation: elevated threat response, diminished capacity for secure relating, and a narrowing of the imaginative range that healthy community requires. Bruce Perry's neurosequential model of development identifies social connectedness as a regulatory resource, not merely a comfort. When that resource is absent or contested, the nervous system bears the cost.

Justice as the sub-virtue the film is actually practicing

The specific sub-virtue at work in That They May Be One is justice-truthfulness. The film does not soften the history of Christian separation. Reenactments bring key moments of division to life precisely because honest memory is a precondition for any genuine reconciliation. To paper over what actually happened between Catholic and Protestant traditions would be an act of injustice toward both communities.

Pope Francis[^3], in Evangelii Gaudium, addressed this directly when he wrote that those wounded by historical divisions resist reconciliation when they think their pain is being ignored or their memory erased. What changes their posture, he argued, is the witness of 'authentically fraternal and reconciled communities' -- not a managed ecumenism that bypasses grief, but a fraternity that can bear the weight of what actually happened[^3].

This is where the film's decision to include both Catholic and Protestant voices matters at the level of moral psychology, not only theology. The act of listening across a historic wound -- without immediately reaching for resolution -- is itself a practice of justice. It requires what Aquinas called rectitude of appetite toward the other: not liking them, necessarily, but willing what is genuinely good for them.

Gonzalez was careful to address a fear that circulates in Catholic circles: that ecumenism waters down Catholic identity. Her answer draws on the institutional record. John Paul II's Ut Unum Sint was not a private enthusiasm but a magisterial document, and the Second Vatican Council established the pursuit of Christian unity as a binding call not only for hierarchs but for all the faithful[^1]. The Catholic who pursues unity is not departing from Catholic tradition; he or she is obeying it.

The anthropological mechanism: unity as a condition of human flourishing

Here is the claim that the CCMMP framework presses beyond what the film itself can carry in 90 cinematic minutes: the drive toward unity among Christians is not only obedience to a command. It is ordered to a deep structure of what the human person is.

The CCMMP, following Aquinas, holds that the human person is a unity of body and soul whose capacities -- intellect, will, the passions -- are ordered toward their proper objects. The proper object of love is the good of the other. Division, sustained by pride, fear, or what Francis calls 'the desire to impose certain ideas at all costs,'[^3] is a disorder of the will. It trains the person toward something less than their full moral stature. And this is not metaphor: sustained social enmity within communities produces measurable changes in attention, in threat-appraisal, and in the capacity for what Aquinas called counsel -- the deliberative function that allows a person to reason well about how to act.

This is the peak insight the film reaches for, and that the CCMMP names with precision: Christian unity is not a bonus feature of ecclesial life but a condition of the person's full moral and psychological functioning. When a Christian community is 'subject to enmity, division, calumny, defamation, vendetta, jealousy,' as Francis writes[^3], it does not merely violate an ideal. It forms its members in vices. It trains the cogitative sense -- the faculty, described by Benjamin Suazo in his work on moral psychology, that habituates the mind to perceive persons as threats or as neighbors -- toward chronic suspicion.

Conversely, a community that practices honest reconciliation across genuine difference does something measurable to the persons within it. It trains the will toward justice. It builds the kind of stable relational environment that Perry's developmental research identifies as the precondition for healthy neural integration. It gives people a lived experience of being seen accurately and treated fairly, which is what justice, at its most elemental, actually is.

What the film cannot do -- and what communities can

A documentary can provoke. It can show a bishop and a pastor praying together, or a Catholic and an evangelical finding that their shared catechesis on the Eucharist runs deeper than their disagreements about ordination. What it cannot do is form the habits of justice that sustained Christian unity actually requires.

That formation happens in communities -- parishes, therapy offices, formation programs, campus ministries -- where people practice the ordinary disciplines of honest memory, patient listening, and the kind of prayer Francis describes as 'a beautiful step forward in love': praying deliberately for the person with whom you are irritated[^3].

For Catholic mental health practitioners, the film's release is an opportunity to name something that often goes unnamed in clinical settings: the ecclesial dimension of a client's relational life is not separate from their psychological life. A person formed in a community of chronic division carries that formation into their marriages, their families, and their inner world. A person formed in a community that has practiced reconciliation brings different resources to the same pressures.

Presence + exists precisely at this intersection. Our work draws on the CCMMP's account of the person as someone created for communion, wounded by sin in ways that fracture relation, and redeemed through encounter -- with God, with neighbor, and with the broader body of Christ that That They May Be One asks us to take seriously again.

The film opens May 19 and 20. The work it points toward has no closing date.

References

1. John Paul II (1995). Ut Unum Sint. Encyclical. -- 'The change of heart which is the essential condition for every authentic search for unity flows from prayer.'
2. John Paul II (1988). Redemptoris Mater. Encyclical. -- 'The unity of Christ's disciples is a great sign given in order to kindle faith in the world while their division constitutes a scandal.'
3. Pope Francis (2013). Evangelii Gaudium. Apostolic Exhortation. -- 'Those wounded by historical divisions find it difficult to accept our invitation to forgiveness and reconciliation.'