France's parliament passed a law on July 21 banning children under 15 from accessing social media, making it the first EU member state to enshrine such a restriction in national legislation. The vote — 243 to 2 in the Senate — positions France alongside Australia as one of the few countries willing to test whether legal prohibition can do what parental guidance and platform self-regulation have not. The psychology of prohibition, however, raises a harder question: when a morally neutral but potentially harmful activity is banned, does the ban change the behavior, or only the terrain on which it plays out?
On July 22, 2026, Pope Leo XIV wrote to the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the United States, calling on religious superiors to prioritize community life. The letter rests on an anthropological claim that runs from Genesis through the communion of saints: the human person is constitutively relational, and stable solitude is a structural diminishment, not a neutral option. This piece traces that claim through scripture, the mystical tradition, and its consequences for formation and mental health.
Zélie Martin ran a commercially successful lace business, raised nine children, and endured recurring episodes of grief and anxiety alongside a serious physical illness. Her letters resist any single, flat description of her inner life. What does Catholic Christian anthropology actually say about psychological suffering in holy people, and why does the answer matter for how we accompany one another through the dark?
José Miguel Gaona and Richard Gallagher spent decades apart, studying exorcisms as skeptics, and arrived independently at nearly the same estimate: psychiatry explains the overwhelming majority of it. What matters for Catholic clinical practice is what a clinician is actually supposed to do with the small but significant remainder.
France's parliament passed a law on July 21 banning children under 15 from accessing social media, making it the first EU member state to enshrine such a restriction in national legislation. The vote — 243 to 2 in the Senate — positions France alongside Australia as one of the few countries willing to test whether legal prohibition can do what parental guidance and platform self-regulation have not. The psychology of prohibition, however, raises a harder question: when a morally neutral but potentially harmful activity is banned, does the ban change the behavior, or only the terrain on which it plays out?
On July 22, 2026, Pope Leo XIV wrote to the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the United States, calling on religious superiors to prioritize community life. The letter rests on an anthropological claim that runs from Genesis through the communion of saints: the human person is constitutively relational, and stable solitude is a structural diminishment, not a neutral option. This piece traces that claim through scripture, the mystical tradition, and its consequences for formation and mental health.
Zélie Martin ran a commercially successful lace business, raised nine children, and endured recurring episodes of grief and anxiety alongside a serious physical illness. Her letters resist any single, flat description of her inner life. What does Catholic Christian anthropology actually say about psychological suffering in holy people, and why does the answer matter for how we accompany one another through the dark?
Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska
Cory Doctorow
Joshua Giles
Sarah Ahn · Nam Soon Ahn
Charlie Mackesy
Why is it hard to find good bishops for large dioceses? One answer says formation doesn't produce enough men with the temperament to run a large organization. Another says the dioceses themselves have grown past a scale any personally-formed pastor could run — the same way family farms were dwarfed by corporate agribusiness over the past century. The Church already has tools for dispersing that load. The honest question is whether it's using them enough.
The USCCB's 2026 Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, running July 19-25 under the theme 'Designed by God, Guided by Love, Open to Life,' invites more than a review of methods. At stake is how each reproductive practice positions the child in the mind and will of the couple — as a subject to be welcomed, a possibility to be excluded, or an outcome to be engineered.
Ignatius of Loyola's rules for discernment of spirits offer clinicians a structured framework for helping clients distinguish constructive from destructive interior movements. This guide translates the Spiritual Exercises' core discernment principles into language and practice applicable in Catholic Christian counseling settings.
Priests who perform exorcisms now command audiences in the millions, and Church leaders are openly debating whether that visibility serves the faithful or distorts the ministry. The more precise question is epistemological: what kind of knowing does an audience acquire when spectacle substitutes for formation? The Catholic tradition answers that question with tools sharper than media policy.
Summer vacation removes the structure that ordinarily keeps pornography use in check, and the Spanish foundation Dale una Vuelta has published nine practical tips for navigating that vulnerability. For Catholic Christian mental health providers, those tips point toward a deeper clinical question: what does accompanying a person toward genuine freedom actually require? The answer runs through emotional regulation, values-based action, and the classical re-ordering of disordered appetite.
