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?
Caritas Lithuania's "Caritas Listens" hotline logged 67,308 minutes of calls to lonely elderly people in its first year — a real answer to a real crisis. But a phone call is episodic by nature, and Christ's own teaching on caring for a stranger doesn't end at the roadside. What the Good Samaritan does after tending the wounded man is the part of the parable this crisis still needs.
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.
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?
Caritas Lithuania's "Caritas Listens" hotline logged 67,308 minutes of calls to lonely elderly people in its first year — a real answer to a real crisis. But a phone call is episodic by nature, and Christ's own teaching on caring for a stranger doesn't end at the roadside. What the Good Samaritan does after tending the wounded man is the part of the parable this crisis still needs.
Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska
Cory Doctorow
Joshua Giles
Sarah Ahn · Nam Soon Ahn
Charlie Mackesy
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.
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.
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?
A cause for canonization is now underway for Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian Nobel laureate who entered the Catholic Church at 42 and spent the rest of her life writing what she had already begun to live. Her fiction's moral architecture — persons made for transcendence, drawn into sin, slowly re-ordered through suffering — maps the same anthropological terrain that serious Catholic formation has always occupied.
