A reader asks whether Saint Paul shows signs of narcissism in 1 Corinthians 4, where he defends his ministry and calls the community to imitate him. The question has a historically specific answer: Paul was writing before any canonized saint existed, in a Greek city far from Jerusalem's only living martyred example. Understanding what he was working with clarifies what he was actually doing.
In April 2026, more than twenty conservators began a five-year restoration of the Hall of Raphael in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace — frescoes executed between 1517 and 1519 and largely untouched since. The project is a working model of what genuine restoration requires: expertise, patience, and the conviction that what was made with dignity is still worth recovering.
Tim Clark's commentary in the National Catholic Register asks whether a machine can do what a person does when they speak truth from their own soul. Catholic anthropology and decades of psychotherapy outcome research converge on the same answer: the therapeutic encounter depends on one person giving something of themselves to another, and that act cannot be outsourced.
Catholic economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk argues that large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat — as a byproduct. Developmental research on sibling relationships supports that claim. Together they point to something Catholic anthropology has long maintained: the self is shaped through sustained encounter with others who have competing needs.
A reader asks whether Saint Paul shows signs of narcissism in 1 Corinthians 4, where he defends his ministry and calls the community to imitate him. The question has a historically specific answer: Paul was writing before any canonized saint existed, in a Greek city far from Jerusalem's only living martyred example. Understanding what he was working with clarifies what he was actually doing.
In April 2026, more than twenty conservators began a five-year restoration of the Hall of Raphael in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace — frescoes executed between 1517 and 1519 and largely untouched since. The project is a working model of what genuine restoration requires: expertise, patience, and the conviction that what was made with dignity is still worth recovering.
Tim Clark's commentary in the National Catholic Register asks whether a machine can do what a person does when they speak truth from their own soul. Catholic anthropology and decades of psychotherapy outcome research converge on the same answer: the therapeutic encounter depends on one person giving something of themselves to another, and that act cannot be outsourced.
On June 29, 2026, the Nordic Bishops' Conference told parish priests across five countries that no Catholic is exempt from the Church's prohibition on Freemasonry. For Pål Nes, EWTN Norway's editor-in-chief, the ruling confirmed a choice he had already made — and his account points toward what the psychology of identity has been documenting for decades about values congruence and personal integration.
In June 2026, the Vatican Observatory brought together leading physicists to work on one of science's genuinely unsolved problems: how to make quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity speak the same mathematical language. The point where those two theories break down together turns out to say something worth noting about what the human mind can and cannot grasp.
Colombia's president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella began his transition not with press conferences but with a pilgrimage through Catholic shrines, publicly naming the sick, the vulnerable, and the armed forces before taking office. For Catholic clinicians, his example offers a concrete model: faith need not be bracketed from professional life but can animate it from within.