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.
When Katy Faust catalogued the experiences of more than 100 adult children raised by same-sex parents, the recurring theme was not hostility toward their parents but grief for the biological parent they never knew. That grief points to something developmental science has been confirming for decades: the married biological mother and father is not one family arrangement among many equivalent options, but the structure most ordered to child flourishing.
Gallup's May 2026 survey finds Americans nearly split down the middle on abortion — meaning the person across the table from you has roughly even odds of holding the opposite view. That statistical reality raises a concrete question: how do you maintain a relationship, and your own integrity, when a moral conviction you hold deeply is one your conversation partner finds wrong?
Msgr. Charles Pope's reading of Matthew 11:28-30 turns on a single agricultural fact: a yoke shaped for the wrong animal causes injury, not relief. Catholic Christian anthropology explains why exhaustion so often persists even after we subtract commitments — and what a genuinely fitted life requires.
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.
When Katy Faust catalogued the experiences of more than 100 adult children raised by same-sex parents, the recurring theme was not hostility toward their parents but grief for the biological parent they never knew. That grief points to something developmental science has been confirming for decades: the married biological mother and father is not one family arrangement among many equivalent options, but the structure most ordered to child flourishing.
Gallup's May 2026 survey finds Americans nearly split down the middle on abortion — meaning the person across the table from you has roughly even odds of holding the opposite view. That statistical reality raises a concrete question: how do you maintain a relationship, and your own integrity, when a moral conviction you hold deeply is one your conversation partner finds wrong?
More than 4,000 people gathered in London in June 2026 for the ARC Conference, where speakers from across the political and academic spectrum asked what holds a civilization together. The questions they raised about meaning, moral coherence, and the transmission of shared frameworks run through the same territory as Catholic Christian mental health practice.
George Weigel's 250th-anniversary meditation in the National Catholic Register argues that republican self-governance depends on a critical mass of people living certain virtues. Catholic anthropology supplies the account of the person that makes that argument intelligible — and clinically actionable.
