Featured image by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash As a Catholic psychologist, I have found that secular people resist the idea of their problems being spiritual, while Christians often resist the possibility that our problems are psychological. Why is this? It is an unfortunate part of human nature for us to resist vulnerability. We are afraid of others seeing our weakness, and especially in our Catholic culture, admitting that we are having mental health problems makes us fee

The First Amendment of the US Constitution, torn in half. Civil rights concept Father Richard John Neuhaus put two Big Ideas into play in American public life. The first was that the pro-life movement (of which Neuhaus was an intellectual leader) was the natural heir to the moral convictions that had animated the classic civil rights movement (in which Neuhaus was also deeply involved). The second was that the First Amendment to the Constitution did not contain two “religions

Conversations with Father Robert Imbelli have been a great blessing in recent years. I have rarely met a more even-tempered and gracious man: a true churchman who, in retirement after years of teaching theology at Boston College, tries diligently to keep the often-fratricidal subtribes of American Catholicism in some sort of conversation (if only through his e-mail account!). We’ve visited in Rome during several Synods and I remember with pleasure the tour he gave me of the C

(Photo: Josh Applegate / Unsplash) I think it’s safe to say that people have been a little on edge lately. We see it in the macro, in the...

A story in its most basic form conveys a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. It wouldn’t be a good story unless it also had heroes and villains combatting one another in a dramatic plot with ample dialogue. Nothing may transmit the human story as a whole better than art: the earliest traces of humanity can be discerned on the walls of caves, the first monumental architecture arose in Ancient Near East, the Greeks and Romans captured the human figure in its perfec

By early March 1865, more than a million Americans had killed or wounded each other in civil war; the killing, wounding, and maiming continued for another month or so. Yet amidst that unprecedented carnage, Abraham Lincoln, at his second inauguration as president, called the American Republic to recompose itself in unity by means of magnanimity: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to…bind u

In his 2003 encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Church from the Eucharist), Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to regain a sense of “Eucharistic amazement.” Being “amazed” by the Eucharist is probably not all that common these days. But Holy Mass should be all amazement, all the time. For in the celebration of the Eucharist, John Paul wrote, our time is linked to the time of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, because the Eucharist has a “truly enormous ‘capa

Over the weekend of August 8-9, someone beheaded a statue of St. Jude at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Denver. This attack is one in a...

The Church’s task of evangelization includes restoring human life and culture. Jesus promises in the book of Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new.” Even though this will happen fully in the new creation to come, the restoration begins now as God’s grace heals and elevates human life, both individually and socially. I explore how the Church’s mission of evangelization touches human culture through issues of nature, beauty, family life, education, and society in my new bo

Thinking out loud about a return to “Sunday normal,” a veteran pastor recently told me that he thought it would take one year for each month of lockdown/quarantine/ shelter-at-home for Mass attendance to return to where it was in February 2020. I said I hoped that people’s hunger for the Eucharist would bring them back more quickly, once they concluded that it was reasonably safe, for themselves and others, to do so. But whether “Sunday normal” returns this year or next year,

When God chose to enter the world to save us, he chose Mary, whose deep faith provided the way for Jesus to come among us. She believed...

Dr. Michelle Connor Harris serves as the Clinical Director for St. Raphael Counseling. Imagine that you live in ancient Rome and you are feeling sad and hopeless. The Colosseum holds no appeal, you have no desire to see your friends, and you just want to sleep. Your physician diagnoses you with melancholia, known today as depression, which is a good start. This diagnosis of melancholia is a more advanced understanding than the centuries-old belief that all mental illness is t

Last November 11, on the centenary of its relocation to a 93-acre campus in suburban Washington, D.C., Georgetown Preparatory School...

In February 1968, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła wrote Father Henri de Lubac, SJ, about a project in which the cardinal was engaged: a philosophical explanation of the uniqueness and nobility of the human person. The idea of the human, Wojtyla suggested, was being degraded, even pulverized, by ideologies that denied the deep truths built into us. The response could not be “sterile polemics.” Rather, the Church should counter-propose a higher, more compelling view of “the inviolable m

We have come to think of the Church, the gathering of God’s faithful, in primarily spiritual terms. Throughout Christian history, however, faith implied social and even political obligations, which supplied a concrete expression for the Christian life. In the history of Christendom, one political organization prominently stands out: The Holy Roman Empire. We think of the Roman Empire as ending in 476, the date of the abdication of the last emperor in the West, although it con

During a short papal flight from Boston to New York on October 2, 1979, Father Jan Schotte (later a cardinal but then a low-ranking curial official) discovered that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, had done some serious editing of the speech Pope John Paul II would give at the United Nations later that day. Schotte, who had helped develop the text, found to his dismay that Cardinal Casaroli had cut just about everything the Soviet Union and its co

In this panoramic view, bishops of the world line the nave of St. Peter's Basilica during the opening session of the Second Vatican...

“Let us get up then, at last, for the Scriptures rouse us,” the Rule of St. Benedict urges us. “Let us open our eyes to the light … and...

In The Shoes of the Fisherman , crusty old Cardinal Leone, canvassing votes for a surprise candidate just before the election of a new...

As our nation celebrates the day of its independence and subsequent founding as a country on July 4, a look back some...