Today's Page · Saturday, August 22, 2026

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Baptized behind bars: Matthew 25 and the work of accompanying incarcerated people
On July 26, two men at a maximum-security penitentiary in Campo Grande, Brazil received baptism, Eucharist, and confirmation after two years of catechesis. Their story opens a practical question: what does Matthew 25's mandate to visit the imprisoned require, and how can Catholics support both prison ministry and the difficult transition back to public life?
When the Machine Pulls the Trigger: Conscience, Distance, and the Church's Case Against Autonomous Weapons
Pope Leo XIV's 2026 encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* declares it 'not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.' The argument is not merely technical but anthropological: autonomous weapons complete a long trajectory of moral distancing that removes the human will from the moment of execution entirely. The Catholic tradition insists that a conscience, not an algorithm, must bear the weight of lethal force.
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A 30-year Study Correlates Lack of Religious Community and Anxiety
A study published in Developmental Science by Leonard Konstantin Kulisch, Ana Lorena Domínguez Rojas, Silvia Schneider, and Babett Voigt tracked anxiety disorder rates across 70 countries over three decades and found that where religious faith declined as a childrearing value, youth anxiety rose. The protective effect operates at the level of the community, not the individual household. For Catholic Christian families, the data confirms what a sound anthropology of the person already predicted.

The Joy of Being Wrong: What Father Mike Schmitz's Conversion Reveals About Humility, Truth, and Hope

Father Mike Schmitz, whose Bible in a Year podcast has reached one billion downloads, recently described a formation crisis in which he concluded the Church was wrong and he was right. His account of that reversal — and the unexpected joy it produced — maps a moral architecture that Catholic mental health and faith formation practitioners recognize as genuinely therapeutic. Presence + examines what that structure actually is.

Aug 20, 2026 · 4 min read

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Bringing Divine Mercy to the Catholic University of America

Father Charles Sikorsky announced on August 12th that Divine Mercy University will move to the Catholic University of America campus in the summer of 2027. The relocation centers on O'Boyle Hall, currently home to Catholic University's school of psychology, which is now under renovation. The move builds on an existing clinical partnership between the two institutions.

Top stories

Baptized behind bars: Matthew 25 and the work of accompanying incarcerated people

When the Machine Pulls the Trigger: Conscience, Distance, and the Church's Case Against Autonomous Weapons

A 30-year Study Correlates Lack of Religious Community and Anxiety

The Joy of Being Wrong: What Father Mike Schmitz's Conversion Reveals About Humility, Truth, and Hope

Top stories

Baptized behind bars: Matthew 25 and the work of accompanying incarcerated people

When the Machine Pulls the Trigger: Conscience, Distance, and the Church's Case Against Autonomous Weapons

A 30-year Study Correlates Lack of Religious Community and Anxiety

More from today

Bringing Divine Mercy to the Catholic University of America