(Editor’s note: This post was updated from an earlier version).
Growing concern over mental health is drawing increased attention within the American Church. This past week, Bishop Michael Burbidge issued a pastoral letter, “The Divine Physician and a Christian Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing,” reflecting his deepening concern — especially for young people.
His letter builds on a 2024 pastoral from Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, who spoke candidly about his own experience with mental‑health challenges, and it echoes themes raised by Bishop John Dolan of Phoenix, who has endured the loss of three siblings to suicide.
This renewed episcopal focus is both welcome and necessary.
New research commissioned by CatholicTV reveals a troubling pattern: emotional and mental distress is present in the lives of a substantial share of U.S. Catholics. Among 1,561 adult Catholics surveyed nationally, exhaustion, anxiety, and loneliness are increasingly visible — 69% report chronic fatigue, 66% struggle with sleep, 55% have recently felt hopeless. These figures mirror a broader national emergency: CDC data confirm that depression has increased across age groups, especially among adolescents and young adults, and remains a leading cause of disability in the United States. Most alarming of all, one-third of survey respondents have wrestled with thoughts of self‑harm in the past two weeks. Even among weekly Mass attendees, a significant share carry these same burdens.
Yet, amid this distress, religion remains a powerful anchor. More than half of Catholics describe their faith as central to their lives, rising to 86% among regular Mass attendees. The data reveal a paradox both challenging and hopeful: emotional strain persists alongside religious fidelity. This reality makes clear that mental health distress shapes parish life far more than most diocesan or pastoral strategies likely recognize. The Church’s mission is not to cure mental illness but to accompany, strengthen, and dignify those who suffer, often invisibly.
This parish reality reflects broader national patterns. A 2024 American Psychiatric Association survey found barely half of U.S. religious communities speak openly about mental health. Within Catholic parishes, this silence — even when born of caution or limited recognition — often fosters shame. A cultural hesitance to acknowledge mental distress may carry consequences far beyond the parish setting. When suffering remains unnamed, individuals often conclude that their struggles are incompatible with a life of faith, or worse, that their distress signals a personal or spiritual failure.
These dynamics extend beyond parish culture and raise a deeper question: Could mental health be an overlooked factor in the generational decline in Mass attendance?
The data do not show a causal link or suggest that mental health is the sole driver of disengagement. But given the magnitude of distress among Catholics, it is reasonable to ask whether these struggles quietly shape participation in ways current analyses overlook. A person battling chronic fatigue, insomnia, or persistent hopelessness may find it difficult to sustain regular parish involvement, even when faith remains important. Mental health may not explain the decline, yet its largely overlooked influence deserves far more attention.
Responding to mental distress is central to evangelization, not a departure from it, for the Church must meet people in their suffering—an encounter essential to its public witness.
If the Church is to respond adequately, it must first recognize the scale and nature of the problem. The CatholicTV data do not describe a marginal issue affecting a small subset of parishioners; they describe a widespread condition that touches every demographic. The crisis is not confined to those who rarely attend Mass or who stand at the periphery of parish life; it is already in the pews, a reality the Church can no longer ignore. This recognition demands pastoral strategies grounded not in assumptions of stability but in the lived experience of today’s Catholics.
Addressing this gap requires more than general encouragement or broad appeals to hope. It requires structures of accompaniment that address the spiritual and psychological dimensions of human suffering. Parishes cannot become mental‑health centers, but they can become places where suffering is recognized early and directed toward appropriate care. Two resources within the Church’s tradition — spiritual direction and Catholic psychiatry — offer complementary ways to meet this need.
Spiritual direction has long served as a means by which Catholics discern God’s action in their lives. Its purpose is not therapeutic but spiritual: to help individuals interpret their experiences in light of the Gospel, to distinguish between movements of consolation and desolation, and to cultivate a life of prayer marked by clarity and fidelity. It restores a sense of coherence by situating personal experience within the Church’s spiritual tradition, which recognizes that the interior life includes periods of darkness, confusion, and trial.
A parishioner meeting their spiritual director to wrestle with desolation seeks discernment, not diagnosis; yet many bear wounds requiring clinical care alongside prayer. Catholic organizations like the Catholic Psychotherapy Association and the Stella Maris Center demonstrate this integrated approach in practice, offering clinical expertise rooted in Church teaching.
Catholic psychiatry brings together the scientific rigor of modern clinical practice with a Catholic understanding of the human person as a unity of body, mind, and soul. When psychological suffering is treated solely within secular frameworks, Catholics may feel compelled to separate their faith from care; conversely, when interpreted only spiritually, individuals lack needed clinical support.
Catholic psychiatry integrates spiritual realities with psychological categories, while honoring the distinct reality of each. It recognizes that mental illness often involves biological, relational, and spiritual dimensions, requiring care that accounts for all three. This approach allows Catholics to seek treatment without setting aside their faith or adopting secular assumptions. Clinicians, in turn, can recognize when spiritual direction, sacramental life, or pastoral support complements their care.
The crisis in the pews requires bold action from bishops and parishes, well beyond the level of recognition it currently receives. Homilies, catechesis, and parish missions should name mental and emotional suffering as part of the human condition — made tangible through small groups, mutual prayer, and shared service that help to combat isolation. Clergy are not therapists, but as spiritual fathers they carry a distinct responsibility: discerning when anguish requires professional care and declaring, without embarrassment or moralizing, that “Your pain belongs here.”
Those in the pews do not expect easy answers or mere words of comfort. They need a Church honest enough to name life’s suffering — and faithful enough to stand beside them as Christ stands with those who struggle.
Will the Church meet the reality of mental illness with fear or with courage rooted in grace? With compassion, humility, and Gospel hope, the Church can become what the culture no longer provides—a home where the weary find rest and the suffering discover they are not alone.
Gaudium et Spes, the 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, calls the Church to share humanity’s “joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties.” Today, that summons means extending Christian mercy toward mental illness — so that grace may build on nature and the weary may find, in Christ’s body, a place of peace.
John Corcoran is the founder of Trinity Life Sciences and serves as chairman of the board of iCatholic Media, the parent company of CatholicTV in the Archdiocese of Boston.