Promoting Mental Health in the Church

Mary, Queen of the Apostles Parish in Salem, MA - 40 Hours Devotion

ACT in Faith, as a project, is meant to go beyond an academic integration of Catholic anthropology and psychological science. The framework gives therapists who want to bring Catholicism into their clinical work a way to do so that holds up scientifically and practically. But it is also meant to give parishes, campus ministries, and other groups a way to look honestly at what they are doing for the mental health of those they serve, and to think about what they might do differently.

What I find most generative about this framework is that what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy names clinically, the Catholic tradition has long named spiritually. Present-moment awareness, acceptance, values-based action are not foreign imports into Catholic life. They are the tradition, described in a language that also happens to be supported by decades of research. That convergence opens a door for parish leaders and ministry teams that I do not think we have fully walked through yet.

Preparing Ourselves

The Church has been increasingly attentive to the needs of its people who experience depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops launched the National Catholic Mental Health Campaign in October 2023, setting out three goals: raising awareness, combating stigma, and making clear that everyone who needs help should get help. Since then the effort has grown, with an annual Mental Health Novena each October, a Mental Health Sunday observance, and an ongoing call for Catholics to journey with those who struggle through both personal accompaniment and advocacy for better public policy. It has been a long-overdue and genuinely encouraging response from our bishops.

There are also wonderful organizations doing the work of preparing communities at the ground level. Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries offers a Sanctuary Course for Catholics that I find myself recommending often. It is an eight-session small group resource built around film, discussion, and reflection, developed with input from mental health professionals, theologians, and people with their own lived experience of mental health challenges. What I love about it is its accessibility: it requires no previous training or expertise, just a willingness to show up and have an honest conversation. It is available for free through their resource portal, in both English and Spanish, and is also accessible through FORMED. The numbers bear out that communities are hungry for exactly this kind of formation: over 71,000 people participated in the Sanctuary Course and its Catholic version in a single recent year.

If you lead a parish or ministry, beginning there is wise. Gathering your staff, your faith formation team, your parish council, or a committed group of volunteers to work through the Sanctuary Course together over several weeks is a low-barrier starting point. It builds a common language, surfaces the fears and assumptions people carry, and creates a foundation for whatever comes next.

But Then What?

We love a good program in Catholic parishes. It is clear-cut, it fits in a bulletin notice, it runs at a set time and place. It is a manageable project, as long as a staff member can be stretched a little further or a parishioner cajoled into volunteering.

I beg you, don't start there.

This is not to dismiss what programs can offer. There are genuinely meaningful ministries doing important work for people who are struggling. But a program, on its own, carries a risk that I think we underestimate: it can take the very people who most need to be woven into the life of a community and quietly separate them from it instead.

Consider a support group for single mothers. Or for bereaved widows and widowers. Or for those living with chronic illness or anxiety. Your parish gives them a space, maybe even provides babysitting, and something real happens in that room. But what happens when they walk out of it? When they file into Mass on Sunday, who else knows their name? When life gets hard in the middle of the week, who from the broader community is there? How welcome do they actually feel in the spaces that are not designed specifically for them?

The Harder Work of Culture Change

The early Church did not have a program for the vulnerable. It had a community. The care of the outcast and the suffering was not an add-on to the mission of the Body of Christ but was constitutive of it. In the Acts of the Apostles, we see a people learning, imperfectly and persistently, to carry one another's burdens. I am not suggesting that a loving parish community can cure someone's depression. But I am convinced that an intentional community can create the conditions under which suffering does not compound. It is here where isolation, which is one of the most powerful drivers of worsening mental health, is interrupted.

This is where ACT in Faith has something to say that goes beyond the therapy room. One of ACT's central insights, one that maps so cleanly onto the tradition, is that psychological suffering deepens when we avoid it. When we treat painful human experience as something to be managed away or kept in its own contained space, we do not protect people. We communicate, however unintentionally, that their suffering is more than the community can bear. A parish that has genuinely internalized a culture of acceptance - of sitting with discomfort, naming struggle without shame, acting from values rather than from the discomfort of not knowing what to say - looks and feels different. People know it when they walk in. And it is not a therapeutic intervention. It is just what the early Church was doing.

The question is how you get there from here.

In the next entry I will share what happened in my own parish. It starts, I will admit, with a program. But it is the evolution of that program, and a community's desire to evangelize, that gradually built something we did not entirely plan for: a place where anyone who walks through the door has a real chance of being known.