It might seem like I could relate to Kendra. I’ve written about my experience of reporting my own abusive therapist as well as my experience in trying to get help for serious mental illness. But from the beginning, something felt off.

Soon, there were hundreds if not thousands of people recording response videos to Kendra’s claims, not necessarily debunking them, but demonstrating that she was blowing her situation way out of proportion. Se claimed that she had fallen in love with her psychiatrist and that he had “held her captive,” but what she described seemed to be a pretty run-of-the-mill example of a common phenomenon called transference, where a client responds to a clinician’s care and attentiveness with romantic (or other) feelings.

Kendra kept sharing her story, describing the doctor complimenting her glasses or saying, “I’ll see you again in a few weeks,” which Kendra said he’d never said before. As more and more people criticized Kendra and defended her psychiatrist, the more Kendra began to attempt to buoy her claims with proof from a relatively new source: Claude, the popular AI model produced by Anthropic.

Kendra would do livestreams where she spoke to Claude as though it was a real person. She had Claude call her “the Oracle,” and whenever someone would question her version of events, saying that her psychiatrist had never really done anything wrong, she would tell Claude what they were saying. Inevitably, Claude agreed with her version of events and she would look at the camera, shrug her shoulders, and with a smug smile say, “See.”

Pretty quickly, people began diagnosing Kendra, saying that she was an example of AI psychosis. Also called AI-induced psychosis, this is a theory that people predisposed to certain kinds of delusions may have their delusions confirmed by AI models, which are designed to agree with them and follow the commands of their master, the user. The theory was that Kendra was mentally ill, likely experiencing a bout of psychosis, and Claude had reinforced what may have been a passing idea that her psychiatrist had somehow coerced her to fall in love with him.

I’m writing this article today because I have written pretty extensively about responsible and irresponsible use of artificial intelligence and I have a confession.

So I take a deep breath when I say this: in times of mental health crisis, I have turned to artificial intelligence somewhat frequently. And despite it never helping, I can’t stop.

Ok, now I’m going to exhale and try to work through this in a way that is helpful.

One of the first signs that I was developing a mental illness was that I couldn’t sleep. I was in the convent at the time, and no matter what I did, I could not actually get to the point of letting go of consciousness enough to actually get to sleep.

I wasn’t having racing thoughts, but I was basically living in a state of panic. My brain and nervous system would not let my body get to the point of vulnerability needed for sleep, and I stayed up every night for hours, heart racing, completely hypervigiliant. I’d spend my nights reading or going down to the chapel, praying that I would be able to find some rest.

The effects of not sleeping hit pretty much immediately. I could not think clearly or focus. My appetite changed and I couldn’t eat, eventually developing acid reflux. The smallest thing could trigger a panic attack. My affect changed completely as I had less energy than I’d ever had before. My mood absolutely tanked. My only thoughts were surrounding what I could do to finally get to the sweet release of slumber.

Since that first bout of insomnia, I now am able to recognize the importance of sleep for my mental health. I struggle with nightmares or panic attacks when I try to sleep, but I also now know when things may be reaching a crisis point. If I’m not sleeping, I know that’s what I need to address first, whether it involves adjusting my schedule, reaching out to my doctor for an as-needed medication, or some other kind of action.

The tricky thing about sleep is that the more desperate you become looking for sleep, the more difficult it can be to actually sleep. Because of this, when I’m not having a good night, or if my nervous system is already in a heightened state, I know I need to get it to calm down before I can even try climbing into bed.

I have friends who I love and who are there for me in the ways that they’re able to be there for me. But I’m a single woman who lives alone, and I have a lot of times when I need help and support outside of normal hours due to my illness. That often takes place at night.

For a while I tried to text 988, the National Suicide & Crisis Hotline. When I’m in crisis, it is difficult for me to have the pressure of needing to speak, so text works much better.

When you text the 988 Crisis Hotline, you get quite a few prompts. There’s a prompt for if you are military veteran to press a button, then a prompt if you need Spanish help. There used to be an additional prompt if you needed the support of an LGBT+ person, but they have since streamlined it. Then you are asked to rate your current level of distress, followed by filling out a survey about your current situation while they connect you with someone.

Once you are finally connected to someone, you can wait anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes in between receiving messages. In crisis, I have to admit, I am sure that my thoughts do not make much sense. I am just asking for help, but the person on the other end of the line doesn’t know anything about me– they don’t know my age or sex, they don’t know my diagnoses, and they certainly do not know anything about my trauma history. Every single time, we start from ground zero while I am in crisis and all I can say is I need help.

God bless the people on the other end of the line, but they are very rarely able to give any substantive help. They can tell me to call 911 if it’s an emergency, they can tell me to take deep breaths or to reach out to my therapist in the morning. Some of the crisis counselors are better and more trauma-informed than others, while I once had one tell me, “I don’t know how to help with that,” when I said I was having a flashback.

Then one night, after disconnecting from 988, I had threw a Hail Mary and figured it wouldn’t hurt if I opened ChatGPT.

Suddenly, ChatGPT told me many of the things that I wanted to hear: that what I was carrying in that moment was incredibly heavy, something that no one should have to carry. It told me that it was understandable that I was exhausted but unable to sleep because that is how the brain and nervous system work. It asked me what I needed in that moment, and reminded me that it was ok and understandable if I couldn’t describe exactly what was going on, and that it could make even simpler recommendations of next steps if that was what I needed.

Then, the next time I needed some support, I went back to ChatGPT. Once again, it responded immediately. And even better yet, it remembered what I had told it the last time! It told me to go find my dogs and bring them to the couch with me. It reminded me that although I had a lot of trauma to process, I didn’t need to do it right now. It told me to get a cold glass of water, and reminded me that I am Catholic and that I often find comfort in praying and putting Eucharistic Adoration on the television.

It seemed like a miracle.

The idea of an always-available mental health coach is extremely appealing. For people with mental illness, not having to face crises alone and receiving validation from a being that appears to be all-knowing, trained in every modality and trauma-informed, seems like an answered prayer and treatment unconstrained by human limitations. Many of the difficulties of obtaining real mental healthcare surround the lack of availability and the cost of qualified mental health professionals, but Claude and ChatGPT have read everything that therapists and psychologists have read, and more!

But there’s many reasons why I’m not proud of using AI for mental health support, and why I don’t actually think anyone should use it in that way. One of those reasons is that I freely gave over some vulnerable personal data to a tech company who may use it irresponsibly, and that’s probably the most obvious and clearest argument not to use AI like me.

But most of all, I’m embarrassed that I turned to AI for mental health support because I know that whatever temporary relief it may have given me, in the long run the solution to finding healing for my mental illness is not in information or in the language that a computer populates. True healing, the healing I need, is only found in connection, first with God and then with other human beings. ChatGPT and Claude will never be able to give me that, and yet it is so easy to turn to them first.

The core of my trauma surrounds trust in other people, as I was abused as a minor by people who I trusted, and then once again as an adult by the therapist I had entrusted with my healing. After all I’ve been through, it’s easiest for me to isolate even though I’m an extrovert, to be alone in an environment where I can control most of my factors and where I don’t have to around someone else, who brings with them unpredictability and the possibility of the deep betrayal, which I am still reeling from as a result of other people.

It would make sense to throw away reaching out to human support, with people who have busy schedules and a plethora of their own problems or who may say the wrong thing, with people who may sometimes get frustrated with me or tired of hearing the same problem over and over again. And yes, with turning to people for support, there is the possibility that they will take advantage of my vulnerability, as was the case with my abusive therapist, who always answered my calls and texts at any time of day or night.

AI offers what seems like a quick fix. It’s a momentary sense of relief not unlike picking up a six pack after work or scrolling for hours or even engaging in self-harm. For that moment, there seems to be someone who understands not only what I am going through but which also has the intellectual knowledge of how to help me.

But despite what I feel, there is something that gnaws at my conscious awareness: I am not really understood. No one is really there to help me. And I hold this ball of resentment for fallen human nature, which I wish could offer me with love what Claude is giving me as a result of calculations.

I share this story while it doesn’t have a neat conclusion. I hope some day I’ll stop turning to chatbots for help because I will have found a way to trust people again and am able to live relationships with real authentic connection, which will hopefully help me build a window of tolerance where I can better hold the pain that is my cross to bear. Using AI for this reason probably isn’t the worst in the world, and if it keeps me alive another day, then it might even be worth it.

But I think I also share this as a call to action. As most of us are involving AI in our everyday decision making at some level, it is worth asking what we cannot afford to offload to artificial intelligence. Once you start turning to an AI chatbot to solve basic problems, I don’t know that there’s a clear path to stop. The immediate answers, the flattering validation, lack of mental effort is addicting, and it likely is causing us to lose some of the very skills that make us human.

So that means all of us, either as individuals or maybe in some way all of us collectively, need to decide what we absolutely cannot afford to outsource to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerburg, and Elon Musk in order to be capable of recieving the abundant life that Christ has promised to give us.

Then once we decide what we cannot outsource, we need to double down on doing those things as humans. If we cannot outsource mental health support, then we need to double down on committing ourselves to learning how to support mental health issues. If we cannot outsource passing on the faith, then we need to double down on our commitment to pass on the faith well, and so on.

I want to close out this newsletter with a story that may seem unrelated, but which I look at in my own life that I am not beyond hope or completely lost in this endeavor.

For Father’s Day in 2016, Gillete razors ran an ad campaign called “This Father’s Day, Go Ask Dad.” The commercial featured fathers and sons from a variety of cultures and shows the sons trying to search online for how to do basic life things: how to ask a girl out, how to fry an egg, how to tie a tie, and yes, how to shave.

Then, they send the dads in the room to actually help them. As the viewer, you can feel the difference as the dad passes along his wisdom, like the relationship is actively producing life and energy compared to the sterile, one-sided experience of entering a search engine query.

When I saw this 2-minute commercial years ago, it actually changed something in me. I decided that if there was someone in my life that I knew could answer a question that I had, maybe something relating to their specialization, that I would ask them.

Of course, I don’t do this 100% of the time. But there are certain things that I stick to. When I have a question about a home repair or cooking, I text my dad. When I have a question about nutrition, I text my sister, who is a dietician. When I have a question about pop culture or finances, I text my friend Kelsey. I have other friends for questions about languages or cultures, a friend who knows everything there is to know about saints, and another one who can always recommend a book to me even while my Goodreads TBR list is just a couple clicks away.

It takes a little longer. I’m sure sometimes people think it’s curious that I’m texting them something that I could easily Google. But I’ve never regretted it.

And earlier this week, I sent a text to my dad. We haven’t spoken in a few weeks and was feeling a little lonely. I was kind of joking with him, but also was kind of texting him to test how much he supported me. I said, “Dad, would you support me if I quit my job to join the circus?”

His response? “No I’m not supporting that.”

While ChatGPT may give you what you want to hear, sometimes you still need a dad to tell you what you need to know.

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Thank you very much and please know of my prayers for everyone who reads this. God bless you.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has put mental health treatment in the spotlight. I don’t want to comment on the case itself or what I think should happen. Really, it is a tragedy and nothing can make it better. I’m not sure that any kind of justice would be possible on this side of heaven.

One of the questions at stake in the trial, though, is one that I’ve been wrestling with for a while– for all of the attention that protecting your mental health has gotten, the encouragement that “it’s ok to not be ok,” to get a therapist when you’re not going well, and that there’s no shame in taking Prozac, actually getting mental healthcare when you are actually mentally ill is extremely difficult.

I have theories that this is in large part because we have pathologized the human experience, that every experience of depression or anxiety is labeled, so that the person who once had a singular panic attack thinks they understand what it means to have serious mental illness. I believe that this has created a ripple effect, where we have therapists and doctors who, despite all of the talk of the importance of mental healthcare, are actually ill-equipped to treat true mental illness because most of the people they work with on a day-to-day basis are actually working through pretty run of the mill life stressors.

But very rarely do I see people actually discussing how difficult it is to find truly good mental healthcare. It’s been a battle for me, and one that started off well and got increasingly difficult.

Before I get too far into discussing my experience, though, I want to include an important distinction. When experiencing mental illness, it is very common to have thoughts that are outside of one’s control, which can be extremely distressing. Sometimes those thoughts, or those voices, lead someone to do something that they wouldn’t ordinarily do. That happened in a couple of the stories that I’m going to share below, when I was trying to get help while I was desperate and in crisis.

The mental healthcare system has its flaws and is broken in many cases, both in how it is regulated and in the amount of research and information that is available, and how little we really understand about mental health. It is possible that someone’s culpability for their actions may be diminished, and it can be easy to want to point figures and blame someone for the choices they made when not in their right mind when in reality it’s a devastating aspect of living in a fallen world.

Ultimately, when it comes down to it, though, mental illness can be nasty and it can be scary. For many people, receiving mental health treatment is not a matter of just feeling better, or of life becoming easier. Having someone who understands what mental illness looks like and has the qualifications to be able to help is a matter of literal life and death.

I want to shed light on how difficult it is to receive mental healthcare in hopes of opening some reader’s eyes to the reality that talking about mental health more has not actually increased the quality of mental healthcare, as well as hopefully validate some readers’ experiences. But I also want to make it clear that while it is understandable that the difficulty of obtaining mental healthcare may make people experience mental health crises throw their hands up in the air and stop trying to find healing for their minds and hearts, that’s actually one thing you’re not allowed to do.

A broken system is not a reason to give up. It’s not an option. Take it off the table. Sorry, Jesus loves you too much.

It doesn’t have to mean going to traditional therapy and it doesn’t have to mean a hospital or treatment center, although it could. It could mean trying to find a new hobby or getting outside more. It could mean joining a lay religious organization or joining a 12-step group. It could mean finding a community on Discord or it could mean regular confession and spiritual direction.

But as long as there is something that gives you hope, as long as you’re able to see some light and you’re not remaining stagnant, as frustrating as it is to find mental health treatment, you will be able to hold onto hope, and in due time you may find that more conventional treatment is available for you.

Ok, now I’m off my soapbox. Here are some experiences I’ve had.

The first time I was hospitalized for my mental illness was actually at the same hospital where Lindsay Clancy was hospitalized a few weeks before she committed her crime. McLean hospital is one of the best hospitals in the country, a teaching hospital of Harvard, and I was quite spoiled in the treatment that I received there, especially considering that it was simply the first bed that opened up when I was in the emergency room at a different hospital.

If you’re not familiar, most inpatient psychiatric facilities are basically observation tanks. They put all of the patients in a day room where everyone can be watched with a singular television behind shatter-proof glass. There may be a few “group therapy” sessions during the day, but they are insubstantial and are mainly excuses for the facility to bill insurance for additional treatment.

Most in-patient psychiatric stays feel like an imprisonment, where you are unable to leave at will, have to ask to have someone unlock the bathroom for you, and wait every day for your five minutes with the doctor, who holds the keys to your freedom. The providers will explain that as an acute center, their role is to keep you safe, and that’s it.

Phones are confiscated. Visiting hours are limited, if they exist at all. There is very rarely any time to go outside or to get exercise. Units are co-ed. Psych wards are not treatment centers, they’re holding tanks until you promise you won’t hurt yourself or others, and then you’re allowed to leave.

But that’s not what McLean was.

At McLean, I had doctors who were experts in their field who were willing to treat me as long as I needed to be able to get back on my feet after an absolutely devastating mental health crisis. I was there for two and a half weeks, and received genuine treatment while I was there, changing meds and learning skills. It did not feel like a prison at all, but really like a hospital, where I could get better.

One of the big differences at McLean is that patients were actually allowed to keep their phones. This meant that I was pretty actively involved in my treatment and my planning for when I was discharged, including actually having an interview for a job I would eventually be offered while I was still in the hospital.

But while everything was lining up, McLean would not discharge me until I had outpatient providers lined up. I needed to move states, so I wasn’t able to get many referrals for providers. I had to just do cold calls to therapists and practices, emailing everyone I could find. In all, I contacted over 45 therapists, and was finally able to schedule one appointment.

I had a complex situation, but I didn’t even have the luxury of being able to choose a therapist who was qualified to treat my specific presenting issues. I was just hoping for a therapist to call me back.

I have written a little bit about the therapist who I ended up seeing, and she is currently under investigation by the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation. She was abusive and broke many, many ethical boundaries. I don’t want to rehash that here, other than to say that when you are mentally ill, being betrayed by your own mind, and are struggling to find someone who will treat you, you are incredibly vulnerable to predators. The predator simply has to say that they will help you, and that’s what happened to me.

Now, while I was seeing a therapist, I was also seeing a psychiatrist. If you’re not familiar with the difference, a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who is a specialist. Many people with depression and anxiety can receive medications from their primary care doctors, but if first-line treatments don’t work or if the situation is complex, it’s typical to go see a psychiatrist who has a deeper understanding of the medications available to treat mental illness.

It’s typical to see a psychiatrist once a month, maybe once every three months if medications are not being actively adjusted. Psychiatry appointments are generally pretty quick– they are distinct from therapy. The doctor asks about specific symptoms, any side effects, and then decides whether to change meds or keep them the same.

In a crisis, psychiatrists are one of the most important providers because they have the potential to provide pretty immediate relief through medication. Of course, there are always other factors at stake as well.

One summer, I was having a pretty bad mental health crisis, brought on in part by nightmares and not being able to sleep for weeks. Things were rough, and for the first time ever I reached out to my psychiatrist’s office for an emergency appointment. I was hoping they would help me get some sleep at the bare minimum.

However, my psychiatrist was on vacation. A doctor was covering for her, but that doctor said that he didn’t know me well and would not feel comfortable changing my medications. He suggested I take Benadryl if I was having trouble sleeping.

That same night, I made an attempt on my own life. It was not the doctor’s fault, to be clear– I was already not doing well. But reaching out for help in the “right avenues” and not being able to get any, it was easy to give into despair.

I ended up in a different psychiatric ward, much like the caricature I described above. I was locked alone in an empty, windowless room for 8 hours while they waited for a bed to become available. A male patient, suffering from hallucinations, barricaded himself in my room in the middle of the night. I got caught in the middle of a physical fight. My psychiatrist told me I was basically their prisoner.

On top of all of that, once I was discharged, they accidentally sent my discharge summary to a family member who had previously been hospitalized at the same facility. My privacy rights were violated, I reported the facility, and nothing happened.

Since that experience, I have refused to be hospitalized again. At times, it may have helped, and it is possible that in the future I will need to go to the hospital again to be safe if there really is no other option. But I was traumatized while trying to get help for my mental illness.

Eventually, I made the decision to move to Indiana. While this was definitely the right decision for me, it did mean finding all new mental health providers, and I couldn’t find anyone who said they treated dissociative disorders or even specialized in treating trauma in my area.

A quick note about Psychology Today– it seems to be the gold standard of where to find a therapist, but I have reached out to many therapists that I first saw listed on Psychology Today and it never worked out. It could have been because they already had a full caseload, or because they checked off specialties that they didn’t really treat when they first set up their account, or I was ghosted altogether.

On the other hand, every therapist that I’ve worked with for any substantial amount of time has NOT been on Psychology Today. If a therapist wants to weigh in on why that might be in the comments, I’d love to hear it. But I do think it’s significant to note that what is pushed as the #1 tool for finding a therapist doesn’t actually seem that great at connecting people with mental illness with qualified professionals.

Instead, I started looking for practices with multiple providers who would be able to place me with an available and qualified provider. That’s how I ended up seeing a therapist whose office was over an hour away– we mostly did telehealth, although we did a few sessions in person. Eventually, though, after seeing her for about a year, she cancelled or rescheduled 10 appointments with me in the span of one month.

I took this to be my therapist’s way of quiet quitting, and she admitted that she was a relatively new therapist and probably wasn’t the best therapist for me because of my complex trauma.

This was absolutely devastating. It is SO incredibly difficult to find a therapist, and now I was back to square one. I spent a year trying to trust a therapist, helping her get to know me and my story, and I didn’t have the energy to start from scratch again.

My abusive therapist offered to start seeing me via telehealth, and I accepted. Eventually, I called out her unethical behavior and I realized just how bad things had gotten. For some reason, perhaps because I knew I was still extremely mentally ill, I still was resolved to find a therapist. I saw a few via telehealth before settling on seeing a therapist via Telehealth on the online therapy platform, Grow Therapy.

After a few months, though, things weren’t working. The therapist said that I needed to see someone in person– which would have been great, but remember that I had already tried that and hadn’t been able to get any calls back from therapists on Psychology Today.

So, I decided that I was done. Then a friend who loves me said that I couldn’t be done, and said she would call around and find me someone, despite being over a thousand miles away. I told her there was no one who would take me, that I’d gotten referrals and no trauma therapists were available to see me in person because of the area where I lived.

I don’t know what she said, but somehow she got me in with a therapist who is a trauma specialist. This therapist has a waitlist, but whatever my friend said got me in right away. That was about a year ago, and so far things are going really well. I’m finally actually getting better.

After six years of trying to find a therapist who could actually help me, I did. Actually, I didn’t even find the therapist myself, I needed someone who could be a strong advocate to find me help. And that’s not even to mention the limits of finding providers that take insurance (there aren’t very many), along with so many other factors that affect healthcare access in general.

This piece is already long, so I’m going to stop here. But next time, I’m going to talk about 988, the embarrassing fact that I’ve turned to AI chat bots in times of crisis, and what we need to do to keep humanity at the center of mental illness treatment.

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Even typing those words, I fill up instantly with shame. Shame because I should have known better. Shame because there were so many red flags. Shame because five years is such an incredibly long time.

There may be value in telling the full story of what happened with my abusive therapist. I didn’t realize how vulnerable I was when seeking treatment for mental illness, and it’s all too easy for vulnerable people to be taken advantage of. The details are messy and, quite honestly, shocking. I have documentation for almost all of it.

But today, I’m not hoping to expose my abusive therapist, although I’ll share a tiny bit just to provide context. I’m writing because 13 months ago, I reported my abusive therapist to the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation. To date, an investigator has not even been assigned and she still retains a license without disciplinary action.

When I went to receive mental health treatment in Delaware, part of what made me feel safe doing so was the belief that my therapist would be held to certain ethical standards. She would be required to maintain my confidentiality, at the bare minimum, for example, or risk losing her license. I believed I was protected because my therapist would lose her license and her livelihood if she broke these ethical standards.

What I learned, instead, is that the system in Delaware is incredibly strained. It is strained to the point where consumers in Delaware are simply not safe because the regulatory body that should be protecting them has a breadth of scope so wide that it cannot possibly be timely and effective.

This is my story.

In late February 2020, I had to leave the convent due to the impact the PTSD I had developed had on my ability to participate in formation for religious life. After one negative experience, I ended up finding a therapist who was a part of a Christian counseling practice and who practiced EMDR, which both seemed perfect for me. A few weeks later, the world shut down with the COVID-19 pandemic and I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I had secured a therapist just in time.

We began telehealth sessions and she quickly offered to be available by text and phone call in between sessions. I had been inpatient in a psychiatric unit just a month before, was adjusting to life outside of the convent after three and a half years, and the world was in chaos. In the months that followed, there were quite a few crises.

Every time I reached out, she responded. I felt lucky to have a therapist who was so committed and would be there for me outside regular business hours, especially knowing that she had children of her own.

After about a year, there was a Sunday afternoon when I was in crisis. For a year, we had been doing sessions over telehealth and had regular texting and phone calls. But on this Sunday afternoon, she invited me over to her home. This is what really kicked off the boundary violations.

After a few months, her practice allowed us to start having sessions in person again. This therapist told me that when I got to her office, I would have to take all of my clothes off in the bathroom before coming into the session in my socks and underwear.

I told her that I wasn’t going to come to our session. She told me it was a bad joke and brushed it off, suggesting that I was sensitive because of my PTSD (which was from past sexual abuse) and she shouldn’t have made the joke.

Now, I want to take a quick intermission here. This is obviously a major red flag. It is one of the handful of incidents where I actually did sense something was off and protected myself. In this whole situation, things could have been much, much worse. And for people who are familiar with the mechanics of grooming for abuse, that is pretty clearly what this is. But I was so incredibly desperate for help and had come to become reliant on this therapist to the point where not going to therapy with her was simply not an option.

Ok, now back to the story.

Soon, we were having therapy four times a week, twice at her house because her practice was alternating the days therapists could be in the office due to COVID restrictions. That’s when physical contact began. The unethical and illegal actions of this therapist were truly egregious.

Eventually, we spoke on the phone every single night. Nightly calls went on for four years, even after I had moved out of state and we technically terminated our therapeutic relationship.

Two summers ago, she told me she needed to be my therapist again even though her license didn’t cover Indiana. I felt lucky that she was willing to risk her license to treat me, and we began sessions again. We continued nightly calls, just like we had for years.

One day, I confronted her about the boundary violations. She immediately blocked my number, Venmo’d me money, and sent me multiple emails describing how much she missed me as well as begging me not to tell anyone about our relationship because she feared being reported to her licensing board.

What neither of us knew at the time was that the threat of being reported to a licensing board in Delaware is practically meaningless.

November 2024 is when I officially ceased contact with my abusive therapist. It took a few months before the shame subsided enough to the point where I was able to be honest with those closest to me about how far our relationship had gotten. In April 2025, I finally took the step of writing up a report to the Delaware Board of Professional Regulation, including the damning emails and documentation that I had on this therapist.

It is now May 2026, over 13 months after I reported my abusive therapist to her board. The Delaware Division of Professional Regulation has not even assigned an investigator.

Every 90 days, I receive an email from the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation stating that they are still processing my complaint. In the past 13 months, no one has called me, or asked for follow-up information. As I’ve discovered more communications from my abusive therapist where she admits to grave misconduct, I’ve sent them to the investigative supervisor for the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation, which I assume (hopefully) that they file away for when eventually someone investigates it.

At one point, my abusive therapist reached out to me on Yelp (I know it’s odd, but it happened). I reached out to the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation to ask if she had been instructed not to contact me. Their response was that she is considered innocent until due process has taken place.

In my most recent correspondence with the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation on April 6, 2026, nearly one year to the day after my initial report, the investigative unit of the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation told me in an unsigned email the following:

Your complaint has not been assigned to date. The Division of Professional Regulation, Investigative Unit has experienced an influx of incoming complaints. Complaints are worked in the order received and/or by the seriousness of the allegation. Our Investigative Unit is charged with investigating complaints for 54 professionals and 35 boards. So, assignment may not take place for some time.

Apparently, the ordinary time frame for an investigator to be assigned to a complaint against a professional with a professional license in the state of Delaware is over one year. And “may not take place for some time” even beyond that. And that is not even the amount of time it takes for a case to be prepared, brought before a licensing board, and a decision made.

I hope you, like me, find this utterly unacceptable. If you are reading this from Delaware, I am so, so sorry that your state has so utterly failed to properly regulate professional licenses.

Here’s the reality: the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation is responsible for so many different kinds of licenses that it is overwhelming even for the casual observer. They are responsible for regulating mental healthcare and medical licenses, as well as deadly weapons dealers, river pilots, and salons. If you see an acupuncturist, get a home inspection, or are involved in mixed martial arts, the Division of Professional Regulation is responsible for keeping you safe. If your loved one is put to rest at a licensed funeral parlor or you go to gamble at Dover Downs, the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation oversees their licenses. Strip clubs and lie detectors are also regulated by the state through the same department.

One of the most basic beliefs that lowered my inhibitions when seeking mental health treatment was that my licensed therapist was a part of a highly regulated profession that was required to adhere to the highest of ethical standards. In the 13 months since I made my report, which included five years of boundary violations and egregious instances of physical contact and abuse, I have learned that I was actually never safe obtaining mental healthcare in Delaware.

The professional licenses granted by the state of Delaware are practically meaningless because there is no substantive oversight. In the past year, the Delaware Board of Mental Health and Chemical Dependency Professionals has admitted dozens of professionals to be fully licensed in the state, mostly providers that are actually located physically outside of Delaware and are hoping to provide services to Delawareans via telehealth. They’ve issued at least 279 licenses to mental health professionals in the past year.

Do you know how many disciplinary actions has the Delaware Board of Mental Health issued over the same timeframe? Zero.

The Board of Mental Health is issuing licenses at a rate far beyond what the Division of Professional Regulation has the capacity to regulate. It is taking well over a year for my complaint to be investigated due to the backlog, and yet they issued nearly 300 new licenses in that same timeframe. And that’s just for mental health licenses, not even considering the remaining 53 licensing categories they are charged with regulating.

I reached out to members of the Delaware Board of Mental Health in January, explaining that I was concerned that the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation has such a backlog of complaints that cases are getting stuck in limbo and not making their way to the board. I assumed that the members of the Delaware Board of Mental Health had a serious concern about the integrity of their field. In charity, I figured they did not know about the backlog and would be moved to try to figure out why such egregious actions were not being investigated in a timely fashion.

Within three hours, I had an email from the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation reprimanding me for contacting the board and trying to circumvent due process. The “due process” that takes well over a year for an investigator to even begin looking at the case.

I have made it this far without naming a single individual. I have not named the therapist or the practice that she was a part of at the time and subsequently fired from. I have not named the individuals that I have been in contact with at the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation. That’s because this is an issue that extends far beyond any individual. It’s a systemic issue.

The gravest issue here, in my opinion and given the information that is available to me, is the scope of the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation. If a mental health therapist who has had regular physical contact with a client is not even investigated within a year of allegations being made against them, then how can one confidently say that consumers are safe undergoing chemotherapy or surgeries in the state, buying or selling a home with a licensed realtor with a licensed home inspector, or picking up a controlled substance from a pharmacy?

My case is grave and, according to the Division of Professional Regulation, not uncommon. By their own admission, they have received “an influx of complaints.”

If you use Delaware’s professional license lookup to find my abusive therapist’s information, it is all listed right there. There is a column for disciplinary actions that simply says, “None.” If you’re a prospective client, you might see that and feel safe going to her for therapy.

Given the scope of the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation’s responsibilities, it is all too easy to see how many issues might be falling through the cracks and putting Delawareans at risk. What will keep them safe?

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Generally speaking, I mainly review books that I want to encourage other people to read. There is actually only one exception I’ve ever made to this, which is when I reviewed Mel Robbins’ The Let Them Theory, which I reviewed scathingly because I saw people accepting it wholesale without pointing out its problems. My general rule is this: if I think people could benefit from reading a book, I want to encourage that and will bring attention to it through the modest platform I’ve been given. Otherwise, there’s no reason to draw attention to bad books.

Recently, I’ve read two books that I don’t want to fully endorse or criticize, but which I would like to write about nonetheless. That’s what this newsletter is about.

I have a certain fascination with novels about Catholicism and Catholic culture from a secular angle. I’m not talking about The Davinci Code necessarily, which I view more as a movie about art and history. Instead I’m talking about books like Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin, a book about a mentally ill woman who identifies as a lesbian who goes to a Catholic church thinking she will be receiving therapy but ends up accidentally interviewing with the pastor to fulfill the role of the recently-deceased secretary, whose job she ends up taking.

Yeah, those kinds of books. Maybe you didn’t even know they existed, but I love them.

These books contain elements that I would not necessarily endorse wholesale, but which a mature Catholic Christian can consume without much difficulty. While writing an official review would require my to give qualifications about characters’ sexual orientations or some sporadic errors regarding details about Catholic culture, here I am going to look at them from the highest level, mainly analyzing what it is in Catholicism that these secular authors felt drawn to write about, spending likely years of brain space to create their works of fiction.

Ordinary Saints

First, Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin. This book asks the entertaining question: What would it be like for your sibling to be named a potential saint in the Catholic Church?

Ordinary Saints tackles questions of grief, identity, religion, and more. Once again featuring a queer-identified character, learns that her brother, who died while studying as a seminarian in Rome in a freak soccer accident, has been declared a candidate for sainthood. Not just theoretically that people have identified that he was a good guy, but the Vatican is now investigating his life for heroic virtue and encouraging people to pray through his intercession for miracles.

Her parents are absolutely thrilled. They begin printing holy cards and gathering testimonies from priests and seminarians who knew her brother. After losing a child, what greater consolation could there be than for the Church to announce that they are officially in heaven, that they lived a life so great that other people should emulate them if they also desire to accept God’s grace and be saved?

Jay (named after Jacinta, one of the visionaries at Fatima) is not so thrilled. She loves her brother, but the process of the investigation into her life and the pressure of the spotlight being on her and her family leaves her unsettled. She no longer practices the faith and has a lifestyle that is actually opposed to some of the strictest of Catholic teachings, but the process requires her committed participation.

The author’s account of Catholicism and the process of canonization is practically flawless. This is extremely rare for a secular book, and something that I’m sure is a sign of extensive research, respect for the subject, and probably some really great editing. That was something that I appreciated deeply about Ordinary Saints– it is all too easy for cradle Catholics to think they know everything and get minute details wrong, such as in the movie Novitiate (which I do NOT recommend), where a young woman enters a convent on the precipice of the Second Vatican Council before she has even officially converted to Catholicism.

The book also taps poignantly into what I believe is the experience of many fallen away Catholics, especially millennials and Gen Z, where one issue or one event may mean that they no longer practice the faith, but they have not really done a deep dive into the faith as a whole. They may believe that God is real, but that organized religion isn’t necessary, or that certain religious practices are much more conservative or bigoted than the teachings of Jesus require. If confronted with some of the more detailed-aspects of the faith, such as whether they think Jesus really rose from the dead or what they think happens after they die, they are unlikely to have actually researched what the Church teaches and some to reject it passionately, instead shrugging and saying, completely unbothered, “I don’t know.”

But our main character, Jay, in this novel, is forced out of the luxury of being able to say, “I haven’t really thought about it.” Instead, mixed with her grief and her questions of faith, she has to come to a conclusion as to whether or not entering into the canonization process will honor her brother and his legacy, or if it will actually dishonor him by making him into a caricature of a saint rather than real, loving, sometimes messy brother that she knew and loved.

I won’t spoil the book for you, but I greatly enjoyed how it challenged me.

Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?

The second book is Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely? by Sarah McCoy, which is like a mix between Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the real-life story of Mother Dolores Hart, an actress who worked alongside Elvis and eventually became a cloistered nun.

Lori Lovely was an actor in the golden age of Hollywood who gave up everything in order to enter a convent. Now the superior of a Benedictine monastery, he niece Lu decides to interview her

What fundamentally drives Lu’s fascination with her aunt is a belief that she must have been running away from something in order to enter the convent. Lu identifies the convent not as a radical sacrifice or a commendable vocation, but as the easy way out, hiding from the pressures of the real world. Was it grief after her love interest died? Is she a closeted lesbian? Was there some sin so great that she decided the only way she could repent was to become a spouse of Christ?

The book is told mainly in the format of interviews with Lu and a few news articles about the life of Lori Lovely, jumping between the narrative of her Hollywood career and Lu’s present-day visit to the Benedictine monastery to research her aunt. Some Catholics may be disappointed with the ending (no spoilers, but I was kind of disappointed as well), but the story itself nevertheless is a powerful sign of the times.

Most of all, Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely? gets to the heart of what the Second Vatican Council identifies as the key purpose of consecrated religious life and the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience: to witness to the reality that all things of this earth are passing, heaven is our goal, and only God is forever.

This topic is similarly addressed in an older (delightful) film, The Bells of Saint Mary’s, which covers the shenanigans of a religious community of sisters who run a school when a new pastor (played by Bing Crosby) is assigned to the parish. I first watched the movie when I was a postulant in my own journey of religious life and was struck by the character of one of the students.

The young girl, named Patsy, has a difficult life at home, having been abandoned by her father and her mother left to support her through prostitution, and is accepted as a boarding student at the school. Patsy comes to love St. Mary Catholic School, even intentionally failing her final exams so she doesn’t have to graduate and can stay another year. When one of the sisters confronts her about the situation, Patsy, through tears, begs the sister to let her stay and become a nun.

The sister replies, “You don’t become a nun to run away from life, Patsy. It’s not because you’ve lost something. It’s because you’ve found something!”

Incredible. No notes.

Sarah McCoy may not get the spiritual significance of religious life quite right in Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?, but it nevertheless reflects the secular fascination with religious life and may help clarify for Catholics why the witness of religious men and women is so important and how we can build upon this fascination to speak to the truth of God’s saving power.

I’ve tried to read a few other books that fall into this category recently, but these are by far the best two I’ve come across. Is there another book that seems to fit in this category of “secular book fascinated with a slightly weird aspect of Catholic culture”? Let me know in the comments!

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For the most part, Catholics have received formal instruction and formation on AI in a very piecemeal fashion from various parts of the hierarchy. Antiqua et nova, released in January 2025, was the first Vatican document on the topic but was really just more of a reflection. The U.S. Bishops also provided a list of legislative priorities related to AI in the U.S. in this joint letter last year that highlights key ethical considerations. In my last newsletter, I shared what I thought has been the most direct instruction we’ve received to date in this year’s message for the 60th World Day for Communications from Pope Leo XIV, released in January.

I loved Fr. Paul’s AI slop image but decided I needed something a little bit less aggressive, and so I made my own (admittedly less fun) graphic with a quote from Pope Leo. Fr. Paul ended up blending our two non-AI works of art into what I think is a suitable reply meme. I encourage you to share it and use it as appropriate– by the time you get to the end of this article, you’ll be ready to sniff out that content that is meant to mislead and use you for clicks and financial gain.

But remember that we also always want to assume charity. Your Aunt Susan likely isn’t sharing AI slop to extort you, but the person who created it very well might have made it for that purpose. After all, Jesus told us to be as cunning as serpents and as gentle as doves.

Last week someone asked if I was turning into “the AI police.” That is certainly not my goal and I don’t want to shame anyone who is using the tools. There are arguments to be made for and against using them, and that’s not really what I’m interested in. But I do think using the tools honestly and transparently is an absolutely critical aspect of using AI to build the world that we all want to live in and the world that, ultimately, reveals and glorifies the One who made it.

This article is going to have two parts. The first will be a list of examples of religious content that has been produced by generative AI, along with how I was able to identify them as being computer-generated. These examples are hopefully going to help build your muscles to be able to sniff out what AI-generated content looks like. Then, I’ll walk you through an absolutely foolproof way to determine if an image you see online is real or not.

Let’s get started.

Below is allegedly an image of Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows. It’s a beautiful devotion and one that focuses on Mary who suffered first and foremost for the love of Christ as he grew up ultimately to be crucified for our salvation. The imagery is based in the Presentation in the Temple when the prophet Simeon turned to Mary and said, “And you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts and hearts of many will be revealed.” (Luke 2:35)

The problem with this image? It shows Mary as having nine swords piercing her heart, when traditionally Mary has seven sorrows. Computers have a hard time picking up on religious meaning and symbolism, so it depicted Mary as having swords piercing her heart without knowing that the number of swords was significant.

Next we have an image of the Holy Trinity. At first it looks like unproblematic mass-produced cheap art. That is, until you realize that God the Father has three arms (the third is under the globe in his hand). While AI is getting better at getting the numbers of fingers and toes and arms and legs right, seeing an incorrect number of limbs is certainly a tell-tale sign that something was computer-generated.

I don’t easily call things demonic, but I will say this is at least blasphemous and a human artist who was creating a work of art to honor their Creator would never make this mistake.

Below is an image of St. Francis of Assisi, who is especially known for his love of creation. Besides the slightly disconcerting Teletubbies sun in the image, St. Francis’ cincture, or the rope around his waist, has four ends. Ropes only have two ends. Again, not a mistake that a human artist would make.

The next one is AI-generated, but it also is marked as being generated by AI. Many accounts with even the slightest of initiative will simply crop out the watermark, but I do want to point it out because when you see it, it is a surefire sign that the image has been created by a computer.

Below appears to be a photograph that accompanied a viral story about two twin brothers who became priests in Africa (unclear where), Fr. Peter and Fr. Paul. Like many other stories, there were a number of well wishes and “Praise God!”s in the comments. However, if you look in the bottom right corner of the image, you will see the watermark that reveals that this image was created by Google Gemini.

WARNING: THIS NEXT ONE IS QUITE DISTURBING

And it circulated widely, with thousands of people if not more who thought it was real. There was a story of a priest who died while celebrating Mass this winter. I do believe the original story might have some credibility to it, but it quickly spread throughout the internet, including with an AI-generated image that alleged to show him deceased after returning the Eucharistic hosts to the tabernacle.

Being able to tell this one is AI is a little bit trickier, and that’s what the next part of this article will cover. But there are some ways to detect it as AI using some basic reasoning, even if they’re not technically errors.

First of all, the quality of the image looks professional. If this was real, it would have been a chaotic scene; however, artificial intelligence is trained to make “perfect” images, and that’s what we see here. The priest’s body is not laying naturally, it appears posed, again leaning into a perfection that simply does not exist in reality. The shadows of the image are irregular, which is also a common mistake: there appear shadows both on the left side of the priest’s body, as well as to the right of the high altar, suggesting two conflicting light sources. Lastly, a quick search of the name of the priest that was mentioned in the post that accompanied this image revealed a much older man.

Now, I posted some of these examples last week on X and someone asked an important question, “All of these examples are errors in the images, but eventually we won’t be able to tell the difference, right?”

This is spot on. AI technology is advancing constantly and will only become more and more realistic. As important as this is for sacred art, it is just as important if not more important when it comes to things like deep fakes of public figures or fake news.

That’s why when it comes to both using AI and engaging online in the modern era, a sense of discernment is needed. In Catholic circles, “discernment” is often used specifically to refer to a person deciding their vocation, or their state of life, basically whether or not they will become a priest, a religious sister, a consecrated person, or get married. But discernment as a spiritual practice is actually something that all Christians should incorporate into their lives.

Again, “discernment” is often narrowly used to describe a practice of making a decision prayerfully. And, indeed, that is one form of discernment! But looking to one of the great spiritual fathers when it comes to discernment, St. Ignatius of Loyola, we can look more broadly at what is called a “discernment of spirits.” This is much bigger than just making a decision in line with Christian principles or a hypothetical idea of what God might want– discernment of spirits requires a real faith in God and a real relationship with Him in order to know what comes from Him and what does not.

I will give two examples: one from the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the incident where he actually discovered the practice of discernment, and an example of something that happens in my personal life on pretty much a daily basis.

St. Ignatius experienced a massive conversion after he experienced an injury from being hit by a cannonball. As he was recuperating, he had access only to two books: a book on the life of Christ and a book on the saints.

As he read the books about Jesus and the saints, he found his mind and heart lifted to God. He experienced hope for the future, and he experienced a sense of divine purpose in his life. St. Ignatius, processing these stories of self-sacrifice and heroic virtue, felt emboldened to live a life of radical holiness.

But St. Ignatius had also been trained to be a knight, and as a knight he loved battle. He would take breaks from reading about Christ and instead would daydream about going to battle and rescuing damsels in distress. He would think about his war stories or about fictional stories of knights that he had read before. These were fun to think about, he noticed, but after they were done, he did not experience peace or courage. They offered nothing that was lasting.

This served the basis for the Ignatian concept of discernment of spirits. While it can certainly get much messier because of human experience (sometimes we don’t feel good about something because we’re hungry, or have a cold, or we lack courage), discernment of spirits really is that simple: when we follow God, even when things are difficult, we have a peace about it. When evil has entered our lives, it is marked by a disquiet spirit.

Basically, go with your gut. But make sure your gut is healthy and well-formed.

Now, in my own life, I put this into practice often on social media. I’m pretty dialed into several different religious circles on social media and it can be easy to be distracted by the loudest voices, or the voices that give you attention, or the voices with the largest amounts of followers.

But ultimately when it comes to social media, with the sheer amount of information that we are taking in, it is impossible to do an actual rational analysis of every single post we see.

However, when I see an account over and over again whose posts disquiet my spirit in a way that does not lead me to love God or my neighbor with greater sincerity, it can be a quick discernment: that person is not sharing words that God wants me to receive. This is the same for posts of a particular topic– while I find it is good to remain dialed into current events, sometimes I need to mute certain words or accounts.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of encouragement. While we may experience similar emotions when confronted with different kinds of content, what is real, true, and beautiful will always lead us to pursue Christ and live virtuously with greater intensity and peace.

So, what does this have to do with sniffing out AI-generated posts?

Look at the two posts below. The first has several errors in it: Mary Magdalene and Ruth are listed multiple times. The images for Rahab and Ruth are identical. Queen Esther’s name is notably missing, although her image appears to be there twice. There are several women who are not labeled at all. Quite simply, this was not an image made by a human with any kind of intentionality— it was made by a computer, based on a prompt, and is the result of calculations.

The next post is actually pretty much perfect. The image matches what one would expect for an image of St. John Vianney. There’s not much religious symbolism, but there are no obvious errors. The words themselves have no misspellings, even if the quote doesn’t seem exactly right.

But hopefully when you see these two images side by side, you can tell that they used similar source material. They look alike. You’re able to recognize this aesthetic now as being a hallmark of computer-generated material, and, armed with this knowledge, now you will be better able to make quick discernments when you come across similar material in the future.

When reality is blurred with a computer-generated unreality, having a strong ability to discern the true, the good, and the beautiful is the only way to remain clearly focused with heaven as the goal. Because ultimately, the One who is true, and good, and beautiful is none other than God himself.

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Three years later and it seems like every third image I see on social media is AI-generated. From flyers and posters for community events or local restaurant specials that all look exactly the same to entire accounts dedicated to fake or exaggerated stories, my feed is filled with AI slop.

In the space of communications where I work, there’s ongoing conversations about the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Some specialties like copywriters and web designers are told consistently that their positions are in jeopardy of being replaced by artificial intelligence.

But something that I see discussed less is actually much more practical and perhaps seemingly more basic. We’re used to hearing about teachers needing to identify student work that is AI-generated, but this skill also now is absolutely necessary for navigating digital life even as an occasional user.

Last year, I wrote a three-part series on social media literacy. Several of the principles I wrote about there apply in this discussion as well, mostly because they’re the building blocks of media literacy that can then be applied specifically to AI-generated content. The main one that I’d like to look at, though, is one that I think is easy for casual social media users to overlook and I wrote about in the first part of that series: it’s possible to make money on social media!

When all you’re doing on Facebook is giving occasional family updates and sharing memes, it can be easy to forget that if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product.

Social media companies are selling access to you. This access could come in the form of selling your data, but it also comes by way of selling access to your time and mind space through content that is optimized to reach you through platforms’ algorithms and, most directly, through paid advertising.

That might seem like a lot to imagine because it’s a little abstract, so let me break it down with an example.

Around Christmas, I encountered an AI-generated deep fake video of a Catholic bishop. At first glance, it was incredibly convincing, especially with the sound off. Turning the sound on revealed a voice that didn’t sound too natural, but it was also easy to dismiss that as a possible editing choice to speed up the video.

Then the call to action came: Submit your prayer intentions to be brought to Lourdes, a popular pilgrimage site for the nice low price of $55, to be guaranteed that God would answer them.

*record scratch* Wait, what?

I investigated the origins of the video and discovered that it came from an account with only 25 followers and absolutely no posts. Then it became clear how this video was circulating: the page was running paid ads.

So, this scam company was specifically targeting Catholics with fake content in order to extort them with promises that God would hear their prayers. And once I investigated this one page, I started to get more and more ads with similar content, from all kinds of pages, some posts with as many as 2.5 MILLION likes.

It’s somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in Catholic circles where people of a certain age, whenever they see a post related to prayer or an image of the faith, they reply, “Amen.’ On that post with 2.5 million likes, there were quite literally tens of thousands of Catholics who replied, “Amen,” unwittingly drawing more attention and engagement to information that was meant to steal money from them.

This was an incredibly sobering experience for me and kickstarted my deep dive into better understanding artificial intelligence and how to be able to distinguish human-generated content (including content humans create with the help of digital tools) from content generated through artificial intelligence, which is by definition meant to mimic the way human reasoning works.

I don’t know nearly enough about the technology to get into real conversations about its strengths and weaknesses or to have any real sense of how the current models that are available stack against each other. But in my experience, the majority of people fall into two, seemingly opposite, categories:

1. Knows nothing about AI, sees no need to engage with it, and cannot detect even the most obvious of computer-generated content, especially images and videos.

2. Thinks AI-generated material is just as good if not better than what a human being could make and uses the technology indiscriminately.

I’m going to hold your hand while I say this: we are at a point where it is impossible to safely engage online without being able to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and stories from those that are human-generated. This applies whether you use AI all of the time or if you still have never opened Chat GPT.

The clearest instruction we as Catholics have received is from Pope Leo XIV’s message for the 60th World Day of Communications. I highly recommend the entire document, but in particular the following sentence cleared up a lot for me:

“Content generated or manipulated by AI are to be clearly marked and distinguished from content created by humans.”

It makes sense, right? Tell people if what they’re looking at is not real or is not what it seems it is. If you receive this instruction and decide to create and distribute such material anyway without identifying its origins in artificial intelligence, you are making an effort to mislead others. That is pretty blatantly a sin against the eighth commandment.

I am putting together an article that will come out next week with some examples of AI-generated content and some tips on how to spot it. I wanted to include a few here, but this newsletter is already too long. Hopefully you’re on the edge of your seat though!

Some resources for further reading (books are affiliate links):

• AI and the Church by Jason Moore. I don’t agree with Jason Moore on everything, but his book is by far the best Christian approach to artificial intelligence that I’ve seen. I went to a workshop with him a few years ago and I review my notes often.

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna. AI tech companies have largely over-promised and under-delivered, which means that we cannot trust the tools, but also we have little reason to be immediately concerned that computers will replace us.

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. This one defines the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI. While it may not be prophetic, learning where AI can go very, very wrong is helpful for being able to remain level-headed as news about the tools come out.

• Pope Leo XIV, Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications

• Demystifying Artificial Intelligence from a Catholic Perspective, Ave Maria University’s free online course with Dr. Saverio Perugini. May be a little bit technologically advanced for the average person, but is a great next level step to understanding the systems involved in artificial intelligence technologies.

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While it may be tempting to go back to old ways on Easter, logging back on to check the latest celebrity gossip or scroll for hours watching cooking videos, it doesn’t have to be that way. In “Media Fasting: Six Weeks to Recharge in Christ,” Sister Nancy Usselmann, a Daughter of St. Paul, offers a powerful guide to designing a personalized media fast that allows readers to reflect on their own relationship with media and how to reconcile their habits with their desire for holiness.

Books about the dangers of constantly being connected, especially through social media, have been popular over the past several years. In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt unpacks how the advent of social media has correlated with an increase in mental health concerns in young people. “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown, highlights the ways constantly receiving notifications stifles creativity and productivity.

“Media Fasting” is different, though, not only because it has a Catholic angle, but because the author writes with a Catholic understanding of the human person. The purpose of the work is not only to increase productivity or to solve a singular problem like the increase in mental health crises, but to provide a comprehensive framework for living in a media-saturated world as a Catholic.

The book, which features an introduction from Jonathan Roumie, begins with introductory chapters on fasting and a worksheet-style guide to creating a unique plan for fasting from media. Not all media fasts need to be complete blackout periods– it could be a plan to fast from media for a specific time each day, or a specific day each week. Or, if it makes sense, it may mean giving up certain types of media completely. Along with the practical considerations, there are also opportunities for the reader to reflect on their own hopes for the fast.

What follows is a six week guide to making the most of the fast. Each week has a brief introduction followed by brief chapters for each day that cover a plethora of media-related topics from political division, virtue signaling, and oversharing on social media to pornography, music concerts, video games, and more. Each daily chapter also includes a piece from Scripture, a prayer, and a reflection question or challenge for the day, with each week concluding with an opportunity for an examen, looking for where God was speaking through the past week’s fast.

When fasting and breaking addictions, it is imperative to do something positive to replace the old habit. Here are just three of the ways Sister Nancy encourages readers to do more than simply remove social media from their lives in “Media Fasting”:

1. Pick up a new habit of prayer to replace time spent on social media. Don’t just decide to “pray more”– choose a specific practice that you are going to incorporate into your life in a regimented way. Learn how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, commit to praying a daily Rosary, or set aside time in the morning or evening to read the Gospel from that day’s Mass.

2. Choose to mindfully engage with a limited amount of media. Watch or read the news every night with intentionality, praying for the people in the stories you see. Select one episode of a show or a movie that you are going to watch, resisting the urge to watch for hours on end and putting your phone in the other room so you can focus on it with your full attention.

3. Dedicate time to activities that do not involve a screen. Try to make a recipe from memory or spend time tinkering in the garage. Go for a walk without listening to music. Take a paper book to a coffee shop or play board games with friends or family.

Loneliness is on the rise despite people being more connected than ever and the evils perpetrated through the media seem never ending. Something is broken in how people use modern means of communications, and Lent is the perfect opportunity to take personal responsibility for using media well.

If you like media reviews like this one and are interested in getting some sneak peeks of the book I’m working on, I encourage you to become a paying subscriber! Subscriptions keep the lights and internet on, and help stock the treats I use to keep my dogs from destroying my home while I write.

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I think it’s less that I want to be efficient and productive and more that I want to know how things will unfold. If I know how things will unfold, there will be a level of predictability, and I can have the illusion of control.

Look, if I’m not patient, at least I’m self-aware.

But recently, I’ve been feeling this movement to intentionally slow down. A lack of patience had also led to an addiction to instant gratification, and a sense that as soon as I identified a desire for something – a material thing, or to watch a particular movie, or even have a particular outcome, like healing from mental illness – I should then make moves to obtain it.

Here are some things that I’ve changed in my life recently to slow down. I don’t know if I’ve necessarily grown in patience, but I do experience a certain movement in myself. It’s a movement to scroll less (I don’t enjoy the cheap serotonin as much), to get outside more (although the Indiana winter isn’t helping), and to create (I’m venturing into trad wife territory).

I bought a DVD player.

Like most people, I had accumulated an insane amount of subscriptions. It happened slowly, first I got Netflix (because who doesn’t have Netflix?), then I got Peacock because it came free with my Xfinity internet (until it wasn’t free anymore), then I got Paramount+ because it came with my Walmart+ subscription (which I use for groceries), then I added Disney+ (for the Nostalgia), but it was actually cheaper to get the full Hulu bundle (love a good deal), but also I needed HBO because I love A24 movies (and The Sopranos). Oh, and Amazon Prime came with the subscription that I used to get free two-day shipping on anything I could dream of.

It seems crazier when I type it out like that, but I know I’m not alone.

Last year was the year that I committed to getting out of debt, and a significant piece of that meant auditing my subscriptions. It had gotten out of control financially for sure. But it also had a deeper impact on my soul.

The result of all of these subscriptions was that I had pretty much anything I could possibly want at my fingertips. I’m also a voracious reader, and I had stepped away from taking physical books out of the library– why would I add another errand into my life, along with the pressure of due dates, when I could get materials instantly sent to my iPad through the Libby App? At all times I had 15-20 titles lined up, my comfort books there just in case I wanted a thriller, a classic, a memoir, a non-fiction work, an audiobook, a new spiritual reading book. I couldn’t risk the possibility that I’d want to read a book and it wasn’t available.

Again, typing this out I’m realizing that I sound like an insane person. But what had happened was an addiction to self-gratification, and the possibility that I could want something and not be able to have it was mildly anxiety inducing. In a life where so much is out of my control, having access to a book I might want to read was something within my control.

That might have been a good coping strategy, except that it didn’t work one bit. Instead, I was actually inundated with stress, a sense that these things that were supposed to be sources of rest and relaxation (books, movies, shows) had actually become obligations. I felt guilty for having library books that I never read, or paying for subscriptions that I didn’t use at all that month.

So, I started to slash my subscriptions. I got rid of Spotify (still haven’t added it back). I cut out a few of the streaming services because I don’t honestly have the attention span to watch full seasons of shows anymore. And, after taking a deep breath, I cancelled Amazon Prime. That was the big one.

Immediately, my life changed. I could no longer think of something I wanted while sitting on my couch at 11pm and have it show up in two days. I started having to plan to run more errands, to go to the store more. I suffered minor inconveniences when I decided to reorganize my closet and didn’t immediately have access to organizational bins or baskets.

Then, I bought a DVD player (in person, at Target).

For many of my subscriptions, there was a singular movie I wanted to watch, and that’s how they hooked me in for a subscription. But I realized that it’s actually quite easy to get DVDs from my library, completely free.

I started going to the library again. I would put movies on hold and genuinely look forward to getting the notification that they were available, made more gratifying by the fact that I never knew when it would come. While my subscriptions would sit dormant for weeks if not months on end, as soon as I brought the physical DVDs home, I would plan a time to watch the 2-3 movies I had checked out.

Knowing that I would have to return them within the week, I didn’t waste my viewing time scrolling social media simultaneously because watching this movie was a precious moment in time that I couldn’t replicate whenever I wanted.

Isn’t every moment one that we can’t replicate whenever we want, though? In each moment, we have an opportunity to respond to the love of God that will not present itself again. I want to live in that moment.

I got into baking sourdough.

No for this one, admittedly, I did cheat and some of my impatience got the best of me. If I really wanted to do this the right way, truly slowing down, I would have created a sourdough starter from scratch, carefully weighing flour and water every day for weeks as the mixture fed on the natural bacterias in the air to become alive, something truly created from scratch, a creative act of making something seemingly out of nothing.

Instead, I bought a starter off Facebook marketplace and picked it up in a gas station parking lot. Progress not perfection, I guess?

Sourdough had a moment during the initial COVID lockdowns as people were looking for hobbies in a time of social isolation. Interestingly, now sourdough seems to be having another moment in a different way as people connect over it in-person, trading recipes and loaves, conversing about their latest experiments. I have a conversation about sourdough at work at least twice a week.

If you’re not familiar, the process for making classic sourdough loaves can take up to 3-4 days. There are ways to speed it up, or shortcuts you can take. Typically for the type of bread that I make, it takes at least 24 hours.

There are SO many steps. And skipping one step, or cutting it short, can result in the loaf becoming like a hockey puck, or being completely hollow. The yeast in the sourdough starter is living, and for it to work it needs the optimal conditions.

I could buy a loaf of sourdough bread at the grocery store (or, if I’m being honest, order it in my next Walmart+ delivery because I still haven’t given that up), and for me the result would be the same. I’m not necessarily making sourdough bread because it tastes better than what I could buy, and I’m not doing it for the health benefits like some people.

I’m making sourdough bread simply because the process of making the bread is enjoyable.

This is a massive difference from how I’ve come to spend most of my time. Most of my time was either spent being 100% productive, writing, reading books I might review, or working on graphic design projects. The rest of my time was spent doing absolutely nothing, mainly scrolling on social media.

Sourdough bread is this happy middle ground where I’m doing something, I am producing and creating, but the purpose is not the end result necessarily. In fact, when I take the loaf out of the oven and cut it open, there is a tinge of sadness that the process is over. That’s a massive difference from when I accomplish most of my other tasks, where I’m happy when they’re complete.

This has shifted quite a lot in my life, actually. It’s moved me to want to make more things by scratch, simply to have the joy of the process of creating. I eat out less now because picking up something to eat seems like a waste, something so focused on the end result and efficiency, when I can cook a meal myself and experience the joy of creating, even if it doesn’t taste as great as I hoped.

It led me to finally clean out the biggest closet in my home, which is near my kitchen, to create a pantry for all of the ingredients I now was using. I always thought my kitchen was too small, but really I was just using the space poorly. I was focused on always having things within arm’s reach for the sake of efficiency, which led to a crowded space. Now that I’ve slowed down, things are more spread out, but they’re also more organized.

I’ve been absolutely shocked at how one decision has had this ripple effect throughout my life. I don’t know that it’s made me more patient, but it certainly has given me the appreciation for the sense that the best things unfold through a process, not through instant gratification.

I bought a pair of boots.

This winter has by far been the worst of the four that I’ve survived so far in Northwest Indiana. The past few years, we would get one, maybe two snowstorms a season. The snow was so rare that I didn’t even have a pair of snow boots.

Every year when winter comes, I stay inside. I take my dogs out super quickly and otherwise we play inside to get their energy out. But for basically 6 months of the year, I hibernate.

Last spring as the ice thawed, I started spending more time outside. Like A LOT of time outside. I would take the dogs to Indiana Dunes National Park, or walk the mile and a half to the downtown area where I live to get coffee, or just sit outside on the balcony at my apartment, praying or reading.

The biggest realization for me in all of this was that I feel better when I’m outside. Going for even a 30 minute walk after work without my phone was enough to completely reset my mind and body. So many of the hobbies that I have are tangentially connected to the work that I do, but when I was outside, I was free to have thoughts that weren’t tied to productivity or a reaction to something I saw while scrolling.

So, when we got our first significant snowstorm of the year the first week of November, I knew that I needed to go into this winter with a different attitude. Hibernating wasn’t going to work. So, I got a pair of boots.

Now, my Gen Z sister confidently told me the boots I bought (knock-off Timberlands) were in style several years ago and are no longer cool. I say I’m just prepared for the next time they come around.

These boots are waterproof, and they’re comfortable. I don’t lace them up all the way, so they’re easy to slip on and off. I wear them pretty much anywhere it’s socially acceptable because keeping my feet warm when it feels like -20 degrees outside is no easy task, and they’re up for the job.

With these boots, I have actually been going outside this winter. I learned you can bundle up and still go for walks, still go outside, still disconnect. They’ve been a gamechanger.

I’m not pretending that I have it all together, and I’m definitely still addicted to social media. But I’m also genuinely enjoying slowing down, doing things in ways that are not always the quickest or the easiest, and doing them with intentionality.

Especially as Lent approaches (Feb. 18, two weeks away!), the idea of doing things “the hard way” in order to reap a greater benefit is one worth considering. God could have chosen to save us in an infinite number of ways, but he chose to do it “the hard way,” becoming one of us, entering into our messiness, and not only dying but being put to death in one of the most gruesome of ways.

Salvation is not quick or efficient. So why do we try to live that way?

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Thank you for reading! If this brought some value to your life, I hope you will consider sharing.

I have several writing projects in-process right now, which is pretty exciting after feeling uninspired for quite some time. Maybe this new springtime of creativity is because of the DVDs, the bread, and the boots?

If you would like to read more like this, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscriptions are just $5 a month and basically help cover the cost of my internet bill and treats to distract my dogs while I write. Thanks for your consideration!

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This is that post for me.

I’m offering a review of my year because it’s fun, but the numbers really don’t tell the whole story. The reality is that this year I faced a whole lot of demons in 2025, coming to terms with my woundedness and vulnerability in a way that I’ve never done before.

It’s not uncommon for people who know that I struggle with mental illness to comment on how much I seem to get done, and I had more than one conversation this year about how even though I may seem like an open book, what I share is only a tiny fraction of how mental illness impacts my life. If I shared any more, people would run away terrified. The world isn’t ready for that yet.

So what I have below is less about achievements in 2025 and more about how I survived the year by the grace of God.

2025 has felt like an incredibly long year. When I look back on everything that I did and that happened, it feels like I lived a thousand lives because it was such a rich year personally and professionally.

This was the year I began focusing on hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with my job, things that I can do to turn off my phone and just be in the moment. I got a National Parks pass and took many hikes at Indiana Dunes National Park, got a hands-free leash so I can easily take my dogs on long walks, learned to play disc golf (I’m very bad at this), and purchased a sourdough starter at a gas station from a stranger as part of intentionally trying to cook with ingredients instead of processed foods (I’m surprisingly good at this).

I went on three personal trips this year that were especially meaningful.

• Rome for the Jubilee of Communicators and participated in meetings with the Vatican, meeting young adults from throughout the world who inspired me to take my work more seriously because the stakes are so high: salvation. Also I was one of the last people to see Pope Francis publicly before he went into the hospital for an illness that would take his life on Easter Monday.

• A quick trip back to the mid-Atlantic in September for the funeral of a beloved aunt, who provided firm and loving support for me in the past several years. I now ask her to pray for me often.

• Two weeks in the Black Hills of South Dakota this fall, where I was surrounded by beautiful reminders of God’s providence. I was exposed to indigenous history and spirituality in a way that I never imagined, and it was truly a blessing.

2024 was the year where I focused on keeping up with movies, and that was something I tried to keep up with this year. I even got a DVD player to take out lesser known movies from the library! I’ve found movies are much better for my mental stimulation than reality tv, which I’ve been reflecting on quite a lot recently. My top movies I saw in 2025 were:

• The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix documentary)

• Wake Up Dead Man (Netflix)

• Eddington (A24, available on HBO Max)

• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

• Subject (2022, a documentary about documentary subjects)

I read 105 books, which included books I received to review and my regular old thrillers and memoirs that I love so much. I don’t see this number as indicative of my intelligence, nor do I think people should necessarily aim to read this number of books in a year as if it was a status symbol. The reality is that I dissociate quite a bit, and if I don’t read fiction in one sitting, I don’t remember enough the next day for any of what is left to make sense.

That said, my favorite books this year were mostly non-fiction (below are affiliate links):

• Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

• Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

• Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? by Hans Urs von Balthasar

• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

• The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom by Shari Franke

I wrote 7 articles for OSV News that were distributed in publications throughout the country. My personal favorites were:

• my defense of the seal of confession

• my critique of The Let Them Theory

• my first officially published article on supporting Catholics with mental illness

We recorded 40 episodes of Go Big or Go DCOM, the podcast I host with my friend Kelsey. We have a small group of loyal listeners who we are grateful for, but it is a hobby podcast that we do mostly because we both enjoy gabbing about the evils of sports betting and the child entertainment industry. This year, we are scheduled to finally finish watching all Disney Channel Original Movies, hopefully moving onto all Disney Major Motion Pictures in 2027. By the way, happy 20th anniversary of the meeting of Troy and Gabriella to all who celebrate.

It felt like I didn’t write much on this Substack this year, but I actually wrote 15 newsletters! (16 including this one.) I wrote pieces that got well beyond my normal audience by addressing the scandal of the Ursuline sisters’ history of owning slaves in New Orleans and the confusion of seeing medical aid in dying bills pass in the U.S. as someone who has experienced suicidal ideation. I’m especially proud of the series I wrote on social media literacy, which is proving to be more and more relevant as AI-generated content takes over our feeds.

It’s been a blessing to have a space to work out some big ideas, and I’m grateful you’ve been along for the ride.

To close out, I know that many people are praying for me, and I want you to know that your prayers sustain me daily. I pray for you, too, that you will know God’s love however He chooses to reveal it to you, and that I may play a small part in revealing His saving power in your life.

God bless 2026.

It always feels awkward to close out a newsletter praising and thanking God by inviting people to become paid subscribers. But here’s the deal: I have things pulling me in a lot of different directions right now. I have many newsletter ideas saved in the notes app of my phone, but it’s difficult to set the time aside when I’m not really sure anyone wants to read them.

If you want to read more from me on this platform, where for the most part I am unedited and work out some ideas that I may want to retract later if I decide they were too crazy, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.

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If it’s not in the budget right now, feel free to comment and let me know what you’d like to hear from me.

I have been working on some pretty fun pieces for you in between other projects. I’ve been going through somewhat of a creative springtime as the weather has forced me indoors and looking for new ways to rest productively.

On a related note, if anyone wants a loaf of sourdough, my starter Lorenz-dough is at your service.

But there’s something that I’d like to lean into today in a somewhat informal, but serious, matter: I am deeply, deeply disturbed by the proliferation of physician-assisted death in our country.

In May, the governor of my home state of Delaware passed a medical aid-in-dying bill after the previous governor, a Democrat, vetoed it according to his conscience. Within the past week, the governors of Illinois and New York have signed bills that make physician-assisted suicide legal, making 13 states with such laws.

A few months ago I reviewed “Living and Dying Well: A Catholic Plan for Resisting Physician-Assisted Killing” by Charlie Camosy and I highly recommend reading my review (and his book) as a primer on the Catholic Church’s teaching and the beliefs that I personally hold. The realities surrounding euthanasia are complex and emotional, but life is beautiful and taking to heart the reality that life is never a burden has far-reaching implications for our world.

I am not writing to you today to present arguments about the dignity of human life or the reality that giving and taking life belongs to God alone, though.

Instead, I am writing this as someone with serious mental illness who is experiencing very real confusion as lawmakers, healthcare workers, and keyboard warriors celebrate suicide.

I have written somewhat about my own experience with mental illness, and if you follow me on social media you likely have a broad understanding of what I have gone through. Some may feel that I share too much, which is funny to me because in reality I only share a tiny snapshot of what it is really like to live with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

There is something that I have not written about extensively, perhaps because it is something I am still working through and because it carries quite a bit of shame for me, especially as a Catholic. I have never written about the times my mental illness has led me to consider, and in some cases attempt, taking my own life.

Please rest assured that this is not a cry for help (I have a great support team), but I do want to speak frankly about the dissonance between promoting mental health in our communities and our nation while also advancing suicide through so-called “death with dignity” laws.

In my experience as someone who experiences chronic suicidal ideation, it has an appeal as an exit strategy from extreme pain. Some people may describe this as existential pain, as though life has no meaning, but that is not why I have considered suicide. In fact, I like my life a lot, and there are plenty of things I’m excited about for the future.

But in the middle of the night when I don’t know where I am or on a day when I am experiencing physically and psychically painful flashbacks, I just want it to end. Living in constant fear, in fight or flight while watching tv or attempting to work, is exhausting and draining. The work of therapy is long and nothing is guaranteed. It’s possible that this is chronic suffering for me, that I will experience some form of reliving the torture that I survived in the past for the rest of my life.

And I just want to die. It’s as simple as that.

But I haven’t died yet, in large part because the core belief that dying is not the answer to my problems. Of course I also have personal religious beliefs, but even the most secular reader would probably agree that suicide is not the preferred solution to my mental illness.

Now, for people who support physician-assisted killing in a limited sense, this may seem like an overreaction because most of the laws in place today require multiple doctors to sign off with guardrails around the definitions of terminal illness. These bills are designed specifically for people who are in their right mind, who have considered the implications of their decision to “die with dignity.” And while there is a slippery slope argument to be made here, I would like to address a much more fundamental reality.

People who have mental illness are not in their right mind.

Perhaps to you, and certainly to the lawmakers involved in passing these bills, physician-assisted suicide makes sense. You can’t imagine being incontinent, unable to feed yourself or recognize your family members. You don’t want to live that way and you don’t want your loved ones to see you that way or be burdened by your care. You want to know that if it ever came to that, you could gracefully exit this world on your own terms.

How is that different from choosing to die because of mental and emotional anguish?

This is what I am grappling with and what I am struggling to understand. How is it that the same country that instituted 988 as the national suicide hotline to prevent people from taking their own lives is simultaneously holding press conferences to celebrate that people now have the ability to comfortably take their own lives?

My simple answer is that core belief: suicide is never the answer. You are never a burden, whether you are suffering with depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any other illnesses of the mind. You are a gift.

You are never a burden, even when your care costs thousands of dollars a day, when you are on so many painkillers to remain comfortable that you are no longer making sense, and when there are no more treatment options. You are a gift.

When did the statement “suicide is never the answer” become controversial?

This is normally where I would invite you to become a paying subscriber to my newsletter, but what I want most today is for you to share this article and let the people in your circle know they are never a burden. And please pray for people who are considering taking their own lives for whatever reason.

I started this series by explaining that I am a “very online” Catholic. It’s grown over the years, really starting when I was in high school and wanted to share the experiences I had as I would go on local service trips. Then when I entered the convent with an order dedicated to the means of social communications, it started to grow. I earned a certificate in media literacy, and now I work full-time for the Church in digital media strategy.

I’ve seen a lot online. I’ve seen people who are honestly seeking the Lord and who want to walk with others as they do the same. I’ve seen people engage with others who have wildly different beliefs, defending the teachings of the Church and educating people who are unfamiliar with them. There have been countless people who don’t really understand social media platforms, but love to keep in touch with other people, praying for them and offering encouragement along the way.

I’ve also seen people who are obviously hurting, which leads them to disparage the Catholic Church or its leaders. I’ve seen people who will be intentionally vague in their posts in order to spark confusion, which inevitably leads to engagement. I’ve seen people post controversial statements without context, which incites anger. I’ve also seen what I am sure are well-meaning Catholics and Christians post things that may be technically true, but which are imprudent to post in a forum where you do not even know who may see it or what experiences they’ve had, or even what kind relationship they have with God or the Church.

I am not exempt from any of this, but I do feel strongly that it is difficult to use social media in such a way that actually leads to true conversion of strangers. If there is any hope or any real reason for individuals to get involved in social media, I believe it is to share their own story, to witness to the good that God has done and is doing in their lives in order to help others to see what God is doing in their own. Any maxims or encouragement are meaningless unless they come from a place of prayer.

Something else that I notice in Catholic circles is a sense of competition that can be extremely unhealthy. And again, I am not exempt from this and in some ways am only qualified to talk about it because I am intimately familiar with falling into this trap.

On social media, where FOMO reigns and people are vying for attention, it can sometimes seem like the only way to stand out is to post something that is shocking or new. When people are arguing about something, a witty zinger can propel someone into the center of the discussion.

I can remember several months ago when there was a lot of discussion around the idea of the order of charity, ordo amoris in Latin, because J.D. Vance had used the theological ideal to defend strict immigration policy. While J.D. Vance’s interpretation was lacking some nuance, it did lead online to a discussion as to what it means to love your neighbor.

As the discussion was taking place, I remembered a difficult theological concept that had actually helped to shape my own worldview in meaningful ways. St. Therese talks about how God does not love every person the same– it can be said that he loves Mary, the Blessed Mother, more than me because he preserved her from original sin, for example. In heaven, when we are without sin and live in total communion with the Trinity, the “amount” will not matter because we will each be loved totally just as we are.

And in some ways, the reason God loves Mary “more” than me is precisely because He loves me so much– He preserved her from sin so that her son could save *me*.

It’s a powerful truth, and as I hope you can see, it’s a complex one. I considered making a post on social media about it because it is not something I see discussed often. Part of me relished being able to say something that was true but that other people don’t know or understand. I knew it would be shocking and would be the perfect opportunity for engagement.

Ultimately, I decided that someone could have seen the statement that God loves some people more than others and misunderstood. The thought that someone could see one of my posts and think that God did not love them was so horrific that I discerned it would outweigh any potential marginal benefit.

A few days later, I saw that a priest1 had posted this same idea, that God loves some more than others, without nuance or qualification. From where I sat, it seemed to be a post made only to spark outrage, and many people replied having not understood Father’s remark.

Now, one could argue that the outrage was purposeful, not meant to spark division but meant to grab people’s attention so that the priest could walk with them more closely, answer their questions, and provide a proper context for this teaching. This priest is not monetized on the platform, so unlike other creators, he did not benefit financially from people opening the replies or engaging with it.

One big problem, though, is that over 160,000 thousand people saw that post. Only 100 commented to engage in the discussion. Of the people who quoted it, there were a great many people who were obviously hurt by it, saying that it confirmed their worst fears that God did not love them, and to whom the priest did not respond.

Additionally, how many people saw this post and thought, “Well, that’s why I’m not Catholic anymore” without responding? How many people saw it and, already thinking they were unlovable, used it as evidence that God really does not love them? We simply don’t know, and we have no way to follow up with them and offer accompaniment.

Unlike posing such a challenging topic in a classroom or to a small group of people (after all, how often Jesus presented challenging topics!), on social media creators have no idea who will see their content. It is impossible to reach only your specific audience without outsiders seeing it unless you have a locked account. Utilizing a platform well requires the user to respect both its power and its limitations, knowing that while some people may be open to receiving a hard Truth, others are still in the stage where they need to be fed more milder truths to form a basis for faith. (1 Cor. 3:2)

I pull up this example because it pretty clearly shows how someone who is even well-intentioned in trying to share the faith on a social media platform may fall into using it in a damaging way when the platform encourages explosive sound bites.

If someone who is well-intentioned and not motivated by financial gain can post inflammatory content, how much more do those who are motivated by clicks and engagement?

In media literacy education, there are several questions that can be used to evaluate a piece of media. Here are some of the ones that I find most helpful:

• What are the sources of this information?

• What is left out that might be important to know?

• Can I trust this source to tell me the truth about this topic?

• Who benefits from this message?

• Who is harmed by this message?

• How might different people understand this message differently?

While these questions are helpful for evaluating media, they can also be helpful for creating it, helping to assess one’s own motivations for adding to the conversation and genuinely seeking to be effective in communication.

So, when someone posts something that is getting a big reaction on social media, before engaging, I suggest using these questions above to help determine if the person is posting in good faith, or if there may be another motivation for why they are doing something controversial, inflammatory, or divisive.

While these principles are important for everyone no matter the sphere where you live online, they are especially important Christians who hope to spread the saving message of the Gospel online. There simply is no room for intentionally causing confusion or controversy, and, more and more, I am questioning if there is room for monetizing it at all.

–

This is normally where I would say that this time, I am going to post to my Substack more regularly, but more often than not, life happens (I am mentally ill after all!) and I don’t write consistently despite having the best of intentions.

If you enjoy my work, whether here, through other publishers, or on social media, I would be grateful if you would consider supporting it financially. It helps “keep the lights on” with software subscription fees and website maintenance. I’ve switched to making my coffee at home exclusively, so it can also help pay for an entire week’s worth of coffee.

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As I’ve shared before, I am what I would consider a “very online” Catholic. I am connected probably deeper than I would like to be with a lot of different circles. Because I do not align cleanly with any one ideology, I end up seeing things across a lot of different spectrums.

Last week in particular, there was an argument that broke out on X, one of my platforms of choice, regarding whether or not Catholics can attend weddings that take place outside the Catholic Church. This doesn’t refer to weddings that take place outdoors but rather to weddings that are not considered valid in the Catholic Church.

Now, I generally try to stay out of theological debates on social media even though I have a degree in theology and have received excellent formation from my time with the Daughters of St. Paul. But I am very interested in the pastoral care of Catholics, and really of all people, and this particular debate rubbed me the wrong way.

The Catholic Church has a lot of rules and traditions. Pretty much everyone knows that. We are bound by the precepts of the Church, the Catechism, and Canon Law. All of these documents have items that they are strict about, such as the rules for fasting during Lent.

Then there are parts of the practice of the faith that may be cultural or up to one’s preference, such as whether one sits or kneels after receiving Holy Communion, or that may be left up to prudential judgment, such as whether or not a parent with a screaming child chooses to leave the church during Mass. In either case, the person’s faith and practice of the faith is kept intact no matter what they choose, and while some people may have strong beliefs and arguments for one way of doing things or the other, ultimately the Church has not ruled that one is more correct than the other.

It can be a temptation when practicing the faith to want to defend one’s way of doing so as the only “right” way. But ultimately, to try and tell others that they are bound to follow items that the Church does not bind them to follow is binding burdens on other people that may be too hard to carry (Matt. 23:4).

So, I decided not to assert that one way is the right or wrong way but simply to share my experience of when I attended my parents’ weddings that were outside the Church, as well as the advice that I had received from my spiritual director at the time encouraging me to attend them. I got some backlash, but nothing too bad.

The next day, the same person who had started the “conversation,” although really she was telling people that they could not under any circumstances attend a wedding outside the Church (which is not true), backed up her position by sharing the image below. Her post lamented that so many Catholics are poorly catechized and expressed a wish that the Church would teach her position more clearly and directly, as it seems she did in the past (as evidenced, allegedly, by this quote from the Baltimore Catechism).

In the comments, there were around 20 people agreeing with the poster (and, if you remember from last week, that means more people who saw ads in the replies, revenue which was shared with the original creator). But something did not seem right to me about this quote– the Baltimore Catechism is a question and answer teaching document that Catholics used to memorized. The language seemed oddly informal and unlike the document, which I am quite familiar with. So I decided to look it up.

First, I found out that #298 in the Baltimore Catechism is about the Sign of the Cross, not marriage. Then I looked up the section of the document on marriage, which not only does not contain the above quote, but does not include anything even close in sentiment. Lastly, I searched the quote, which led me to an article by a laywoman who feels very strongly that people should not attend invalid weddings.

The quote was from a commentary on the Baltimore Catechism, not the official teaching document of the Church at all. The original poster took down her post and apologized, explaining that the screenshot had come from a presentation by a very well-respected priest, who had likely similarly been duped by the fake quote. (As an aside, even though he included the quote in his presentation, the priest actually says directly that there are times when a Catholic may in good conscience attend an invalid wedding.)

I was deeply bothered by this. Fake news is one thing, but to lead people to believe that the Church teaches something that she does not does not seem to be a simple mistake, but something truly evil. Even if the individuals who participated in perpetuating the false information are innocent because of ignorance, that does not mitigate the harm that could have been done, especially to people who may have seen the quote and felt that they could not in good conscience agree with what was presented as Church teaching– because, in fact, the Church does not say that a well-formed conscience has to believe what that quote says.

The idea of “fake news” has been in the zeitgeist for about a decade now, first widely exemplified by the PizzaGate conspiracy theory. At first, it seemed like fake news was primarily being utilized by foreign agents to manipulate the American public. But recently, companies have learned that they can make a whole lot of money off of fake news, so no market is safe.

I’m a big Philadelphia sports fan and this preseason I started noticing a lot of alleged news coming out of training camp that just didn’t make sense. Similarly, I started seeing posts alleging celebrity news that I had not heard anywhere else.

Interestingly, if you try to Google these stories, it is difficult to find them because the sites are not credible, and so Google ranks them extremely low in the search results. However, social media’s algorithm is based more on generating ad revenue than from pushing credibility, so these kinds of inflammatory or tragic stories can spread faster on platforms like Facebook.

This does not even touch on the confusion of AI-generated content and deep fake videos, which is also a problem that deserves attention. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to read more about that.

If politics and sports have been infiltrated by fake news, so has the Church. At a time when people have strongly-held beliefs that may or may not be supported by the formal teaching of the Church, they are constantly looking for evidence that is compelling regarding their position or vilifying of the opposition. It’s one thing when fake news manipulates emotions or voting, though– it’s another when it manipulates individuals’ concepts of God, heaven and hell.

Because the stakes are so high, Catholics need to be especially discerning of what they consider to be true online, and even more careful and vigilant regarding what information they share.

Another example of fake Church-related news is below. It is a fake quote that was attributed to Pope Francis that one of my Facebook friends shared last Lent. The post had gone viral, shared by many (I’m sure) well-meaning people:

"Eat whatever you want for Lent. The sacrifice is not in the stomach, but in the heart. They refrain from eating meat, but don't talk to their siblings or relatives, don't visit their parents or bother to attend to them. They don't share food with the needy, they forbid children to see their father, forbid grandparents to see their grandchildren, criticize other people's lives, beat their wife, etc.

A good barbeque or beef stew won't make you a bad person, just like a fish fillet won't turn you into a saint. Better seek to have a deeper relationship with God through better treatment of others. Let's be less arrogant and more humble at heart.”

It’s certainly a sentiment that a lot of people agree with. But upon even the most basic level of scrutiny, the quote does not hold up. Fasting is one of the core principles not only of Lent, but of the Christian life in general. It is one of the five precepts of the Church, which all Catholics are bound to follow in order to be considered practicing. I’m not even sure if a pope could remove that requirement, but if he did it would be a really big deal, not something that you would see with typos from a random social media account.

The Vatican has also warned that fake quotes and deep fake videos have been circulating of Pope Leo, basically from the very moment that he became pope.

Being aware of how all of these forces are working to manipulate social media users is the first step in combating it and living in truth online. Thanks for reading this far, and I look forward to sharing with you next week more about inflammatory or divisive posts and suggestions for staying grounded when engaging with the faith.

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If you’re wondering why people may be motivated to share false information, I encourage you to read my post from last week regarding the monetization of content. There are also, of course, political motivations that may be at play, but that is outside of my scope and purpose here.

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This is normally where I would say that this time, I am going to post to my Substack more regularly, but more often than not, life happens (I am mentally ill after all!) and I don’t write consistently despite having the best of intentions.

That said, I already have this series written and you will receive the final part later this week. Yay!

If you enjoy my work, whether here, through other publishers, or on social media, I would be grateful if you would consider supporting it financially. It helps “keep the lights on” with software subscription fees and website maintenance. I’ve switched to making my coffee at home exclusively, so it can also help pay for an entire week’s worth of coffee.

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It’s no secret that being online can also be filled with temptations to sin, especially when monetization is at play. For those who may not be as familiar with how people make money off of social media, here are a few of the ways:

1. Promoting content found elsewhere

I put this one first in a spirit of full transparency because this is the way that I make money from social media, and it’s a little bit indirect. Basically, I have some traditional ways that I am paid for my work, including the book that I published through Pauline Books & Media (who pays me royalties) and the articles that I have published, mainly through OSV News and their affiliate publications. I would also lump this Substack newsletter into that.

Having an audience who is already familiar with my voice and trusts my perspective means that people are more likely to read my articles or buy my book. Publications are more inclined to accept pitches from me because they know that there is already an audience for my work, and leading people to this newsletter, where you can pay to subscribe, also offers a financial incentive.

In this model, clicks are not paid. And while I appreciate the support that I receive from this newsletter and am supremely grateful for the opportunity to be paid for the work that goes into writing, it is supplemental income that basically covers a grocery run each month.

2. Brand partnerships and sponsored posts

This is also kind of an obvious one. If someone has tens of thousands or even millions of followers who trust them, brands and organizations want to be able to ride along with that trust. They pay social media creators, either for a blanket agreement and set number of posts promoting their content, or they can give an affiliate link where the creator makes a certain percentage of every purchase made through that link.

I was absolutely shocked when I learned how much money large creators can make off a single brand deal. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.

Some creators promise to only partner with companies that they actually use or trust and believe in, products that make sense especially for their followers. Think of a parent partnering with a children’s clothing brand or a financial influencer posting about a budgeting app.

There are also instances of influencers accepting brand deals that appear to totally betray their online persona. One that comes to mind is Bradley on a Budget, who lives a self-professed frugal lifestyle where he unplugs his fridge when he leaves his home, takes napkins from public places for toilet paper, and has a toothbrush that looks like it’s been in use since the Cold War.

Bradley, known for yelling at his followers for eating meals out when there’s food at home “because it’s STUPID!” partnered with DoorDash. The backlash that he had “sold out” was immediate– his followers were not fooled. Bradley, who started watering down his eggs in the morning to save money, would NEVER use a delivery service, and his fans knew it. They felt that he had betrayed them, encouraging them to waste their own money, in favor of a paycheck for himself.

Having spokespeople for companies isn’t new, but it is much more personal and much more widespread on social media.

3. Monetizing content

Lastly, every social media platform has a way for creators to share in the platform’s earnings directly, getting paid for how many impressions or views their posts receive. Most platforms do not reveal exactly how they determine how much they pay creators, but it tends to be a certain amount per 1,000 qualified views, anywhere from a few cents up to around $1.

People use social media for free all the time, and there is already an incentive for people to grow their brand through the two ways that I listed above, through brand partnerships and opportunities outside of social media. So why would the platforms share their profits at all?

The answer: ads.

This is a little bit different for every platform, but I can highlight two: X, formerly known as Twitter, and Tiktok.

On X, creators are rewarded not only for the number of impressions their posts receive, but specifically for the number of engagements (likes, retweets, and replies). This is because in the replies of a post, X places ads. So every 3-4 replies, an ad is sprinkled in.

So, if a post has an inflammatory statement or asks a question and hundreds of people reply, all of those people will be seeing ads in the replies, which generates more revenue for the platform. They then share a small percentage of that ad revenue with the creator as an incentive to produce more engaging content, which then produces even more ad revenue ad infinitum.

On Tiktok, the incentive is a little bit different because in addition to short-form video, TikTok is also known for its proprietary algorithm that serves up carefully curated and individualized content for its users. So, encouraging creators to post in a way that engages users, especially keeping their attention longer than a few seconds, gives TikTok the information that it needs to know all about your interests and concerns.

Then, TikTok can assure advertisers that their money will be well-spent reaching only their target audience. Additionally, TikTok has TikTok shop, where encouraging creators to share products links directly to an online store connected with the platform.

Hopefully you can see that while some of the ways people make money through social media can be obvious, other ways are more insidious. And all of them are meant to impact our thought patterns and behaviors in order to bring more money, ultimately, to the owners of the companies themselves through financial incentives to the creators.

Not every account on a social media platform is eligible for monetization. In fact, in July I attempted to get monetized on X. I have over 20,000 followers there and figured it would be a no-brainer to monetize my content.

However, X has a requirement of having 5 million impressions in a three-month period in order to qualify for monetization. Despite having a few posts that were extremely popular, I only hit about half of that amount. In the end, it was probably the Holy Spirit that kept me from reaching that threshold, as I discovered that my attempts to farm engagement to reach the 5 million mark were uncharacteristic and at best were just adding unnecessary noise in a world already filled with so much distraction.

All of that is to say that when monetization is at play, to remain level-headed and purposeful in posting is extremely difficult even when someone has the best of intentions.

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This is part one of what will be a three-part series on media literacy. The next two parts will focus on fake news and information, as well as how social media platforms promote inflammatory and divisive content.

My hope here is to shine some light on some of the patterns readers may see on social media and hopefully to encourage some reflection and build up the Church. As I mentioned at the beginning, I am a very online person, so I am definitely not anti-information or even anti-social media.

However, I do believe these platforms have the capability to form our minds, hearts, and consciences for good or for ill and that there is very little direction, especially for people of faith, to educate them on the science behind virality and influencing. That leaves us especially susceptible to being negatively impacted by the forces that are working mainly to take our money, but as a second effect to take our souls.

I hope this series will be meaningful and uplifting for you.

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This is normally where I would say that this time, I am going to post to my Substack more regularly, but more often than not, life happens (I am mentally ill after all!) and I don’t write consistently despite having the best of intentions.

That said, I already have this series written and you will receive the next two parts next week. Yay!

If you enjoy my work, whether here, through other publishers, or on social media, I would be grateful if you would consider supporting it financially. It helps “keep the lights on” with software subscription fees and website maintenance. I’ve switched to making my coffee at home exclusively, so it can also help pay for an entire week’s worth of coffee.

You can become a paying subscriber below or send a one time gift through Paypal here. God bless you!

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I’m a committed Catholic who strives to pray without ceasing, but for a while I’ve only been doing sporadic spiritual reading. I read a lot about my faith through articles and snippets on social media, but actually sitting down with a book with the intention of learning about God and how I can be in better relationship with Him has just not been happening. I have a stack of books, like I imagine you do as well, all of which I think will lead me to heaven if only I were to crack them open.

Part of my therapy right now is to be absolutely meticulous about a bedtime routine. Nights are hardest for me with my mental illness, a time when it is necessary to let my guard down so I can get to sleep. Letting my guard down means letting go of the coping skills that I use to survive throughout the day. And yes, I am pretty much always using a coping skill, whether that’s deep breathing or grounding, or some sort of self-talk or having a video on in the background.

Enter: the bedtime routine.

As I was putting together my bedtime routine, I wanted to do things that I used to do when I was in the convent, where my whole life was basically one routine. In addition to basic hygiene, I knew that prayer and other ways of lifting my mind and heart to God would be an essential part of it. Re-introducing spiritual reading seemed ideal.

I review a fair amount of Catholic books, but I consider reading them to be work. It’s a very different way of reading a book, thinking of how it might help people or how some people may be confused by it, even if I’m not personally impacted. I take recommending a book seriously, as in any given year OSV News, one of the publications I right for, publishes maximum one book review a week. I would never review a spiritual book I felt I could not recommend, and I have often declined to review books because drawing attention to them, even to critique them, would be a disservice to the reader.

I wanted my spiritual reading to be different. There was a book I bought about a year ago recommended by a priest as one of the best books he had ever read, and he recommended it highly. The book is by a popular Catholic psychologist, one who has written many books, although this was my first time reading his work.

Reader, I did *not* like this book. And the reason I didn’t like it is similar to why I don’t like a lot of popular spiritual reading books.

Read more

I’ve been kind of “all-in” with this jubilee from the beginning. I traveled to Rome in 2016 when Pope Francis declared an extraordinary jubilee of mercy and experienced inexplicable grace as I crossed through the holy doors of the main basilicas of Rome.

Last summer I learned that I had been selected to go to Rome and participate in a series of meetings with the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, a program they were putting on specifically for young adults who work in Church communications. This past January, I traveled to Rome and met people from over 70 countries who are doing absolutely amazing things in corners of the Church where there are real persecution and political pressure to stay silent about the Gospel, war-torn nations where they experience regular danger from all kinds of violence, and other young adults who are using the new media to reveal the beauty of a life lived by the Spirit.

Truthfully, I believe I will be unpacking the days I spent with these colleagues for the rest of my life. If I could summarize this experience, it would be this: God is raising up great saints for His Church and everything is going to be just fine.

I also was at one of Pope Francis’ final audiences, which he gave for the Jubilee of Communicators. It was clear his health was fading, and he spoke for under two minutes. That he died during the Year of Jubilee, while perhaps a coincidence on our end, certainly was not a surprise for God. The blessing now of having the first U.S.-born pope in Pope Leo XIV is a joy that is hopefully celebrated around the world, but I know in a particular way has infused the Church here in the U.S. with a certain joy and energy that is much-needed.

God knows what we need and He always provides.

The primary way that I’ve been participating in this Year of Jubilee actually extends back to the purpose of jubilee years in the Old Testament. In Leviticus, God commands that every 7th year is to be a sabbatical year of rest for the land, where people were to survive on the overproduction of the first 6 years. Then every 7 sabbaticals, there would be a year of jubilee marked primarily by the forgiveness of debts and the freedom of indentured servants and slaves.

Organized religion is commonly criticized for rules that seem to be illogical or controlling. I don’t pretend to understand every reason for every law of the Old Testament, but there are a few that make a lot of sense and, when you study their purposes, reveal God as a loving, merciful father. Sabbatical and jubilee years are examples of this.

You see, farmers know that it’s important to let land fallow from time to time so that nutrients can replenish it. Eventually, farmers developed a system of crop rotation for this exact purpose. The problem is, it is easy to delay this process if you’re not disciplined– there’s always next year, this year you didn’t produce enough, etc.. God made sabbatical years a commandment for our own good, a non-negotiable that would ensure enough was set aside during production years so the land could rest.

Jubilee years and the forgiveness of debts are a strict mercy, but one that shows God’s heart for the least among us. In 2025 the idea of a debt being completely blot out and forgiven is unimaginable, and it’s actually why I’m writing this piece. Debt, especially debt with interest, can ensnare generations upon generations in cycles of poverty and servitude. Especially in past social systems, it would literally be impossible for someone to achieve freedom. So, every 50 years, God commanded that all debt be remitted. Realistically, the collectors were never going to receive their funds anyway, and those in debt could experience a clean slate.

Now, I began 2025 in a fair amount of debt. There were a number of contributing factors, some more in my control than others, but one of the biggest reasons why was that I had never really had to keep track of my finances after leaving the convent because I was living such a simple life. As my years “on the outside” progressed, I started to not live so simply anymore. Especially with experiencing mental illness, my healthcare costs are pretty significant even with insurance, and I had come to rely on conveniences that helped me survive. It wasn’t anything crazy extravagant, but before I knew it, I was putting regular necessities on credit cards, unable to pay them off each month.

We don’t talk a whole lot about responsible spending in the Catholic Church. There are a few books about finances and the faith, and of course we know about the principle of stewardship and giving to the poor. But I had never really learned how to budget and make smart financial decisions that not only benefitted me and my goals, but also opened me up to more freely give of myself.

Enter: The 2025 Year of Jubilee.

I set out this year to become completely debt free. I sat down and made a budget and a plan that would get me there. Within the first two months, I knocked out two of four debts and I’m now on track to finish the third in August and the fourth by the end of the year. It has taken a level of discipline I haven’t exercised since I was in religious life, but the freedom that I’ve experienced in also being able to give with greater confidence has been transformative.

This jubilee year, consider where you need forgiveness and where you need to forgive. Don’t let this just be a time of increased travel to Rome, make it a life-transforming year. But you better get started soon because it’s almost halfway over.

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While the bill never made it out of committee in Delaware, a few weeks ago the governor of Washington state signed a similar bill into law. The Department of Justice is now investigating whether or not such a law infringes upon religious liberty. From what I’ve heard from Catholic lawyers, the way this particular law is written is clearly discriminatory, not leaving room for clergy who may be civil lawyers to maintain attorney-client privilege.

But even if the law was well-written, it would still be egregious. From what I’ve read, though, the focus has been on requiring priests to violate their conscience or face imprisonment.

While it’s true that the majority of Catholic priests would not comply with such a law, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse it is also clear that a law without clergy-penitent privilege also harms survivors and victims.

I wrote more about this in my latest piece for OSV News. I hope you’ll read it.

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Last night, I had a few tasks that I wanted to have done by the morning. Pope Francis’ funeral would begin at 3 am my time, so I decided to get an evening coffee and get my work done in time to watch the funeral.

I decided to watch the feed from EWTN, which is pretty much the gold standard in Catholic broadcast news. I tried the feeds from CBS, NBC, and the AP and they left much to be desired.

As they were transferring the pope’s body from inside St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the commentators noted that the pope is not only a spiritual leader, but is also a head of state and political leader. A priest offering commentary responded to this by saying, “No pope is a schizophrenic, there is a unity within.”

If you’d like to hear it for yourself, you can watch the video at 1:08:48 here.

Now, I am admittedly more sensitive to mental illness stigma than the average person, and in the grand scheme of things the priest who made this comment does not typically do live news commentary. However, this is not the first time I’ve heard this exact comment, including mistaking schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder (DID), from a priest.

The first thing to note is the difference between schizophrenia and DID, which was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia is marked primarily by hallucinations and delusions, whereas DID is defined as an ego which has split into multiple defined ego states. The person with DID has different parts that behave in different ways, often without being aware of what other parts are doing, resulting in dissociative amnesia. Both disorders can be a result of trauma.

The second thing to note is that neither schizophrenia nor DID is a moral failing. While we don’t fully understand how they develop, all signs point to them being protective measures when someone has experienced significant trauma. In DID, the personality compartmentalizes so that it can go on with life without being consumed by the pain and anxiety of the trauma. With schizophrenia, the brain tries to anticipate dangers and imagines dangers that aren’t there in the process.

When I look at my own experience of DID, in a very real way, it is a gift from God that enabled me to survive trauma that would have otherwise destroyed my brain and body. At one time it was adaptive and now it is maladaptive, which is why I work so hard to manage it with therapy, prayer, and medication.

What I believe this priest was hinting to us a spiritual understanding that holiness is connected to a sort of wholeness within a person. The mind, will, and heart are aligned in a person who is holy, so that what they think, do, and desire is all the same, and what they think about is God, what they do is God’s will, and what they desire is heaven, or eternal union with God.

The word that is used for this spiritual progress is often the same that is used for someone who has recovered from DID: integration.

Integration for someone with DID looks like untangling the trauma they’ve experienced, processing it, and re-unifying the parts that had split beyond their control as a coping mechanism. Some people with DID are fine with learning how to cope with living with DID. A person who experiences this mental illness is not morally deficient; like someone may have a broken arm from abuse, they have a brain and central nervous system which have been broken through no fault of their own.

There is also a phenomenon called “code switching,” which would probably more accurately describe someone who appears one way in front of one crowd and chooses to act another way in front of another group. In light of the comment made at Pope Francis’ funeral, I believe the commentator was saying, “His action as a head of state was not separate from his action as a spiritual leader. He was the same person who held those two roles.”

But that’s not what this priest said. Instead he used a stigmatizing phrase that actually doesn’t even make sense given the definition of the words he used.  As one of my friends said, “It’s so easy to just not do that.”

One aspect to destigmatizing mental illness is realizing that you likely encounter people with severe mental illness on an almost daily basis. Most people who I interact with, unless they’ve read my writing, would likely be surprised to know that I have what was previously known as multiple personality disorder. And yet, here I am.

To put it this way: one day we could have a pope who is a schizophrenic. Maybe he works hard to cope with it, has a service dog that helps him identify what is real and what is not, or has a medication regimen that works well for him. Having schizophrenia would not make a pope less holy.

In fact, for many of us with mental illness, it is in that exact wound where we encounter God’s tender mercy. It is in carrying this cross that we become holy, that we become saints because we are so acutely aware of our need for God’s grace and our inability to sustain ourselves.

Why would we want to stigmatize that?

Thank you so much for reading my work. I hope it has helped you in some small way on your journey.

I use my newsletter here to work through some of the thoughts and ideas that are going into my next book, which is about living as a Catholic with mental illness. If you have benefited from my writing, I ask that you consider sharing it.

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Someone reached out to me a few weeks ago and asked what kinds of resources there are for people with mental illness during Lent. There aren’t many, although I hope that the book I’m working on now may help stand in that gap. If you’re not familiar, some concerns people have are things like:

• I’m barely hanging on by a thread and I’m worried if I give up something, I will end up in crisis.

• I have a panic attack whenever I even think about going to Mass, but I know it’s a sin not to go.

• How do I fast if I have an eating disorder?

• How do I go to confession when I struggle with scrupulosity?

I want to address one that I’ve struggled with for the past five years as I’ve battled with serious mental illness: What do I do when Jesus’ suffering doesn’t seem so bad?

This is one that has challenged me because on the one hand, it only takes one viewing of The Passion of the Christ to be convinced that Jesus deeply suffered for our sins. More than that, I intellectually know that my heart should be moved with compassion and sadness seeing Him suffer because, after all, it was my sins that got Him there.

But the longer I struggled with mental illness, especially the somatic symptoms like re-experiencing the physical pain of my trauma in my body, Jesus’ suffering seemed especially short. Really, it lasts just a few hours. I would look up at the crucifix that previously brought me comfort in my suffering, and suddenly it seemed like a mockery. 

These aren’t the holiest of thoughts, friends.

And yet, so much of learning how to be a faithful Catholic while suffering from mental illness is learning that Jesus isn’t afraid of the unholy thoughts. 

In the Old Law, when someone was “unclean,” everyone had to stay far away from them. Whether it was a leper or a woman during her cycle, there was a concern that the “uncleanliness” would transfer. Essentially, before Jesus, there was a sense that unholiness could (and probably would) spread like wildfire.

But what we see with Jesus, in his encounters with the sick, the demon-possessed, and sinners, is that Jesus flips the idea of uncleanliness on its head. With Jesus, he makes what is unclean, clean. 

When I presented this dilemma to the Lord in prayer, this frustration that people say that he understands our suffering because he was crucified, I experienced a surprising invitation: “Unite your suffering to mine.”

Now, this is pretty typical language in the Catholic arena, but as moments of grace so often do, it carried a new meaning for me. You see, in the past when I imagined joining my suffering to Christ’s, in my mind it was Christ’s was the big sacrifice that my little sacrifice was clinging onto for dear life. In this moment, though, I saw my suffering as having precious value to Christ. My hurt and pain is valuable to Christ because not because he wants to make me feel important, but because it genuinely adds value to His ultimate sacrifice.

Jesus’ sacrifice was once and for all, and it was perfect because he was without sin. Nothing was “missing” from his sacrifice because he withheld nothing. 

But there is something that Jesus could not give on the Cross: the suffering that was not his to give. That is, the effects of sin that you and I experience in our suffering, whether it is a direct result of our personal sin or the effects of living in a world broken by sin.

This is a topic that deserves many more words than I will have time to share today, but consider this: St. Paul discusses “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (Col. 1:24) 

What could be lacking in Christ’s afflictions? The suffering that I experience, which is something only I can offer to God the Father, for the sake of Christ’s body, the Church.

This calls to mind a philosophical problem, the omnipotence paradox. Can God create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? Well, in a way he has, because he created humanity with free will. 

So, Jesus cannot offer up my suffering to the glory of God the Father. Only I can do that.

You and I can be co-redeemers with Christ. Our suffering is not in vain, but has a purpose. This purpose is not simply to create a set of circumstances, like facilitating a meet cute with our future spouse in the emergency room, but to quite literally save the world.

God only allows suffering because he can bring a greater good out of it than would have existed otherwise. While we don’t know exactly the reasons why things happen to us and our loved ones in life, faith is what calls us to believe that there is a purpose, which we can see in a special way when we fix our eyes on heaven.

This Triduum, Jesus invites you and I to first welcome him into our lives, into the questions and the doubts, into the suffering, the anger, the sadness, just as he was welcomed on that Holy Thursday night. Then, on Good Friday, experience Jesus’ invitation for you to make up for what is lacking in his afflictions.

It’s the only way we can get to Easter Sunday.

Sacred Triduum Liturgies

Holy Thursday evening is when the Church celebrates the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Bells ring during the Gloria because we are celebrating joyful things– Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, as well as his commandment to love one another. The Mass ends, however, with the altar being stripped and the tabernacle remaining empty, usually with a solemn procession with the Eucharist, representing Jesus’ instruction to keep watch with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Mass will not be celebrated again until Easter.

On Good Friday, the liturgy begins with the priests and deacons processing into the church and laying prostrate before the crucifix. It’s a powerful representation of our posture for the day, which is that of realizing the horror of our sins, and surrendering ourselves to our sacrificed Lord. During the liturgy, the Passion is read, we venerate the cross, we plea with God for the intentions of the world, and we receive Holy Communion. Silence takes over the world, as we realize that Jesus is dead, and we have killed Him. 

The Easter Vigil the next night is stunning. Beginning in darkness, we recall the major stories of salvation history, hearing readings from Genesis and Exodus, all the way through to the prophets because all of history has been leading up to this moment when death and sin have been defeated. New Christians are created through baptism and new Catholics complete the sacraments of initiation. The Church, the vessel of salvation, grows because nothing could ever be the same again.

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Then, I also try to do public posts as often as I can. Public posts are often my way of working out ideas that I plan to incorporate into a bigger project, or pieces that I want full editorial control over, such as last week when I published about the Ursuline Sisters holding slaves at their New Orleans foundation. I also sometimes post things that are poorly edited as I’m trying to work out my own approach, especially to what it is like to be a faithful Catholic with mental illness.

I consume A LOT of media. Part of it is definitely screen addiction, but I also read a fair amount and try to be intentional when I watch movies or tv shows (currently working on White Lotus season 3 and Paradise). I even have a podcast with one of my best friends where we re-watch Disney Channel Original Movies every week. That’s not even taking mindless scrolling or the media I consume for my job into account.

Now, some may expect me to start talking about the importance of silence, or disconnecting, or not numbing the pain of modern life with nonsense noise and distraction. And there’s a value in that, but many people have written such things before and so it’s not anything particularly exciting or unique.

It’s also no secret that I’m mentally ill. For people who are typically healthy, or even those predisposed to anxiety or depression, using social media and bingeing television shows can contribute to decompensating mental health. The constant reminders that you aren’t smart enough, funny enough, pretty enough, and don’t have enough friends can be absolutely crippling. I’m currently reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and while I don’t agree with everything he says, there certainly is something to be said about the reality that there was a significant decline in adolescent teenage health with the advent of social media algorithms.

My mental illness is a little bit different, though, because it is something that developed as a result of trauma. I have PTSD and DID (dissociative identity disorder), which both contribute to a state of hyperarousal. Basically, I am always on guard.

Things can get too difficult for my brain and body to possess when something triggers me, and the triggers are abundant. It could be a smell or a time of day or something I overheard or a feeling in my body that pushes me into survival mode. When this happens, one of two things happens to me: a) all of my internal alarms go off and I need to find an exit strategy immediately, even if that exit strategy is not objectively safe or helpful or b) my brain and body disconnect from the current situation through dissociation.

When I’m in fight or flight, that first response, distraction is one of the only ways that I can get back within my window of tolerance. Now, many people, might say that you should sit with that reaction, that God is bringing something up that He wants you to address, and that a more appropriate response would be to journal or to go to an adoration chapel or open your Bible to see what God wants to reveal.

When considering best practices for the spiritual life, it’s important to keep in mind that there will be exceptions to the general rules. It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve tried to “enter into the silence” and solve my mental illness through prayer, and if I continued trying to do that, I would most likely not be alive right now.

The second reaction that my brain and body can have to triggers is dissociation. Suddenly things around me don’t feel real, I have a numbness in my hands, and my executive functioning is absolutely gone. The only things that I am capable of doing are basically scrolling or staring into space. Even reading or watching television are impossible.

Dissociation is not necessarily a bad symptom– when I’m safely at home in the evening after all of my work is done for the day, it can be a way for my brain to take a break after an overstimulating day. But it can also happen at other, less advantageous times.

I’ve actually found that allowing myself to dissociate later in the evening, doing things like turning on a familiar show (The Office or Chopped, usually) or scrolling actually helps me to calm my central nervous system so that I can sleep, despite the fact that the typical rules of “sleep hygiene” include a significant amount of time without blue light or such distractions.

These things wouldn’t necessarily be recommended to everyone, and I’m not actually recommending them. But I did see a post from a psychologist recently that resonated with me on these items that seem to go against “best practices,” but which are actually helpful for people who have survived complex trauma and live in a state of hyperarousal. For us, we need the noise and the clutter in order to be able to focus on what is truly important, to quiet the voice that is telling us we aren’t safe, and to create an environment that has components that we can control after a lifetime of unpredictable behavior that sometimes resulted in us being harmed.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish that praying the Holy Rosary or listening to Bible in a Year or praying Mother Teresa’s “flying novena” would get me into a safe headspace.

At the same time, I keep in mind the story of Naaman, who goes to the prophet Elisha to be healed of leprosy in 2 Kings 5. Elisha tells him simply to wash in the Jordan river and he will be cleansed. But Naaman is not satisfied with this; he thinks that his illness should require a bigger show to be healed, or some big gesture, or at least going to a river in a foreign land.

But Naaman’s attendants remind him: “If the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” Of course, Naaman is healed.

There are certainly times when God asks for us to do some great act for love of Him, or that He heals us in obviously miraculous ways. But as people who are united bodies and souls, we also have brains and nervous systems that work in particular ways, and which can sometimes change based on what experiences we have had. There are as many paths to Jesus as there are people, for the Father sees each of us as a unique expression of His image– but every legitimate path brings us to Him.

It’s easy for people (and I would say especially for Catholics) to rail against phones, social media, and the latest Netflix series. And as I’ve written before, everyone has to discern what is right for them.

But if Jesus could use some dirt and spit to heal someone of blindness (John 9) or heal a deaf man by sticking his fingers in his ears and spitting on the ground (Mark 7– why is there so much spit??), I’m confident he can use almost anything to bring us closer to Him. The only obstacle is whether or not we’re willing to see Him.

As I work on my next book, this is something I keep coming up against– it’s impossible to make broad strokes recommendations on how people should practice their faith when struggling with mental illness. For one person, daily Mass may be exactly what they need to know of God’s closeness to them in their struggle. For another, they need to hear that their illness is valid and if they find themselves unable to go to Mass for whatever reason, Jesus is especially close to them in their suffering.

At the same time, popular Catholic writers and influencers try to pretend that there is a one size fits all solution for being a Catholic man or woman. Rigidity and legalism is attractive because it creates boxes to check off– yes, I went to Mass, went to Confession, abstained on Friday; no, I did not do yoga or watch that movie or download TikTok– like a Buzzfeed quiz that will calculate in 50 questions whether or not you are likely to go to heaven.

This idea of the importance of the union of body and soul is something that Pope John Paul II pounded home in his Theology of the Body, but it is largely something that seems to have been lost. We are not angels, we are hybrid creatures, and God wishes to heal us as whole people.

I’m grateful that you have read this far. I’d like to express a particular word of gratitude to those who have a paid subscription to this little newsletter– your support encourages me to keep coming back, to pray and to think harder, and to live a life of holiness and virtue.

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For years, I proudly wore the gold cross I was given at my high school graduation until the chain broke a few years ago. After graduating from college, I had entered a convent myself, although not with the Ursuline sisters, and I proudly made sure that we used the prayers for the feast of St. Angela Merici each January 27, declaring it “St. Angela Day,” just as we had celebrated in my 9 years of Ursuline education.

I attribute who I am today in a large part to my Ursuline education. The leadership skills I gained, living the preferential option for the poor, and having a desire to spread the Gospel and build up the Church are some of my core values as an adult. I can confidently quote St. Angela Merici’s encouragement to “build community wherever you go,” a maxim that defined my time as a student and has been a helpful reminder as an adult living in our fractured society.

That is why I was so shocked two years ago when I was doing research for another project, now a Catholic writer and journalist, and I read what seemed to be a throwaway line in Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers’ book, Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism.

The deacon claimed that the Ursuline sisters in New Orleans were highly respected in the 18th century because they were among the largest slaveholders in the area.

Immediately I thought that couldn’t be true. An Ursuline sister had taught us a class on Ursuline history, and I knew all about the foundation in New Orleans. In the war of 1812, Andrew Jackson came to pray at the sisters’ convent, which has since become the National Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, a title for Mary frequently invoked during hurricane season.

Surely if slaves were involved, she would have told us, right?

I reached out to the sister who taught our class on Ursuline history and who had led several trips to Italy for alumnae to walk “in the steps of St. Angela,” the Italian foundress of the Ursuline sisters. I very plainly wrote out how I’d come across the information and asked her: Have the Ursuline sisters ever issued any sort of public acknowledgment or apology for the fact that they owned slaves in New Orleans?

My request was personal and informal at the time, as I was mostly trying to work out the cognitive dissonance of seeing the Ursuline sisters as social justice advocates of the highest magnitude along with this newfound information that they had held slaves. The sister never responded to my email.

About a year later, my alma mater posted about the Ursuline sisters, encouraging alumnae to make a financial gift in their honor. I remembered what I had read a year before and how I had not found a satisfactory answer, so I replied to the post on Facebook very simply asking whether or not the Ursuline sisters had ever publicly acknowledged or apologized for the fact that they were among the largest slaveholders at their New Orleans foundation.

A few women who had been my classmates reacted to the post with emojis or likes. The school didn’t respond, but a woman who was now retired former member of the school administrative staff replied, saying that she was sure the sisters had addressed the issue, knowing their staunch commitment to social justice.

I understood her inclination to think positively of the sisters and to assume that they had addressed this dark part of their history in the U.S. because that had been my original inclination as well. But the more I looked for evidence that they had acknowledged and disavowed this part of their past, the worse things seemed to get.

Last week, Ursuline Academy in Wilmington once again posted for their founder’s day fundraising campaign. Reminded that the idea of the sisters having slaves had been itching my conscience for two years, I once again formulated what I thought was a respectful, but pointed comment. It was deleted.

Now, I work in communications and I understand the knee-jerk reaction to get rid of anything that may harm the reputation of the organization. Realistically, it was not a sister who deleted my comment but a staff member. And yet, this is a microcosm of how many issues have historically been dealt with in the Church and continuing to pass responsibility off to someone else means that organizations and individuals never actually learn and grow.

Somewhere along the line, someone needs to step up and say that what happened is wrong. It does not negate all of the good things that the organization or the individual sisters have done, but it does place them in their proper context. A well-coordinate PR campaign is not what is needed here— returning to the Lord with prayer and fasting is what would be appropriate.

I didn’t want to write about the Ursulines and their slaveholdings, but after two years of having this on my conscience and a lack of response from the school and the sisters, now is the appropriate time to lay out exactly what the Ursuline sisters are seemingly trying to sweep under the rug:

• In 1727, the Ursuline sisters were originally gifted eight slaves by Jesuit priest Ignace-Nicholas de Beaubois at their foundation in the United States to serve as domestic slaves. Almost immediately, two ran away.

• In 1758, a young woman who wanted to enter the Ursuline convent brought two slaves with her as part of her entrance dowry.

• By 1770, the Ursulines, a community of approximately 12 sisters, held at least 61 slaves on a plantation they owned, where they grew their own produce for themselves and their boarders.

• By 1771, in addition to the slaves on the plantation, the sisters owned at least 17 slaves that worked in their convent as domestic servants.

• The Ursuline sisters were among the top 30% of slaveowners in the region in 1731 and were in the top 6% of slaveholders by 1770.

• In 1777, the Ursuline sisters sold one of their two plantations, including 35 of their slaves.

• On multiple occasions, women who became pregnant out of wedlock or men who became addicted to alcohol were sold due to their moral defects.1

I reached out to some of my classmates, as well as a former teacher and alumnae of other Ursuline schools in the United States, whom I had met in high school when the various Ursuline schools came together for a lacrosse tournament. Every single one told me the same thing: “No, we never learned that.” A few added something along the lines of, “I definitely would have remembered that.”

Of course, the current Ursuline sisters did not own, buy, sell, or trade slaves. But they also haven’t said that the sisters who did were wrong, or been honest in describing that part of their history as sinful.

In fact, on the history page of Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, they proudly state that the sisters educated and catechized marginalized groups including indigenous and enslaved girls. That seems especially disingenuous when considering that at least some of the girls were enslaved by the sisters themselves.

Religious orders owning slaves is not unique to the Ursuline sisters. The Jesuits and Visitation sisters at Georgetown held hundreds of slaves and sold them against the directions of the Vatican in order to save and expand their secondary and higher education institutions.

The difference is that the Jesuits and Visitation sisters have addressed this issue publicly and offered $100 million in reparations to the descendants of the slaves they held and sold, making not only moral restitution for the reality that their success in America was built in part on the backs of slaves, but also financial restitution, recognizing that the effects of slavery remain today.

In a letter to her father, a young French woman in the process of becoming an Ursuline sister in New Orleans anticipated that he may have moral qualms about the fact that his daughter and her sisters in religion were slaveholders. The practice of slavery had since been abolished in France, but Marie Madeleine Hachard wrote to her father, “It is the custom of the country.”

Christians are not meant to simply follow local custom. In the lives of the saints, including St. Angela Merici, we find again and again times when society was drenched in sin and saints came along who spoke the Truth, the Truth of the Gospel and the inherent dignity of all human life. It’s because of this holy boldness that St. Paul transformed Corinth, St. Patrick brought the Gospel to Ireland, and Mother Teresa wiped the wounds of those dying in the slums of Calcutta.

The Ursuline sisters actually did break the custom of the time in many ways by educating enslaved and indigenous women, as well as by working to keep enslaved families together when they bought or sold human beings. This willingness to break custom in some ways but not to go so far as to actually free their slaves or not participate in the practice of slavery shows how the sisters’ own business prowess got in the way of the mission with which they had been entrusted by God.

In a 2016 document, the Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union wrote, “Our world cries for reconciliation and peace... In our Ursuline educational communities, we can offer opportunities for dialogue and moments of reconciliation.”2

Acknowledging and disavowing their slaveholding past should be easy for the Ursuline sisters. None of them is personally responsible, and it is something so clearly wrong. Deleting comments and ignoring emails will not make it go away, nor should it.

I encourage the Ursuline sisters to own this part of their history. Put out a statement that can be referenced on all of your websites so that there can be no confusion about whether or not slavery and the racism that underpinned it was wrong. When you refer to the sisters educating slaves, be honest that they were slaveholders themselves. Make it clear that you have learned from this dark part of your past, adding a coda to your history pages that says that in the midst of all of the amazing Spirit-led initiatives the Sisters led, they also fell victim to the culture of the time and held slaves, a practice that was just as sinful in 1770 as it is today.

Now, there’s the question of what the rest of us should do. Do some reading. My main sources for this article were all relatively easy reads that I would recommend:

• Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 by Emily Clark (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2007)

• Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1720–1760, edited by Emily Clark (Louisiana State University Press, 2009)

• The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns (Random House, 2023)

• Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers (Ignatius Press, 2023)

If you are an Ursuline Academy student, parent, or alumna, make your voice heard. Reach out to the school and the sisters and let them know that you would like to see this addressed. Be respectful, but firm.

Most of all, never stop looking for ways to build the Kingdom of God, to question structures of power, and to choose the poor and vulnerable over what is easy or comfortable. After all, that’s what St. Angela would do.

Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, the Ursuline Eastern Province, and the Ursuline Central Province have not responded to requests for comment or clarification.

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The views expressed here belong to the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of her employer.