We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

CNA Staff, Jun 7, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

In a recent interview with the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe), former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback discussed how Christian organizations are increasingly being deplatformed and debanked when engaging in public debate and offered ways to address these challenges and uphold religious freedom. 

“The typical technique in the West is a suffocation technique on religion,” Brownback told OIDAC Europe Executive Director Anja Hoffmann in an interview released June 4. OIDAC Europe is a nongovernmental organization that researches, analyzes, documents, and reports on cases of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe. 

According to Brownback, examples of this technique include pro-life pregnancy centers being dropped by their insurance companies and organizations being taken off of social media platforms. 

Brownback’s own National Committee for Religious Freedom had its bank account canceled without explanation by Chase Bank in 2022 after 45 days of it being opened. 

“You see these techniques and it’s all a suffocation effort. We’re not going to throw you in jail — we can’t throw you in jail — but we can try to strangle you as much as possible so that you can’t operate as a group. And that’s why we’ve got to push back against it in the West more and more,” he said.

In 2018, Brownback — who previously served as a U.S. Senator from Kansas from 1996–2011 and as the 46th governor of Kansas from 2011–2018 —  was sworn in as the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. He became the first Catholic to serve in the role.

During his tenure, he promoted religious freedom as a means of promoting individual and economic flourishing and reducing religion-related violence. He also highlighted China’s persecution of Uyghurs and strongly condemned the Xinjiang internment camps. At the 2020 Ministerial to Advance Freedom of Religion or Belief in Poland, Brownback also spoke about the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on religious freedom.

In the interview, Brownback pointed out that now with the use of social media, issues of religious persecution happening around the world have become more visible and need to continue to be brought to light.

“We’re not powerless now … we used to be just dependent upon the media to surface and to get these things out and for us in the United States; if it didn’t get on CBS, NBC, or ABC it didn’t happen, we didn’t know about it,” he explained. “That’s not the case now. You’ve got all these social media outlets that are out there … and you can put it out there and you need to get it out there.”

Brownback also encouraged individuals to not only share content about the issues taking place but also to include ways that individuals can help. He said he thinks many might be surprised to see how much people actually care about these issues once they find out they’re happening.

“You’re seeing more support for religious freedom in the United States and other places and a lot of it has been a long-term awareness building. These things are going on and then as people look at them and say, ‘Is that really happening?’ you say, ‘Yes, that’s really happening.’”

He added: “Changes rarely happen until people actually have to smell and feel something and see that something actually is going on here that’s wrong.” 

CNA Staff, Jun 7, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

After years of therapy with certain patients, Catholic psychologist Greg Bottaro felt “stuck.” 

“I had poured myself into them for seven or eight years, but despite all that effort, we weren’t reaching real breakthroughs,” Bottaro explained. “Deep down, I knew there had to be a better way.”

During a subsequent sabbatical, Bottaro had an idea: therapy inspired by Christ’s “model of accompaniment.” It wouldn’t be a week-to-week check-in, where Bottaro said clients often forgot the problems they meant to ask about, or run up against the session time constraints. 

Instead, Bottaro’s vision involved 24-hour access to a therapist — not through paragraph-long texts or late-night phone calls but through voice messages.

After testing the process out with some clients using a voice message app, Bottaro found that “within weeks, we started seeing breakthroughs.” So he launched a program called Integrated Daily Dialogic Mentorship to provide a new take on traditional therapy. 

“This is how Jesus actually accompanied people,” Bottaro explained. “He walked with his disciples daily, immersed in their lives and available.”

Mental health and Catholicism 

As a psychologist himself, Bottaro sees an opportunity to bring the Catholic understanding of the human person into the realm of mental health. 

“The mental health space is crying out for a deeper vision of the human person — and Catholics are uniquely positioned to offer it,” he said. 

“We have a tradition that sees every person as made in the image of God, created with reason, will, emotion, and the capacity for communion,” he continued.

He noted that the field of psychology “often reduces people to diagnoses or data.” In this atmosphere, Catholic anthropology is “desperately needed.” 

Bottaro sees a deep connection between Catholicism and mental health. 

Catholics are “called to love,” Bottaro said simply. “Love means presence. It means walking with people in their pain, not from a place of superiority but from solidarity,” he said.

Mentorship is only possible with this “accompaniment.”

Bottaro said he hopes the app “draws people into deeper connection with God, with others, and with themselves.”

“My hope for this app — and this movement — is that it becomes a bridge,” he said. “A bridge between faith and psychology. Between suffering and healing. Between isolation and relationship.”

“I hope it raises the standard — not just for mental health care but for what it means to truly care for the human person,” he added.

Inspiration from Francsican friars

Bottaro spent four years discerning with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. He credits the experience for giving him the strength to launch the program.

Living with the friars trained Bottaro in “daily practice of trustful surrender to divine providence,” he said.

“There is no food unless God provides it through the generosity of another person. That’s hard,” Bottaro said.

The friars take a vow of poverty and work closely with the impoverished and the homeless of New York City. Living with them helped Bottaro “to leap with a faith that all things work for the good of those who love the Lord.”

“There is no way I would have taken the leap and launched a whole new method of accompaniment without that trust,” he said. 

The Integrated Daily Dialogic Mentorship program is more than just 24-hour access to a therapist. Therapists are formed and trained through Bottaro’s mentorship program, which has roots in his own “deeply ingrained” Franciscan spirituality.

Central to that worldview is “reverence for the individual human person and a love for the suffering soul,” Bottaro said. 

Most of all, Bottaro credits the “life, teaching, and friendship” of the late Father Benedict Groeschel, the Franciscan friar who mentored him.

As part of the certification process, soon-to-be mentors read Groeschel’s book “Spiritual Passages.”

“My students get to read his brilliant way of communicating the integration of spirituality and psychology, its importance, and how it can lead to human flourishing,” Bottaro said.

Centered on relationship 

With the rising use of AI chatbots for everything from grocery lists to therapy, Bottaro said it’s important to remain centered on “human connection.” 

Many are turning to AI chatbots when they need help, using it as a journal or treating it like a therapist. But Bottaro noted that AI lacks the essential human element of relationship.  

“AI can simulate answers — it can’t simulate relationship,” Bottaro said. “It can’t know you, hear the inflection in your voice, or pray with you. It can’t love.” 

Through the app, Bottaro hopes to provide that element of relationship.

“It’s a community of people who are formed together, who grow together, and who are invited to heal together,” Bottaro said.

“Everything we do is about building real human connection — rooted in faith, formed by truth, and carried out through relationships,” he added.  

Bottaro’s ministry, CatholicPsych Institute, will host its second annual conference this month, gathering together spirituality and mental health experts to discuss a Catholic response to the mental health crisis. Keynote talks will be led by various experts, including Francsican Friar of the Renewal Father Columba Jordan, at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, from June 20–22. 

“In a world increasingly tempted to turn to algorithms for meaning and direction, we are trying to offer something radically countercultural,” Bottaro said. “Real people, trained and formed in the truth about the human person, who show up to walk with you toward healing, growth, and purpose.”

Feast date: Jun 07

Anthony grew up in a poor but pious family in a small farming village in Lombardy, Italy. The owner of his family farm paid for Anthony's seminary education because he was such a promising student. He was very young for ordination and required a special dispensation, however he was ordained in 1812 and served as a parish priest, and eventually founded several religious communities, some of them short-lived.

In 1827, he founded the Missionaries of St. Alphonsus, which lasted until 1856. He also founded the Oblates of Saint Alphonsus in 1828, which lasted only 20 years. The Daughters of Our Lady of the Garden, which he founded in 1829, still continue their ministry in education and among the sick in Europe, Asia and the United States.

He was named bishop of Bobbio, Italy in 1837 and actively restored devotions and instructed the faithful. He was a people’s bishop, visiting with his parishes and organizing two synods. He died after nine years as bishop on June 7, 1846 due to a serious fever and tuberculosis.

He was canonized in 1951.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 6, 2025 / 17:57 pm (CNA).

On Wednesday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., seven Dominican brothers were ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, who leads the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia.

“We are overjoyed at the ordination of seven of our brothers to the priesthood of Jesus Christ,”  Father Allen Moran, OP, prior provincial of the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph, told CNA.

“I, and all the friars of the Province of St. Joseph, look forward to the good work that God will do through them in our parishes, campus ministries, intellectual apostolates, hospital chaplaincies, and digital evangelization efforts.”

The newest Dominicans joining the community as priests are Louis Mary Bethea, Gregory Marie Santy, Bertrand Marie Hebert, Basil Mary Burroughs, Titus Mary Sanchez, Nicodemus Maria Thomas, and Linus Mary Martz.

“May God bring the good work he has begun to completion,” Moran said at the June 4 ordination. “Thanks be to God for the gift of these seven new priests!"

Fisher ordained the priests in a three-hour-long Mass and ordination ceremony. “Now seven of Dominic’s sons will become the fantastic seven,” Fisher said. “All part of a team of 400,000 priest presbyters sanctifying our world.”

Fisher served as the ordaining bishop and was joined by Archbishop James Green, who ordained Pope Leo XIV a bishop in 2014. 

Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala of Washington and Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, also concelebrated the Mass.

At the end of the liturgy, Fisher asked for “a word of thanks” for all “who have influenced and supported the priests on their vocational journeys” and those “who have helped them in discernment and formation.”

“Seven is a very Catholic number,” Fisher continued.

“Not just for clergy but for sacraments, virtues, hills of Rome, and deadly sins,” he joked.

“You can work out which of our new priests is best identified as Father Baptism or Father Confession, and the rest. And who is Father Prudence, or Father Temperance, Father Hope. Which is more aventine or escaline. But of course none of them would be Father Gluttony or Father Sloth,” he continued.

“Dominican Province of St. Joseph and the Church universal rings out with joy today; the Church has seven new priests,” Fisher said. “Yet the flock of Jesus Christ needs many new shepherds if we are to fulfill Christ’s injunction to lead the sheep and nurture the lambs. So I ask you all to pray for more like these.”

Fisher offered a message to the young men of America: “People are crying out for words of life and sacraments of grace to transfigure their hearts and lives. You might be the very one by God’s grace to offer them this as a Dominican priest.”

“May our new priests inspire you to give yourself over to God’s plan for you,” Fisher said.