Saint Joseph Catholic Church

The Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life began a three-day plenary assembly on February 4, only the third such assembly since the dicastery’s establishment in 2016, and the first such assembly since 2023.

In the four-minute video, filmed in San Pellegrino in Vaticano and released on February 5, Pope Leo began, “Lord Jesus, who welcomed the little ones in your arms and blessed them tenderly, today we bring before you the children living with incurable illnesses.”

The Pope concluded:

Make of us a Church that, animated by the feelings of your Heart and moved by prayer and service, knows how to uphold fragility, and in the midst of suffering, becomes a source of comfort, a seed of hope, and a proclamation of new life. Amen.

“As a priest and bishop, I have observed with increasing pastoral concern the emergence of a broad crisis concerning mental health that is negatively impacting Americans, and especially young people, in terms of their spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing,” Bishop Burbidge wrote in “The Divine Physician and a Christian Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing.”

The prelate also offered his reflections on the “proper place of counseling in the Catholic life—when and in what manner we should make use of it in our pursuit of that authentic happiness that is holiness.”