This article examines children’s exposure to graphic Holy Week practices in the Philippines, including self-flagellation, reenactments of the crucifixion, and sinakulo (passion plays), which often feature the dramatic yet simulated hanging of Judas Iscariot. While these practices are seen as expressions of penitence and devotion, their public and visually intense nature raises serious concerns about child protection, mental health, public health, and appropriate religious education and formation. This study uses a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach by combining insights from child psychology, trauma studies, public health, and Catholic theology. It references the Evangelium Vitae, relevant scriptural teachings on the body, particularly those of St. Paul, and principles from Catholic social teaching. Baldwin’s trauma-sensitive theology is also used as a complementary pastoral-theological lens for examining suffering, religious meaning-making, and children’s well-being. It analyzes how children, as intended and unintended observers, may be affected by exposure to ritualized suffering. Research shows that graphic images of bodily harm may lead to significant risks, including fear, anxiety, desensitization, potential normalization of violence, and difficulties in moral and cognitive processing, especially when these actions are portrayed as meaningful or redemptive. According to Bandura’s social learning theory, repeated exposure to publicly displayed ritualized suffering may influence children’s perceptions, interpretations, and emotional responses to both violence and religious devotion. The article supports a collaborative approach to protecting children’s rights, using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and relevant Philippine laws, such as Republic Act No. 7610, to guide appropriate policy responses. This response should involve parents, local government units, parish churches or faith-based institutions, and public schools. The article emphasizes that religious expression should promote life and safeguard children’s well-being, including their psychological, social, and spiritual well-being, within the context of public health.
Excommunication from a high-control religious or spiritual community can disrupt far more than social membership. Where identity, morality, spirituality, family, purpose, and interpretations of reality have been organized within a single relational world, exclusion can produce rupture across several dimensions of life at once. This article develops the third story as a conceptual framework for understanding what may follow. The first story describes coherence within an encompassing communal order. The second story describes protective differentiation and renewed personal agency. The third story names differentiated reintegration, in which spirituality, morality, intimacy, community, purpose, and individuality can develop new relationships under conditions of greater authorship. These stories are proposed as relational configurations rather than empirically established developmental stages. Excommunication is treated as a revealing extreme case of a wider relational problem: How can belonging continue when people change? The framework also offers pastoral and clinical implications centered on protecting agency, supporting gradual self-authorship, and allowing recovery to proceed without a prescribed relational or spiritual endpoint. Recovery may involve forms of belonging capable of sustaining distinctness within relationship, allowing continuity, participation, and difference to coexist after profound relational rupture.
This paper offers a perspective on radicalization as a project of self-transformation that individuals, often men, undertake in an attempt to overcome an internalized sense of failure. To foreground an account of this inwardly focused view of radicalization, the use of the term is examined in both popular discourse and academic literature, suggesting, finally, that we address radicalization not in relationship to an imagined political center but in terms of the nature by and degree to which the individual seeks to radically transform the self. Then, drawing from William James’s classic lectures in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the contemporary phenomenon we call ‘radicalization’ is considered in terms of the age-old idea of ‘conversion.’ Finally, this paper suggests a view of radicalization prevention as a different kind of conversion—this time to a new way of relating to one’s own perceived failures and humiliations.
Drawing on recent experiences of grief, the author proposes the concept of amalgamated grief to describe the sense of carrying a heavy rock in one’s soul. The author posits that in a neoliberal age, attention to third-order suffering is especially necessary. He discusses ways to break up and ameliorate amalgamated grief, including the significance of personal vocation and the role of body-aware practices. Beyond these resources, a political pastoral theology requires a commitment to communal practices that center the care of human beings, other species, and the Earth.
Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a major public health concern, yet its antecedents and consequences within religious leadership remain poorly understood. Catholic priests represent a distinctive case for assessing loneliness; their ministry is highly relational, yet their vocational commitments often limit traditional sources of social support. Using panel data from the 2022–2025 National Study of Catholic Priests (N = 1,056), this study examines how baseline dimensions of well-being, institutional support, and priestly life predict subsequent loneliness and mental health. The results show that priests reporting higher flourishing experience significantly lower loneliness at Wave 2, while those reporting greater psychological distress and burnout at baseline reported greater loneliness. Institutional and relational supports also emerge as central; stronger perceived support from fellow priests, bishops, and lay networks is associated with reduced subsequent loneliness. In addition, priests who more strongly affirm the centrality of the Eucharist exhibit lower loneliness, suggesting a compensatory role of some spiritual resources. Private prayer frequency was not found to significantly predict future loneliness. Taken together, these findings shift attention from loneliness as a static condition to a process shaped by prior relational, institutional, and spiritual contexts, highlighting the importance of early support structures and priestly formation for sustaining long-term well-being.
