A Catholic who reported having had some sort of mystical experience is not automatically a candidate for sainthood, Pope Leo XIV said, but such a report is not a reason to dismiss a candidate either.

It was 1995, and I had just arrived at St. John’s University in New York, fresh from a summer spent at a Hindu monastery. I was on a spiritual quest—a journey sparked, in part, by post-traumatic ...

As a graduate student, I was first drawn to Angela of Foligno (c. 1248-1309) because of her intensity. Here was a woman who, in a moment of devotion and penitence, stripped herself naked before the ...

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During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all locked down, I suddenly had enormous stretches of time on my hands. I did a lot of reading. One thing I learned from all that reading ...

Louth concludes that the Fathers undermine “any tendency towards seeing mysticism as an elite, individualist quest for ‘peak’ experiences.” The spiritual (mystical) life is irreducibly embedded in the ...