Faced with rising suicide rates among nuns and priests, the Catholic Church in India launches a ministry of healing and mental health

(ZENIT News / Washington, 12.03.2025).- India’s Catholic Church has begun reshaping its healing ministry in a direction that many clergy and religious consider long overdue: toward the psychological well-being of its own people. After years of scattered initiatives, private counseling efforts, and quiet alarm over rising deaths by suicide, Church leaders have launched a nationwide mental-health ministry meant to weave professional care into the fabric of pastoral life.

The shift is largely the result of persistent advocacy from religious sisters who, long before bishops or diocesan offices took notice, were counseling colleagues crippled by trauma, isolation or burnout. Among them stands Sister Joan Chunkapura, a veteran religious with decades of work in therapeutic education. She speaks without dramatics, yet her assessment is stark: priests and sisters have suffered in silence while the Church’s healing institutions focused almost entirely on physical illness.

Her concern is not academic. The deaths of dozens of priests and more than two dozen sisters over the last twenty years—many in mid-life, many linked to depression, exploitation or untreated psychological distress—have exposed vulnerabilities that ecclesial culture struggled to acknowledge. “We had the expertise,” she said in an interview, noting the wide presence of Catholic mental-health professionals in India. “What we lacked was a shared mission.”

That collaboration began taking shape this year through the newly founded Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministers of India, working under the Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The launch was paired with a national conference in Changanacherry that drew more than two hundred professionals, most of them religious women, along with several bishops who sat through sessions on trauma, resilience, emotional literacy and accompaniment in pastoral settings. What emerged was a consensus that psychological care must no longer sit on the margins of Church life.

Archbishop Thomas Tharayil, who heads the association, framed the matter with unusual candor. Parish life, he said, cannot be pastoral if it ignores mental well-being. His remarks resonated particularly in Kerala, where several priests in recent years have taken their own lives, leaving dioceses to reckon with a pattern they could no longer chalk up to isolated crises. For Tharayil and others, mental and spiritual health are intertwined but distinct—two paths that must converge if pastoral ministry is to be sustainable.

Concrete steps are already underway. In Bengaluru, the St. Dymphna National Institute of Wellness—named for the Irish patron of those with mental illness—has become a training hub for sisters who serve as counselors in schools, clinics and rural missions. Workshops there combine classical psychology with art therapy, cognitive-behavioral techniques and spiritual discernment, offering both skills and personal healing to participants who often arrive already burdened by the needs of their communities.

Psychologist Sister Jessie D’Souza, who helps lead the institute, has met sisters coping with post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression—conditions often compounded by the expectation that religious life requires emotional self-sufficiency. “We don’t screen people out,” she said. “We receive them as a group, and we sit with their stories one by one.” The model has since expanded to multiple congregations, from the Carmelites of St. Teresa to the Sisters of St. Joseph, creating what amounts to a grassroots mental-health network.

Other regions are taking similar steps. In Maharashtra, psychiatrist Sister Sally John runs a parallel initiative for women religious, while in Rajasthan, workshops led by Sister Rani Augustine address the mounting pressure faced by sisters who run schools, where shifting family dynamics and social media anxieties now shape the lives of students. Many of these educators serve in environments where they receive threats from extremist groups—a reality that often leaves them navigating their own trauma while tending to the distress of others.

The movement has now extended beyond care facilities and professional workshops. India’s Conference of Religious Women recently released a wellness guidebook for its 103,000 members across nearly 300 congregations. The manual—RENEW, an acronym urging reflection, resilience and holistic self-care—grew out of a multiyear partnership with the psychology department at Christ College in Bengaluru. Its launch, attended by hundreds of superiors and congregational counselors, signals a new willingness to confront mental-health challenges openly rather than behind convent walls.

Priests, too, are beginning to find dedicated support. Father Shinto Mathew, head of the mental-health ministers’ association and himself a Carmelite, acknowledged the emotional loneliness many clergy face. Pastors spend their days absorbing the burdens of their communities, yet have few safe spaces in which to unburden themselves. Plans are now underway for a dedicated center in Kerala to accompany priests and religious brothers—a counterpart to the programs already thriving among sisters.

The initiative has drawn international attention as well. Permanent deacon Ed Shoener, who leads the International Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministers, praised the Indian network as one of the fastest-growing in the world, noting in particular the pivotal role played by women religious. Their leadership, he said, is not accidental; in many countries, sisters are the first to recognize psychological distress in their communities and the last to abandon those suffering from it.

What is unfolding in India is neither a quick fix nor a public-relations effort. It is a cultural shift inside a Church long accustomed to heroic endurance and reluctant to treat mental illness with the same seriousness as physical disease. The creation of an integrated mental-health ministry marks a recognition that care for the mind is inseparable from care for the soul—and that the Church’s mission falters when its own workers are left to struggle alone.

If the movement succeeds, it may offer a model not only for India but for Catholic communities elsewhere: a vision of ministry where compassion, professionalism and pastoral care are not competing instincts, but the very tools that sustain the people who carry the Church’s work forward.

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