Catholic support for mental health and spiritual problems. Linking religious knowledge, medical discourses, and human rights

Religious and medical knowledge have been intertwined at different historical moments. Beyond the opposition between scientific and spiritual discourses, different institutional dynamics have coincided in practices that relate to subjects, bodies, and communities. In contemporary Western societies, we observe the emergence of a demand for attention to non-specific ailments defined in the interstices of the physical, the psychic, the emotional, and the spiritual. In the face of these ailments, it is challenging to identify a specific disciplinary area of expertise, and there is an increasing demand for specialists in various fields: psychiatrists, pastors, priests, and coaches. The increased demand for healing and exorcism in the Catholic field reflects this dynamic. The practice of rituals of healing and exorcism, which has increased in the first decades of the 21st century, generates groups of "specialists" made up of committed lay people and nuns, often including doctors and psychiatrists. My ethnographic fieldwork allowed me to deepen the pastoral, ecclesiastical, and ideological positions of the faithful involved in the plural healing practices. As a result of my research, I can conclude that the representations of sociability, the body, and the Church are traversed by contemporary concerns related to sexuality and mental illness. Discourses about minorities, especially LGBTIQ minorities, emerge unexpectedly in this environment, straining the conservative Christian ideology that often shapes church groups.