About the Diagnostic Series for the Liturgical Life

**“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”** (Mark 12:30)

Christ commands us to love God with the mind — not just the heart, not just the will, but the way we think, perceive, remember, focus, discern, suffer, and pray. The mind is part of the gift we lift up at every Mass.

But there is one thing the saints knew, and most Catholics have forgotten: you cannot offer to God a mind you do not understand.

St. Augustine prayed it best — “Noverim me, noverim te” — let me know myself, that I may know You. For fifteen centuries, the Catholic spiritual tradition has insisted that self-knowledge is not psychology — it is the doorway to deeper prayer. To know how God has wired your mind is to discover how He intends to meet you.

The Catholic Mind is a diagnostic series for that work. Each tool is short, prayerful, and free of psychological jargon. Each one ends with a personalized profile, recommended saints, devotions that fit your design, and a tailored plan for the spiritual life. None of them measures your holiness. All of them help you cooperate with grace more fruitfully.

This is not a personality test. It is a liturgical and spiritual discernment series.

Begin Your Assessment Journey

Two tools are available now. Eight more are on the way. Together they form a complete map of how your mind meets God in prayer, sacrament, and liturgy.

NOW AVAILABLE

1. The Memory Type Assessment (The Spiritual Cognition Assessment)

How does your mind remember God?

Some minds remember in scenes, like watching a film. Some relive moments through sensation and emotion. Some hold onto stories and meaning. Some recall ideas and structures. Some keep the sound of words. Some receive in symbols and quiet flashes of grace.

These are not flaws or accidents — they are designed. Your memory style shapes how you pray, how you read Scripture, which devotions feel natural, and which spiritual tradition is yours by nature.

This tool reveals your primary spirituality type — Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, Benedictine, Carmelite, or Marian — along with the saints who think and pray like you, the devotions that fit your mind, the prayer practices that will bear fruit, and the spiritual tradition you may have been searching for without knowing its name.

“Do this in memory of Me.” — Luke 22:19

Your memory is the doorway through which God continues His work in you.

[Take the Memory Type Assessment →]

2. The Mass Focus Diagnostic Tool

Why do you struggle to stay present at Mass?

It is rarely what you think. Distraction at Mass has causes, and the causes can be named. Some Catholics drift because their cognitive prayer style does not match the way the liturgy presents God. Some drift because they were never taught what is actually happening at the altar. Some drift because their attention is wired for movement, novelty, beauty, or silence — and the liturgy is not feeding it. Some drift because their spiritual temperament clashes with their parish’s style. And some drift because they are carrying an emotional, environmental, or physical load that crushes prayer before it can begin.

This tool reveals your Primary Distraction Type and the two contributing factors beneath it; it tells you where to sit at Mass, how to prepare, what to focus on during the readings, how to pray during the Eucharistic Prayer, the devotions that support your attention, and the truth that has freed thousands: you are not bad at Mass; you have not yet discovered how your mind meets God there.

“Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation.” — Mark 14:38

Your attention is the doorway through which God meets you at the altar.

[Take the Mass Focus Diagnostic →]

COMING SOON

The following eight tools complete The Catholic Mind. Each diagnoses a different verb of the spiritual life — discern, receive, struggle, grow, read, embody, suffer, share — and produces the same kind of personalized profile and tailored plan.

3. The Discernment Style Assessment — How your mind recognizes God’s will. Discover whether you discern primarily through Ignatian consolation, doctrinal reasoning, providential signs, prudential weighing, communal counsel, or interior peace — and learn the 5-step decision template that fits your wiring. Most Catholics use a discernment method that does not match how their mind works, and assume the problem is “I can’t hear God.”

4. The Sacramental Reception Profile — Which sacrament most powerfully delivers grace to your design. Some Catholics are most transformed through Confession; some through the Eucharist; some through Anointing; some through the gifts of Confirmation; some through the ordinary graces of marriage; some through sacramentals. Discover your primary grace channel and how to lean into it when Mass is dry.

5. The Spiritual Combat Profile — Your dominant temperamental tendency, in the language of the desert fathers. Maps you to one of the eight thoughts of Cassian and Evagrius — not as a moral failure, but as a temperament-rooted pattern. Output: the virtue that opposes it, the saint who fought your same battle, and a tailored Examen prompt set.

6. The Conversion Pathway Map — How God has typically broken through to you — and how He likely will again. Categories include intellectual conviction, dramatic encounter, gradual habituation, suffering, beauty, relationship, sacramental moment, and vocational call. Most Catholics miss God’s next move because they are watching for the previous kind of breakthrough.

7. The Scripture Reception Style — How your mind receives the Word. Maps you to the five senses of Scripture — literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical, and liturgical — and tells you which to start with for lectio, which Bible study format fits your mind, and which translation will speak to you. The natural companion to How to Read the Bible Using the Senses of Scripture and studying David L. Gray’s Liturgical Sense method.

8. The Liturgical Body Profile — How your body wants to pray. Diagnoses postural and embodiment preferences — kneeler, prostrator, stander, stiller, gesturer, processor — and tells you which liturgical form fits your body, where to sit, and which devotions will engage you somatically. The most overlooked layer of liturgical formation.

9. The Suffering Integration Profile — How your mind processes pain in the light of the cross. Reveals whether you suffer in an offering mode, a lamenting mode, a penitential mode, a contemplative-acceptance mode, an active-resistance mode, or a communal-bearing mode — and where each is at risk of distortion. One of the most pastorally underserved areas in Catholic formation.

10. The Apostolic Style Inventory — How your mind is meant to share the faith. Five postures drawn from the early Church: mystic-witness, teacher, servant, healer, builder. Reveals the evangelization style that matches your design — and the kind that quietly exhausts you and produces no fruit. The closing tool of the series.

The Aggregate: A Personal Liturgical Life Plan

Once all ten assessments are complete, your profile becomes a complete map of your interior life — how you remember God, why you lose focus at Mass, how you discern His will, which sacrament most fully reaches you, which capital tendency shadows your design, how God has historically broken through to you, how to read His Word, how your body prays, how you suffer in Christ, and how you are sent to others.

This is not a personality profile. It is a liturgical life plan — drawn from the deep wells of the Catholic spiritual tradition, translated into a language a layperson can use on a Tuesday morning.

How to Approach This Series

Begin with the Memory Type Assessment. It is the foundation; every other tool builds on it. Move next to the Mass Focus Diagnostic. Together, the two answer “how I meet God” and “what is keeping me from meeting Him fully.” Take the remaining tools as they are released, in any order that draws you. Answer honestly, not ideally. Trust your first instinct. There are no right or wrong answers — only deeper self-knowledge before the Lord.

A Closing Word

You are not a generic Catholic. You are a particular soul, made by a particular God, at a particular moment in salvation history, with a mind shaped for a particular kind of prayer. The whole of the Church’s spiritual tradition exists to help you find that prayer and live it.