The National Religious Vocation Conference’s quarterly journal Horizon, featured an article by Saint Luke Institute (SLI) President & CEO, Rev. Patrick J. McDevitt, CM, PhD, in its Fall 2026 issue. The article was based on Fr. McDevitt’s opening address delivered August 31, 2026 at the Conference on Human Formation and bears the same title: “Discernment as a moral act: Ethical decision-making in formation and discernment.”
In a quotation from the article, Fr. McDevitt highlights the crucial importance of discernment around candidate admission in today’s Church: “Every discernment decision carries ethical, spiritual, pastoral, psychological, and ecclesial consequences. We know this not simply from theory, but from experience. Many of the ministry-related crises facing the Church today can be traced, at least in part, to failures in formation. Collectively, the Church did not always prepare some priests and religious to resist clericalism, confront misogyny, or recognize the divesting reality of the sexual abuse crisis as it unfolded. Those painful chapters in our history remind us that formation is never a peripheral concern. If we desire a healthy Church tomorrow, we must be deeply committed to healthy formation today. Therefore, who we admit matters. Who we delay matters. Who we decline matters. How we make those decisions matters even more. At its deepest level, discernment is participation in the work of the Holy Spirit.”
The video version of this presentation from the Conference on Human Formation is available on SLI’s online learning platform, SLIconnect as part of a purchasable set of over a dozen recordings on the topic of “Navigating Personality in Discernment and Formation.”