Presence+
Formation for everyone in the work of healing.
Divine Mercy University's Presence+ takes the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person — the anthropology behind DMU's graduate degrees — and puts it in the hands of the doctors, counselors, coaches, ministers, teachers, and parents doing the actual work of accompaniment. And in the hands of the parishes, dioceses, and Catholic organizations that support them.
For individuals
For everyone doing the work of accompaniment.
Courses are published for individuals as well as institutions. You don't need your parish to partner — you can enroll directly, work through the material at your own pace, and bring what you learn back to your practice, your ministry, your classroom, or your family.
Doctors & clinicians
CCMMP-grounded continuing education for psychologists, psychiatrists, primary-care physicians, and other licensed clinicians. Understand how a Catholic anthropology reframes assessment, treatment planning, and the interventions your EMR is now recommending.
Counselors
Accompaniment training that complements clinical work — scope, ethics, and referral literacy in a stepped-care ecosystem where you're one of several people walking with a person. Made for licensed counselors and counselors-in-training alike.
Coaches & mentors
CCMMP-grounded formation for the change-agent role. What coaching can do, what it can't, when to hand a client to a clinician or a spiritual director, and how to work well in that ecosystem.
Ministers & spiritual directors
Psychological literacy for pastoral work — recognizing when the person in front of you needs a clinician, staying present without overstepping, and drawing on the same anthropology their counselor already knows.
Teachers
Teach the human person accurately, in a Catholic frame. Classroom-ready CCMMP content for high school and college educators, plus formation resources for teachers who lead their students in prayer and discernment.
Parents
The anthropology behind raising children in the Catholic tradition. Practical content on marriage strengthening, family grief, and forming the interior life of your family — from the same body of work your priest and your counselor draw on.
For institutions
Built for the institutions of the Church.
The accompaniment crisis facing the Church — loneliness, fragmentation, addiction, grief — strains parishes far beyond what clergy alone can address. Presence+ exists to multiply the reach of every diocese, parish, and Catholic organization willing to walk with its people.
Parishes
Catechetical content, adult formation, and a parish toolkit that unifies adoration signups, registration, prayer walls, and course promotion.
Dioceses
Diocese-wide curriculum, accompaniment training for clergy and lay leaders, and coordinated formation across many parishes at once.
Newman centers & universities
Young-adult formation, discernment content, and tools for accompanying college students through identity, vocation, and the spiritual life.
Catholic organizations worldwide
Multilingual content (including Spanish), CCMMP-grounded curriculum, and a coach/mentor network deployable wherever the mission calls.
Areas of focus
Six efforts, one anthropology.
Presence+ is not one product but six coordinated bodies of work. Each effort is doing its own recognizable job — teaching a course, running a parish, publishing a textbook, hosting a clinical relationship. What they share is the CCMMP, which governs every one of them the same way. That's the point.
Area 1
Presence+ Phone Application
iOS & Android · formerly TruePresence
The Presence+ phone application — previously called TruePresence — is where individual users encounter the platform in daily life. It carries the daily formation feed, the accompaniment relationships (mentor, coach, spiritual director, licensed clinician), the outcome-measurement loop, and the CCMMP-grounded library.
The rhythm is different from a social feed on purpose. The daily spotlight surfaces the saint of the day, the virtue of the week, the Mass readings, and the Liturgy of the Hours. Journals, habits, and goals are for character formation, not streak optimization. The accompaniment layer meets the user at the right intensity: from a peer mentor for early-stage formation up through a licensed clinician when clinical care is what's needed. The person isn't two people; the app doesn't treat them like they are.
Area 2
Lifelong Learning Institute
Online certificate programs
DMU's certificate programs deepen knowledge, sharpen skills, and support personal and professional growth — each rooted in the University's commitment to faith, scholarship, and service. Maintain professional licenses with CEUs, demonstrate continued competency, and build specialized skills across a growing catalog of certificates.
Certificate
School of Spiritual Direction (SOSD)
A school at the service of the Church. Formation for spiritual directors and those who serve others in ministry — rooted in the Church's spiritual tradition and guided by the Holy Spirit.
Certificate
Foundations of Advanced Clinical Supervision (FACS)
An NBCC-approved online program that meets the educational requirements for the Approved Clinical Supervisor (ACS) credential. Because excellence in counseling does not automatically translate into excellence in clinical supervision.
New Presence+ certificate programs — parish accompaniment, teacher formation, coach training, family-healing tracks — are being added continuously.
Area 3
Divine Mercy University Press
Publishing arm
DMU Press publishes the primary literature of the CCMMP — the academic volumes clinicians and faculty cite, the accessible primers parishes and lay groups read, and the clinical case-conceptualization work that turns the CCMMP into training material.
The CCMMP
The foundational academic volume presenting the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person.
Mini Model of the CCMMP
An accessible primer of the CCMMP for parishes, small groups, and lay formation.
Introduction to Psychology Textbook
The first introductory psychology textbook built around the CCMMP, in development for the Fall 2027 adoption cycle.
Case Conceptualization by Dr. Scrofani
Clinical case-conceptualization framed through the CCMMP for graduate students and practicing clinicians.
Case Conceptualization Workbook
Companion exercises for the case-conceptualization text, designed for coursework and supervised practice.
Support the textbook campaign at /give/textbook.
Area 4
Professional Assistance
Consulting & Speakers Bureau
Two consulting pathways for organizations that want DMU expertise on their side of the table.
Speakers Bureau
DMU faculty and alumni available for keynote talks, retreats, formation events, and academic conferences. Grounded in the CCMMP and tailored to your audience — diocesan clergy days, professional conferences, university faculty gatherings, or parish formation nights.
Consultants for Organizations
Help for parishes, dioceses, schools, and religious communities positioning themselves to serve the mental health needs of their members. Program design, accompaniment ecosystems, staff formation, referral protocols, and stepped-care models built for your specific community.
Area 5
Center for Trauma & Resiliency Studies
CTRS — disaster response & trauma care
CTRS equips students, alumni, and community professionals to respond effectively in times of disaster and crisis. Through specialized training with the Green Cross Academy for Traumatology, CTRS prepares Mental Health First Responders to serve individuals and communities with clinical excellence, resilience, and care when it matters most.
Led by Dr. Benjamin Keyes, CTRS also develops a national Response Team trained to deploy alongside first responders across the United States — supporting recovery efforts, addressing compassion fatigue, and providing trauma-informed counseling in the aftermath of crisis.
Learn more about CTRSArea 6
Practice Management Systems
One platform with four components, each built to the same understanding of the person — the CCMMP. It serves licensed clinical care, daily spiritual formation, the operational life of parishes and Catholic universities, and the discernment work of pastoral and mission leadership.
Component 1
The clinical and accompaniment core
Mentor, coach, spiritual director, and licensed clinician relationships, all running on the CCMMP. Stepped care so the person meets the right helper at the right intensity. Outcome measurement — Regular Outcome Measures (ROM) — used as a feedback loop with the person, not as a score about them. Session notes belong to the relationship. Clinical data is walled off from operational data architecturally, not as policy. The data exists to serve the work, not to flatten it.
Component 2
Daily formation
A daily spotlight — saint, virtue of the week, Mass readings, the Liturgy of the Hours — that hands the user a rhythm of prayer rather than a feed. A library of courses authored by Catholic clinicians and faculty, much of it from Divine Mercy University. Journals, habits, and goals tools that assume the user is forming a character, not optimizing for a streak. The same anthropology that governs clinical care governs daily practice — because the person isn't two people.
Component 3
Ministry and mission management
The everyday operational tools a parish or Catholic university needs to run — adoration sign-ups, ministry rosters, prayer walls, mass intentions, room reservations, work orders, digital signage, campus chaplain schedules, residence-hall liturgies, Newman Center sacramental preparation, faculty formation cohorts — built so that what the software notices is consistent with what the CCMMP claims about the person. The adoration system remembers who has covered the 4am hour for six years. The lector schedule notices when the same name carries every funeral and surfaces it so the pastor can say thank you. The prayer wall is treated as intercession, not engagement. The mass intentions queue carries the weight of what a mass intention actually is. The parishioner is not the slot. The student in the residence hall is not a data point.
Component 4
Mission Vital Signs
A measurement layer for parish and Catholic-university leadership built on the same anti-scorecard premise — operationalizing the Genesis Compass framework of Divine Renovation on the parish side, and a parallel framework on the campus side for chief mission officers, provosts, and campus ministers. Three keys — Culture of Prayer, Evangelization, Shared Leadership — and a North Star gauge for Vision. Every indicator reports Level and Momentum so the dashboard can never be misread as a leaderboard. Each parish or institution is its own control; no rankings, no cross-comparisons. Targets are set by the leadership with their coach or mission advisor. Where laity, students, or faculty contribute their voice, the pulses ask what they heard and what they're resolving — not what they thought of the homily, the orientation talk, or the convocation on a scale of one to five.
Why this is one platform, not four
Each of those components is doing recognizable work — scheduling adoration hours, holding clinical relationships, surfacing daily readings, measuring parish or institutional vitality. Why insist they share one platform and one anthropology?
Fr. Robert Spitzer, in his commentary on Pope Leo's encyclical on artificial intelligence, names two dangers. The first is the reduction of a person to numbers and categories — the quiet drift from valuing who a person is to valuing what a person produces. The second is that a small number of large companies train the models everyone else uses, and that training can leave out the moral and religious view of the person, sometimes by choice and sometimes by omission.
His answer is to build the moral and transcendent view of the person into it, so that a wisdom system stands next to the knowledge system rather than under it. Get the Church involved. Keep a human being in charge of the judgment AI cannot make. Remember that Christian morality is good for emotional and relational health, not only spiritual health.
The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person — the CCMMP — begins where Spitzer's worry begins. Its first premise is that the person carries a dignity that cannot be earned or lost. The model holds together the three things AI pulls apart, reading theology, philosophy, and psychology as one account of the person. It is published and in use at Catholic universities. It is the spine of every Divine Mercy University degree, and hundreds of alumni now practice from it in clinics, parishes, Catholic schools, and diocesan offices.
Spitzer's first danger — the reduction of a person to numbers and categories — does not stop at the clinic door. It is just as easy to claim that a person carries unearned dignity and then to build software that quietly contradicts the claim. The reason ministry and mission management, daily formation, and Mission Vital Signs share a platform with the clinical core is that the anthropology has to govern the whole. The parishioner is not the slot; the student is not a retention metric; the prayer request is not a post; the mass intention is not a checkout step. The same model has to govern them all or it doesn't govern anything.
Held together
These are not separate apps assembled into a suite. They are one platform, one model of the person, one set of disciplines. The clinician on the clinical side, the pastor on the parish side, and the chief mission officer at the Catholic university share an anthropology — and therefore an architecture. The data the mentor sees about a client is walled off from the data the pastor sees about a parishioner, which is walled off from the data the provost sees about an institution; the philosophy they operate from is one and the same.
A human stays in every judgment AI cannot make. The Church holds the tools. The measurement points at movement, not performance. The mundane work of running a parish or a Catholic university is held to the same anthropology as the work of accompanying someone in their healing. They are, after all, the same work.
Future direction
The two problems in front of us right now.
Paul Vitz spent decades studying the psychology of religion. His book Faith of the Fatherlessand the research behind it pointed to something psychology had stopped looking at: the soul. That work led to the founding of Divine Mercy University in 1999. New problems are surfacing now — and two multi-year research programs at DMU are the answer.
Problem 1
The tools reshaping clinical care
The major EMR and practice-management systems are adding automated transcription and AI-recommended interventions. Those recommendations come from frameworks that have nothing to do with the CCMMP. Some of them work against it. At the same time, therapy simulators are training students in technique — how to run a session — without training them in the anthropology that should sit underneath.
Problem 2
The wider circle already doing the work
The helping profession is getting bigger, and not just in numbers. Parishes are already working with spiritual directors, coaches, group counselors, and accompaniment ministers alongside psychologists and counselors. This isn't coming. It's already here. What's missing is a shared anthropology.
Presence+ is built for both realities at once. It starts from CCMMP principles and builds outward, so a parish accompaniment minister and a licensed counselor are working from the same understanding of the person. DMU answered the questions Vitz raised thirty-five years ago. Melete and PathwayStudio are answering the ones in front of us now.
Melete — measurement of formation
Building the measurement science
Melete builds the validated instruments that measure formation across the helping disciplines DMU trains — counseling, spiritual direction, coaching, lay-minister formation, and others. Eleven methodology tracks plus coaching and spiritual-direction tracks. The outputs are peer-reviewed papers, published instruments other institutions can adopt, and the trained psychometrician staff who carry the work forward. Melete is what makes it possible to claim that formation has occurred.
About MeletePathwayStudio — counselor-training platform
Productizing the simulation platform
PathwayStudio is DMU's simulation-based counselor-training platform — where counseling students, coaches, and spiritual directors practice on validated AI client scenarios before sitting with real human beings. Pairs naturally with Melete: Melete builds the instruments; PathwayStudio is where the practice happens. Once validated and published, every Catholic and partner counselor-training program becomes a potential adopter.
About PathwayStudioLeadership
A team built for institutional reach.
Presence+ operates as a focused initiative within DMU, with dedicated roles spanning theological supervision, course development, partnerships, implementation, and platform engineering.
Tom Cunningham
Executive Director
Platform architecture, product, and strategic leadership.
Fr. Lino Otero, L.C.
Director of Promotion & Course Development Supervisor
Theological supervision of the course catalog, institutional outreach, and the multilingual program.
Ways in
Two doors. Same building.
Individuals can enroll directly and start working through courses today. Institutional partners walk through a demo with our team and land on a shared plan.
Individuals
Enroll in courses
For doctors, counselors, coaches, ministers, teachers, parents — anyone doing the work of accompaniment. Browse the catalog, enroll, and work through the CCMMP-grounded material at your own pace.
Institutions
Partner with Presence+
For parishes, dioceses, Newman centers, and Catholic organizations. We're onboarding institutional partners through 2026 and 2027 — diocesan curriculum, parish toolkits, Newman programming, and white-label deployments.
Want the intellectual foundation first? Read about the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person .