Saint Mary’s program is launching its M.S. in Clinical Psychology program this fall, the first online master’s program of its kind in the U.S. with Catholic faith integration. Rooted in the Lasallian Catholic tradition, this program blends rigorous clinical training with a faith-based perspective, emphasizing ethics, spirituality, and holistic well-being.
Anthony Isacco, Ph.D., program director, professor, and head of clinical research of the program, says his program uniquely blends faith-integration with science, emphasizing emerging areas of research.
“I want our students to read the scholarship to understand the science, but then also produce research that will be clinically meaningful to them and their clients. They’ll be providing the evidence for their evidence-based practice,” he said. “My ideal vision for the future is that when a client sits down in front of one of our graduates, whether the word ‘faith’ or ‘God’ or ‘ethics’ is ever said out loud, that the client will feel a qualitative difference with with our graduates, in the sense of the care and the compassion from our graduates, and the competence to be excellent clinicians who understand the science of psychology and can put that into practice, but do so in a way that honors the dignity of the person in front of them and truly views them holistically in a deep and comprehensive way, which is how God made us. We’re all very unique, complex human beings. And you know, people who go to clinicians who don’t have the same perspective as we do, can often feel minimized or reduced to a symptom or a category or a diagnosis, and we want clients to feel their fullness in the room with us.”
Likewise, Dr. Isacco wants clinicians to no longer have to leave behind their faiths at the door. “You become more effective whenever you bring all of your strengths into the room with a client,” he said. “For thousands of years, psychology was basically understood as a combination of theology and philosophy. … That all changed in America in the early 1900s when psychology decided to kind of divorce itself from philosophy and theology. That also meant that a lot of professionals had to leave their faith at the door when they entered into the mental health space, in their training and their education, and in their professional life. There are Christian and Muslim and Jewish practitioners out there who were trained not to integrate their faith into their professional work. But in doing so, we’ve trained people to leave the best part of themselves out of who they are as a professional — what gives them the most strength and energy and nourishment. This program will help students bring who they are into the classroom and into their clinical work in an ethical, intentional, and competent manner. Who you are as a person includes your faith, your spirituality, your religion; you want to bring that in just as you bring in all of your other strengths as well, because you want to offer the best of yourself to the person that you’re working with.”
Really, he says, what Saint Mary’s is doing, is what had been done for thousands of years (excluding the past century). “We’re doing something kind of old but we’re doing it in a new and integrative way because we’re taking the best of what modern psychology has produced in terms of science and evidence-based practice, and we’re merging it with that philosophy and theological grounding in the Catholic faith. It’s the only clinical psychology master’s program in the country that’s doing that, so it’s unique by nature, and was designed to be unique.”
In his work, he sees this blend of faith, ethics, psychology, and clinical research interact successfully.
Dr. Isacco is a licensed psychologist and is the principal of Puritan Psychological Services in Pittsburgh, Penn., a small private practice focused on helping clergy, seminarians, and women religious live healthy, holy, and happy lives in their vocations. Dr. Isacco is a generalist, with areas of expertise in psychological assessment and religious/spiritual integration in psychology.
“Integrative clinical practice is something that I do every day, I know many colleagues that do exceptional faith-integrated counseling,” he said. “Real healing takes place. You see that, clients seek it out, and you know it works.”
Dr. Isacco is excited that the M.S. in Clinical Psychology will join with Saint Mary’s already well-established and respected grouping of mental health graduate programs including the M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy, M.A. in Counseling and Psychological Services, Master of Social Work, and Doctorate of Psychology in Counseling Psychology program.
“I’m honored to be part of that mental health group, a group that’s such a strength of Saint Mary’s, and I think it’s really a testament to Saint Mary’s that it is responding to the mental health crisis in the country. What sets us apart from those programs is our faith integration is very explicit, very intentional. It’s woven into every class, every lecture, our research, our clinical placements. And it is clinical psychology. So it fills a gap in that grouping of programs where there was no clinical psychology program before.
“It’s our hope that we can live up to the standard that they’ve already set and be part of what I call the mental health wall of the university. We want to be a strong block in that wall.”
In addition to his work, Dr. Isacco is also a Fellow of the St. John Paul II Foundation. He sits on the Advisory Board of Saint Paul Seminary, Diocese of Pittsburgh, and the Formation Team of Saint Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Seminary, Eparchy of Pittsburgh. He is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville (B.A.), Boston College (M.A.), and Loyola University of Chicago (Ph.D.). He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and four daughters.
