Recently, I came across a magazine article that deeply caught my attention. It spoke of an enormous crisis that many people in our time are suffering from: loneliness. The article presented the issue as a crisis because it is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a widespread and growing reality within our communities.
Loneliness has been defined as the voluntary or involuntary lack of companionship.
From the very beginning of creation, God revealed to us a profound truth: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). When God created man, he gave him the opportunity to name everything he had made; yet this was not enough, for man found no companionship. He had everything — except another human being like himself. He was alone. That is why God created woman.
We were not created to live in solitude or isolation. We were made to turn outward and not inward upon ourselves. We were created for relationship, for encounter and for communion.
And yet, in our time, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the rapid advancement of technology and what we now call artificial intelligence. In many cases, we have allowed these tools to influence — and even control — our lives.
Technological progress is the fruit of human intellect; therefore, it demands responsible and sound stewardship. We are not called to surrender ourselves to it nor to become its servants. Rather, technology must remain at the service of what is truly good.
When we let dependence on technology become codependence, we surrender our will. We forget our neighbor. We neglect interior silence and personal reflection, and our natural desire for transcendence — a desire that finds its fulfillment only in God. When this desire weakens, we distance ourselves from God and begin to believe that he is absent.
Everything that human beings create must remain at the service of humanity — never the other way around. Yet too often, unchecked technological progress turns the human person into a passive subject, causing him to forget his vocation, weakening his faculties, and robbing him of creativity.
When we forget our vocation to communicate with our neighbor, to share time and life with others — when we set aside encounter and the spoken word — we cast ourselves into an empty universe for which we were never created: an empty universe of loneliness, where the human person becomes the object of consumption.
Faced with this reality, we ask ourselves a fundamental and challenging question: How can our faith and the Gospel make a difference today?
One concrete response is the apostolate of listening — helping others understand that they are not alone. This is lived in a privileged way in our Eucharistic celebrations.
The Eucharist is, above all, a celebration of encounter and community. In it, there is no place for loneliness, because we enter into communion with Jesus — God Himself — and with our brothers and sisters. It is not a celebration of isolation, but of union.
In the holy Mass, we find the true antidote to loneliness: Jesus himself. Entering into communion with him is not a retreat into exclusivity. He receives us as we are, with our imperfections, and unites our voices and our lives to heaven so that together we may implore and participate in the mystery of God’s infinite love. Our participation in the Eucharist is always communal.
For this reason, we must wake up and give thanks for the blessings God has bestowed upon humanity and recognize that these gifts demand growth in responsibility. We are called to be faithful stewards of the progress that has been achieved.
This responsible stewardship is an expression of our divine filiation — of being children of God, the creator of all that exists and giver of every good gift. He did not create us for passivity, but for active participation as conscious collaborators in his plan of creation. It is within God’s divine plan that we discover our true dignity.
Participation in the Eucharist, then, calls us out of ourselves and into communion with Jesus and with our neighbor, so that we may become one with him. We are invited to leave behind loneliness and enter into the communion of love — into communion with the love that is the very essence of God.
In that communion, the Lord makes us one with himself. How wondrous is this mystery of the wisdom of God’s love.