via Jesuits Magazine:

In 2023, and earlier this year, Fr. Patrick “Paddy” Gilger, SJ, presented a lecture on loneliness in two venues—first at St. Paul’s College in Winnipeg, Canada, and then as part of an Ignatian Volunteer Corps event at Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago.

Through anecdotes, research findings and statistics, Fr. Gilger examines the ways society has affected the mindset of individuals through the decades, and why he believes we are in the place we are in today. Some of the statistics are mind-boggling. In recent years, 58% of Americans reported experiencing loneliness, with even higher rates among Millennials (71%) and Gen Z (79%).

Once the plight of older Americans, loneliness now plagues the young, so much so that in 2023 United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a health advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.”…

Loneliness, he says, is a social problem, not an individual one. “I’m convinced that our loneliness epidemic is rooted in our shared history,” he says. “We feel lonely because we no longer feel we belong here. We lack a sense of destiny, of individual purpose and collective meaning. We are missing a story, a community, a set of common practices, and a shared understanding of the world in which we can find our own place….

He stresses many times in the talk that individuals are lonely because society—the way we live now and have lived for decades— has made them so. “This post-everything life in which we live, has given us, I think, many wonderful freedoms.

But in gaining those, we’ve endured immense losses. Foremost among those losses, I think, is our lost capacity to live a common life. We’ve forgotten, or our society is failing to pass on, the habits of belonging. Can we relearn them?”…

“If you are lonely, go take care of the poor,” he says. “Seriously. That’s the remedy. Put the old corporate practices of prayer in addition to this—processions, adoration, the liturgy of the hours, in which, for example, there is no liturgical constraint against the laity preaching. Why don’t we just do that, and have the laity preach? We can do shared rosaries again. We need common action that is delinked from right-wing ideology, that comes from our tradition. Desperately, we need it.”