At the first college retreat I led, I made a strict no phone policy. It was helped by the fact that the retreat center we were using had no cell service. When I first announced it to the group, there was a mix of shock and fear. They had never been disconnected before. Their entire lives have been lived under the blue glow of some kind of screen. Their childhoods were marked by the advent of the smartphone which came on the market when they were 6 or 7 years old.
I stuck to my rule for their own sake. To add to it, the priest I was working with and I made 4 hours of the retreat silent. We knew that the Lord would work in the silence we were forcing them into. I’ve learned that young people, including my own daughter, will not willingly go into silence, so I have to corral them into it.
What happened to the students was a deeper encounter with Christ and the beginning of healing. Some of them have started fasting from technology in order to hear the Lord more clearly and to give themselves a break from the noise and chaos of the digital world. Others returned to their former ways. This is how ministry goes.
I’ve noticed the struggle to let the phones go is particularly virulent amongst women. Social media plays into the relational needs of women in a way it does not for men. The addiction roots more deeply for women. I was recently asked to co-lead a retreat last minute with a different college. At the beginning of the retreat, I announced that there was no cell service and that they should embrace this time of silence to draw closer to Christ.
The students struggled with the silence the entire time. The young women loudly proclaimed that they couldn’t handle not being able to “doomscroll” and that they would “make up for it when they got back to their dorm rooms.” When they couldn’t be on their phones, they talked about the content they had seen on their phones. This is the response of a full-blown addict. We are wrecking entire generations of people, especially women.
Young people are terrified of silence. They have been taught from a very young age that they should constantly be entertained and that noise—whether visual or audible—should always be attended to. This is not all together surprising given that we live in a cacophony of noise day-in-and-day-out.
I’ve been meditating on this noise because my own town turned my neighborhood into a motor speedway while it repairs a bridge just outside of my neighborhood. The noise is intolerable when at its zenith during commuting hours. Coupled with trains, planes, and trauma helicopters, there are seldom moments of silence. We tried to purchase a house in the country to get away from it, but it didn’t work out.
As a culture we are incapable of silence because the opportunities for it are extremely rare. This is a bigger problem for those of us who live on the East Coast, West Coast, or urban centers. Growing up in Montana, there were plenty of occasions for silence, and there still are today, but I no longer live there. Plus, the smartphone in our pocket guarantees that we never experience silence.
The lack of silence is one of the primary drivers for the increasing anxiety rates among younger generations. Constant stimuli make us anxious. The need to scroll or listen to music 24/7 harms us. It keeps us from being able to hear God’s still small voice in the depths of our soul. This raises the question: Are Catholics adding to the anxiety and addiction by our over-emphasis on digital content? I think the answer is yes.
First, good content is unhelpful or even harmful when it plays into addiction. Doomscrolling Catholic content is just as noisy and anxiety inducing over time. It keeps young people trapped in cycles of dependence and distraction. Praying with an App is good for a beginner, but it doesn’t help someone progress spiritually up the holy mountain where the only way forward is through silence. Prayer is not consumption of content.
Second, I’ve started to realize that we are not practicing our own teachings in the digital age. We are not living solidarity and subsidiarity. We have convinced ourselves that the digital world is where the “real work” of evangelization must take place. False. Young people don’t need our digital content; they need our physical presence. The young adults I’ve been able to minister to have only come about because I have built deeper relationships with them in person. In fact, I’ve had to temper their Catholic digital dependency because social media has led some of them into very polarizing places within the Catholic online world which fuel anger, division, and sin.
Solidarity means to live in communion with those directly around us first. It is to share in the joys and sorrows of the people the Lord puts in our path. Other forms of solidarity such as supporting people impacted by devastation, war, violence, and poverty are also important, but our ability to be fully united to them doesn’t typically move beyond prayer and providing donations.
To live solidarity more deeply we must physically and spiritually walk with the people around us on the path to heaven. It is not something that can be fully lived in the digital world. The digital version is a shell of the real thing, and it costs very little. True solidarity requires sweat, blood, and tears. It means sacrificing time and energy. It cannot be done from the comfort of our sofa.
One aspect of the principle of subsidiarity—another dimension of Catholic social teaching—is the call to work at the lowest level of society in order to make the greatest impact. It is at the lowest level that we are able to properly discern the needs of particular communities rather than use top-down approaches that are unhelpful or harmful for particular peoples.
The saints, especially reformer saints, understood this principle. They worked from the bottom up by renewing their own local communities before moving outward. St. John Vianney and St. Francis of Assisi are two examples who understood that they were called to reach those in their direct physical vicinity first. Given the state of the culture, it is glaringly obvious that we have abandoned our local communities for the unreality of the digital “community.”
Our communities are crumbling, young people are lost and struggling, and the world is becoming more divided. If we were working at the lowest level—within our families, parishes, workplaces, clubs, local government, and schools, etc.—then things would begin to change over time. We are not called to evangelize the whole world with our popular digital content. There may be some with that calling, but it is not the majority. You want to help young people? Go serve in college campus ministry or with a young adult group and teach them how to shut their phones off so they can hear God.
We aren’t living our own teachings. We are allowing the temptations of both the ego and the enemy to lead us to think that everyone is called to be Word on Fire. I’m watching in real-time as young people get swallowed up by both social media and AI addictions, then cannot understand why they are anxious and unhappy. When I do get them to stop scrolling and staring into the false light of the smartphone, they begin to feel better over time, even if they have to go through the withdrawals of an addict. I’ve been there.
Evangelization is needed in our local communities. We should be going into hospitals to help the sick and the lost. Walking onto college campuses to help young people encounter Christ and to embrace the silence that allows us to commune with Him. The poor and the homeless need us to show up. We should be visiting the elderly, homebound, and the lonely. Our local parishes need to build communities around genuine fellowship and presence so we can lead others to Christ. There are people around us the Lord wants to help, but we have to look up from our screens to seem them.
We need to be brutally honest with ourselves as a Church, as parents, and as disciples about whether or not we are adding to the addiction or helping. Conversions through digital content are great at the beginning of the spiritual journey, but if young people never break free of their addictions to technology because of the incessant content we are producing, then we become a hindrance to their sanctification.
What are we putting in place as next steps to help people grow in their relationship with the Lord that does not have a digital interface? How are we walking with them in person in order to help them break free from harmful addictions that are not from the Lord? How are we seeking to renew at the lowest level?
Recently, one of my former college students showed up unannounced at my house. He couldn’t call or text beforehand because he was taking advantage of his fall break to take an entire day technology free. We had a wonderful visit during which no screens mediated the discussion. He came back later to get my daughter and me for Adoration because I was battling vertigo that day and my husband was working on a construction project 45 minutes away. It was a deeply human experience.
All of us, along with another former college student, went to spend an hour in silence before the Blessed Sacrament. This young man is more capable of hearing God now than when I first met him precisely because he has encountered Christ in the silence. He knows it’s the only way forward to mature as a disciple. His spiritual progression since I first met him nearly two years ago is remarkable, and I know it is tied to Our Lady’s intercession.
This is what we should be doing as a Church, rather than constantly enabling addiction through more digital content. Regardless of the optimism of Catholic influencers, young people are not doing well. They are trapped, and they need us to help pull them out. We can only help them when we shut off our own devices, so that we can truly seek them out and bring them into the loving silence of Christ.
Photo by Melyna Valle on Unsplash
