For many, 2021 has been a year of emerging from the unexpected conditions of the pandemic. Nearly everyone has a vivid experience of reconnecting, of taking delight in seeing people and interacting with them in more normal ways. This is unsurprising: Catholic tradition clearly teaches that we are made for relationship. We are social creatures to the core. Some researchers even go so far as to call us the “ultra-social” species.

Yet as we reemerge, we might reflect on what experts have termed a crisis of loneliness in our society that predates the pandemic but the conditions of which have been made real and more extreme by stay-at-home orders and social distancing. What exactly does a crisis of loneliness mean? And what does it have to do with larger social issues?

Answering the second question first, we can say this: It has everything to do with the whole range of social issues. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (On Integral Human Development), begins a key chapter by writing, “One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being loved or from difficulties in being able to love.”