In the early days of 2026, a columnist for Our Sunday Visitor news service pinpointed an all-too-often ignored danger of our all-too-pervasive social media environment.

The threat, Notre Dame theologian Leonard DeLorenzo wrote, goes well beyond distraction, misinformation, or the urge to spout uninformed personal opinion evolving into an autonomic human response. Our own embodied unintelligence might soon rival artificial intelligence as a threat to the survival of the species, but DeLorenzo argued the real risk lies in the opposite direction.

“We’ve built technologies that make disconnection frictionless,” he wrote. “It’s easier than ever to pull away from people with minimal consequence: ghost someone, block, unfollow.”

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Damage done far exceeds hurt mystification on the part of the ghosted person. It is worse than a habitual blocker training his or her brain to default to interpersonal cowardice. The real loss DeLorenzo identified is that of genuine love.

Love, he emphasized, does not have a coefficient of efficiency. Love and friendship emerge from the “slow messy work” of knowing and understanding another human being body and soul. 

“Real connection requires what we’re increasingly unwilling to give: time. Embodied presence. Inefficiency. The awkwardness of sitting with someone who’s struggling instead of sending a text. The risk of being misunderstood or rejected.” 

Viewed another way, however, DeLorenzo is pointing out that reconnecting to another’s humanity makes “forgiveness and reconciliation…more radical.” It turns remaining present to work through conflict into a “revolutionary” act. It is, he says, the revolution of “willingness to kneel in the pigpen with each other (and) pray together when nothing is fixed yet” as in Our Lord’s parable of the Prodigal Son.

“We can’t hack intimacy or engineer belonging. We can only do the slow work of showing up, choosing reconciliation over convenience, presence over productivity, the risk of real love over the safety of managed relationships,” he said.

In one of the great brain-bending paradoxes so beloved of Holy Mother Church, nowhere is taking the “risk of real love” better illuminated than in an aspect of our Catholic faith that is such a stumbling block for the secular world: the “yes” of consecrated life.

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From a purely non-Faith perspective,  consecrated life is synonymous with withdrawal from human connection, an overt refusal to show up for embodied love. At best it is dismissed as a kind of sterile simulacrum of human relationships. At worst, it is scorned as a circular cause and effect of various psychological perversities.

Yet as Cardinal Frank Leo writes in his message on the Feb. 2 World Day of Consecrated Life, no such presumption could be more mistaken. In his text, reprinted in our Verbatim column this issue, Cardinal Leo situates consecrated life as a “gift” made to God, His Church and, by obvious extension, to the world.

“Your vocation places you at the heart of the Church’s mystery,” he writes to the consecrated. “By your profession of the evangelical counsels, you proclaim that God alone is sufficient, that the Kingdom of Heaven is already present and growing among us, and that the ultimate horizon of human life is communion with God.”

Talk about showing up! And the Cardinal emphasizes it is precisely by living alongside, but not being consumed by, the divisions, distractions, dissatisfactions and egotism that mark our time, that the consecrated speak a “different language” to their fellow human beings.

It is, as he itemizes, a language of “radical availability” founded on obedience and service, modeled after Our Lord and Our Lady.

In his message, Leo underscores that the model should not be mistaken for a variation of what DeLorenzo calls “frictionless disconnection” from the world. On the contrary, it requires “sacrifices known only to God” arising from faithfulness and prayerfulness. 

“Consecrated life is not a retreat from the world, but a prophetic way of loving the world as God loves it, and in so doing inviting others to a more authentic way of life,” he writes.

 A key word there is “inviting” precisely because Jesus made clear to his disciples that consecration is by no means some kind of universal obligation but is aligned with the voluntary “yes” of those able to accept it. Fittingly, Matthew’s Gospel tells us that after delivering the teaching, Jesus welcomes the “little children” to Him. 

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Some accept consecration’s call. Some bear and raise the children. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven, though not, in its current state, of the social media environment on which we have grown dangerously dependent.