Pope Leo’s prayer intention this month lands on the modern city — a machine for making people lonely.

That’s not a new observation. But it’s worth taking seriously precisely because the Church keeps reaching for solutions that don’t always speak to city dwellers.

Our way of living and sharing the Gospel must respond to the society and world in which we live, and to people’s longings for a generous way of living.

The isolation economy

Cities were supposed to bring people closer together. Instead, they’ve perfected distance.

Commuters travel further and see fewer neighbours. Supermarkets are designed to require no conversation at all. Many families rely on childcare and eldercare out of necessity, not preference — but the wider pattern still holds: it’s as though everyone is somewhere else, and the systems around us are built to keep it that way.

This isn’t just a poverty problem, though poverty makes it worse. Wealthy suburbs are disconnected too.

What’s striking is how thoroughly this atomization has been normalised as progress. Efficiency, convenience, and mobility are marketed as freedoms; the distance that comes bundled with them is not advertised.

Shopping centres as false community

Shopping centres have become the closest thing many neighbourhoods have to a town square. That should worry us perhaps more than it does.

A mall can simulate gathering without producing it. People are present to each other, not known to each other with corporations, not neighbours, seting the terms of the encounter.

Amalgamated parish – the megachurch temptation

Faced with emptiness, one instinct is nostalgia: recover the vestments, the catechisms, and the certainties of an earlier era.

Another instinct is imitation: study the megachurches, borrow their production values, and hope scale solves what smallness couldn’t. In practice this often means merging several parishes into one larger, more efficiently run operation, modelled loosely on the megachurch’s logic of scale.

Both instincts misread the situation. Neither nostalgia nor size addresses disconnection; they just repackage it. The amalgamated parish-megachurch model too easily produces spectacle — and bigger crowds are not necessarily the same as less isolation.

Following Jesus however, often invites us to go beyond the organisation, and beyond a preoccupation with size and technique.

A different measure of success

If neither the past nor the amalgamated-megachurch is the model, what is?

Jesus didn’t scale. He gathered an unimpressive dozen and went looking for need — the isolated, the sick, the hungry, those needing shelter and a shower.

That’s a strange standard to hold up against modern metrics of growth, but it may be the one that actually goes some way towards addressing the loneliness Pope Leo is naming.

A Church that measures itself by attendance figures will always envy the amalgamated-megachurch.

A Church that measures itself by whether the isolated feel found might look small and unimpressive — and still be doing exactly what it was built for.

• Andrew Hamilton SJ is the consulting editor of Eureka Street and a writer at Jesuit Social Services.