Pastoral Care for Loneliness: A New Apostolate, MatthewFforde, Leominster, Gracewing Publishing, 2023 (ISBN 9780852449936), xiii + 79 pp., Pb $14

Matthew Fforde, lecturer in Contemporary World History at LUMSA in Rome, calls loneliness a ‘spectre’ that is ‘now haunting Western societies’ (p. 1). He asks pointedly, ‘Do we really want to turn our Western societies into open-air prisons made up of solitary confinement cells’ (p. 1)? The answer is ‘no’, of course. He posits, ‘Christians are now called to heal Western man of this epidemic of our epoch and to relieve the suffering that it imposes’ (p. 1). However, Fforde seems so focused on the problem that he avoids an even more pressing issue. Healing is insufficient. Christians can offer a vision of communal thriving that goes beyond diagnosing and treating a disease. But whether we think Fforde goes far enough, he still asks the right question: what will Christians do in the face of the epidemic of loneliness? Pastoral Care for Loneliness (PCL) launched as a Roman Catholic project from a 2019 symposium in the Archdiocese of Crotone-Santa Severina, Calabria. Because Fforde says that much of the present work owes itself to the wisdom of that gathering, it should come as no surprise that Fforde's project, while open to other churches, focuses entirely upon Roman Catholic practice (p. xi). That the need exists is beyond dispute, and Fforde links it directly to dogma. He quotes the RCC Catechism to say that ‘society is not for [the human person] an extraneous addition but a requirement of [our] nature’ (p. 12). As T. F. Torrance might have put it, ‘We are who we are in our relationships’. Fforde ties this back to the creation stories, in which ‘God declared, “it is not good that man should be alone” (Gn 2:18)’, and he brings it forward to the Gethsemane story: ‘Christ as he approached his crucifixion asked his apostles to keep him company at a moment of unimaginable travail. Are we not called to keep Christ company in those of our brothers and sisters who are being crucified by massive isolation?’ (pp. 1, 46). In the ‘secularized West’, ‘loneliness is conspicuous by its presence’ (p. 8). To ignore it is to condone open-air prisons of solitary confinement cells. Fforde exclaims that loneliness is a crisis against which Christians must act—now (p. 1). If they don't, not only individuals, but Western society as a whole, might be lost. As the pastor of Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas, I get loneliness. My vocation elicits a fair amount of it in myself. I also witness isolation and its effects clinging to the people of my community, leading to depression, mental health crises and addiction. People ache from it. It numbs us to the world, leading to a life slumped against the beauties of creation, slouching towards a lonely death. I was excited then to see the title of Fforde's book and hoped it would provide a roadmap for ministering to my own congregation's needs. As I read, however, I became more critical of Fforde's approach. Along with him, I would like to know what Christians should do to address the crisis of loneliness hiding in plain sight in our streets and communities. To think with Fforde with this issue, we should take three steps. First, we should appreciate Fforde's call for a Pastoral Care for Loneliness. It should go without saying that Christian denominations need to organize their response to this quiet killer and work for on-the-ground and structural reforms to enable genuine human community. For Fforde, PCL could form part of the ‘new evangelisation and at the same time both carry out Christ's commandments and act to counter consequences of the fading of faith in our hemisphere’ (p. 39). We should appreciate Fforde and others for raising the issue and pointing out that Christian churches have a responsibility to face it. Second, though, I think we should question Fforde's approach. For Fforde isolation and loneliness are first and foremost a problem of the head. On the one hand, there is ‘mass society’, which creates things so large that they are no longer ‘on a human scale and human beings cannot relate to a context which is simply too big for their need for familiar and accessible frameworks’ (p. 37). Add to this ‘the materialist matrix’ of ideas and one finds a ‘dark symbiosis’ with both working ‘massively to objectify man and provoke social distance’ (p. 37). The other great feature of desocialisation is ‘deculturalisation’; ‘desocialised man is also deculturalised man’ (p. 19). If Fforde is right, we are dealing with huge forces—mass society, materialist ideas and the decline of Western civilization—that dwarf and victimize individuals. PCL seems like a band-aid solution aimed at treating the symptoms. As such, it is hard to see how PCL could ‘aid’, as Fforde wishes it to, ‘in the regeneration of Western society and the revitalization of Christianity. Remembering the task of St Francis of Assisi, we can help repair two interconnected houses’ (p. 39). But how? Fforde's analysis leans conservative. There are real issues with the disintegration of cultural institutions, the nesting holons that create a robustly interconnected life, but going backwards is not the solution. We have to find a way forward … together. Third, to think with and beyond Fforde on this topic, we should offer a compelling vision for thriving human community. Fforde's vision seems essentially individualistic. PCL is for individuals. Yes, groups might do it, but the thing that might help the person suffering from loneliness is the idea that they are and have ‘an immortal soul’ on ‘an eternal journey’ (p. 57). This vision is a future, yes, but it is a lonely one. In A Future That's Bigger Than the Past, Anglican priest and theologian Sam Wells writes, ‘Recent political movements have demonstrated that when people lose sight of a genuine telos, and lose confidence in their own ability to play a constructive role in advancing towards it, they resort to imagining a better past and seeking others to blame for inhibiting their ability to recreate it’ (Wells 2019). Wells paints a picture of thriving human community, a place where ‘immensely diverse social classes, racial backgrounds and experiences of flourishing and hardship cross paths, find common ground and are enhanced by encounter. This is what human flourishing and social cohesion [can] look like’ (Wells 2019). Visions like this one arise from the eschatological visions of Isaiah (e.g. 61:1–2; cf. 58:6), or from Jesus' vision of the year of the Lord's favour in Luke 4, or from the images from the Apocalypse of a restored human community bringing their treasures into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21). There are no end of biblical images that could be employed to construct a vision for thriving human community that fixates neither on the glories of the past nor the injustices of the present. With such a vision in place, we could return to Fforde's recommendations for parish and diocesan PCL interventions by teams and accompanying centres (see p. 54). As an adjunct to church-life, they surely would reach and help people otherwise overlooked and become important to the church's mission. However, will we only replicate the problem if we choose to wait for a Pastoral Care for Loneliness to form before beginning the work? The problem is not only ‘out there’. It is ‘in here’ as well. Realizing that we are part of the problem means that each of us has a responsibility, a responsibility that is as simple and as difficult as putting down this review and inviting someone into our lives. ‘How beautiful it would be’, Fforde writes, ‘if after our deaths Christ could say to us: “I was lonely, I suffered because of it, and you kept me company”’ (p. 2). This intuition is where Fforde's analysis is deepest and truest. There is no thinking our way out of loneliness. Pastoral Care for Loneliness is a bottom-up, one-thing-at-a-time reality. It is building reciprocities, duties, respect, weaving together a fabric of relationships for a renewed future. In other words, it is essentially institutional. Institutions mitigate loneliness. They generate hope and hope generates community. Whatever we do going forward, we have to include but go beyond ‘keeping Christ company in those who are [isolation's] victims’ (p. 71). We have to invite. We have to build. Christians can offer a vision of human communal thriving by living and building it. We should think more on this, yes. Then, we should put this review down and invite someone into our lives.