Pope Leo XIV calls for concerted prevention of addictions, from drugs to digital overuse, urging solidarity to combat youth isolation and despair.
Newsroom (07/11/2025, Gaudium Press ) Pope Leo XIV issued a stark call for collective action to prevent addictions, highlighting their role as symptoms of deeper societal and spiritual voids, in a video message released Friday to Italy’s Seventh National Conference on Addictions.
Addressing the gathering in Rome, the pontiff emphasized that while traditional addictions like drugs and alcohol persist, emerging threats from excessive internet, computer, and smartphone use pose significant risks. “The growing use of the internet, computers, and smartphones is associated not only with clear benefits,” he stated, “but also with excessive use, which often results in addictions with negative consequences for health.”
These modern dependencies, he noted, frequently intertwine with compulsive gambling, pornography, and perpetual engagement on digital platforms, turning objects of addiction into obsessions that dominate behavior and daily life.
Pope Leo framed such phenomena as indicators of “mental or inner distress” and a broader “social decline in values and positive points of reference,” particularly affecting adolescents and young people seeking meaning and future direction. He decried a “world without hope” marked by surging drug markets, easy gambling profits, and harmful online content, where youth struggle to discern behaviors amid relativism.
This moral ambiguity, he said, underscores the vital role of parents, schools, parishes, and youth centers in instilling spiritual and moral values to foster responsible citizenship.
Young people, the Pope observed, require conscience formation, inner development, peer relationships, and adult dialogue to become “free and responsible architects of their own existence.” Fears of adulthood render them fragile, exacerbating withdrawal tendencies.
He summoned state institutions, volunteer groups, the Church, and society to recognize youths’ struggles as pleas for help and a “deep thirst for life,” offering supportive presence that encourages intellectual, moral, and volitional growth.
“It is a matter of committing ourselves ever more, and in a concerted way, to a work of prevention,” Pope Leo declared, advocating community-wide interventions within youth distress policies to boost self-esteem against insecurity from social pressures and adolescence itself.
Outlining a preventive path, he proposed opportunities in employment, education, sports, healthy lifestyles, and spirituality. Concluding, the pontiff urged conference participants to develop concrete proposals for a “culture of solidarity and subsidiarity” opposing selfishness and utilitarianism, prioritizing listening, encounter, and aid to the vulnerable.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Vatican News
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