Some elderly parishioners are occasionally accompanied at Mass by the family of one of their children, who, like the grandparents, are a very large family. After the celebration, they came to greet me, and it occurred to me to ask how many siblings there were. The father turned to the eldest, nine years old, and repeated the question to her alone. The girl, in a show of courage, half shy and half absentminded, said, “Several.” The father became angry with her and reminded her of the math lesson they had recently been reviewing. There were eight siblings. But the girl looked at us as if she were discussing a strange subject: the number of siblings.

Surely, if I had asked her, as the older sister, to introduce me to her siblings, she would have named all seven of them.

For me, it was remarkable: many children from the same family. The number was the most striking thing: eight children. From what I could see, the number doesn’t indicate anything special or significant to them.

Numbers allow us to classify, organize, and control. Those who can calculate, classify, and control numbers. And that gives us the peace of mind of possessing and mastering.

When one becomes a number, one loses the characteristic that defines one. Sometimes in hospitals, penitentiaries, military centers, or schools, subjects are a number, abstract and interchangeable. To count is to anonymize.

Even pastoral work is quantified: the number of faithful, liturgical celebrations, communions distributed, and students in catechism classes.

The productivity of our vocation is measured by the number of positive responses to the action taken.

Mark Twain popularized an expression, attributing it to Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, big lies, and statistics.”

I don’t intend to develop theories about mathematics. But I’ve been reflecting on the malaise of our culture, the frustration generated by quantifying and comparing ourselves with others. Thus, after striving for success, we struggle to share our defeats. Educated to win, we have made losing a taboo. To whom can we explain our failures without fear?

Leo XIV, at the Mass for the Jubilee of Youth, recalled that fragility is not a “taboo” to be avoided, but rather a part of who we are, who were not made for a life where everything is firm and secure, but rather for an existence that is constantly regenerated in giving, in love.

We have the resources, we’re better prepared, but depression or dissatisfaction is increasing, both among young and old. Much has been written recently about the causes of suicide. I refer you to the previous article. But rather than looking for the causes, which respond to multiple factors, I believe the wake-up call should lead us to seek a healthier life, from a psychological point of view. One of the things that generates tension is measuring life quantitatively. It’s true that numbers can distort reality. In my novitiate, there were five of us. One of them, without realizing it, began to develop a psychiatric illness, which developed shortly afterward outside the novitiate, with a fatal outcome.

The training team lacked sufficient training to identify the problem. Coexistence became very problematic. Faced with this difficulty, the novice master made it mandatory for us to meet for an hour a day to improve the community atmosphere. He decided that after lunch, once homework was finished, we would meet in the recreation room. One hour each day. We don’t know if it was punishment, therapy, or a challenge.

Indeed, from three to four in the afternoon, for exactly sixty minutes, we sat in silence, waiting for the hour to end so we could each go to our rooms. Occasionally, someone would put on a record so we could listen to music. The record could be repeated, but no one paid attention. Thousands of minutes were invested in improving our coexistence, but with completely fruitless results. No matter how many days we spent together, our relationships, especially during that recess hour, were cold, frozen like ice. It didn’t depend on the number of minutes we were together. It would have been better to invest the time in observing to better understand. To truly contemplate the problem. Anyone would have been surprised that four young people, during recess, didn’t speak to each other, and not precisely because we were praying. It felt like the waiting room of a terrifying dentist.

Observing, contemplating, listening—these are actions that don’t thrive in haste; they require time, but not minutes. We don’t listen for three minutes; we listen to what you tell me, or what you don’t tell me, your story and your side of the story.

The head of psychiatry at a large hospital referred patients with chronic grief to me. It’s true that the results of the bereavement group intervention were good. One day, when we met and were able to talk, he congratulated me on the results. Without false humility, I replied that he was more prepared than I was. The difference was that I dedicated time to them, they felt listened to, and we could work on the problem. To which he agreed. In his case, the most I could dedicate to a patient was twenty minutes. But I responded that, precisely, optimizing resources means investing therapy time wisely so that it is effective. Maintaining the problem, or the trauma, because there isn’t time, and wasting medications and years maintaining the discomfort, is even more unproductive than investing quality time in initial therapy.

There has also been talk these days about the loneliness of the priest, and the failures he must endure alone. Our quantifying style leads us to feel suspended in the face of a lack of results. This is aggravated by the fact that when we get together, far from sharing our sorrows, we dedicate ourselves to exposing successes, masking the emptiness. Clergy meetings can often seem like a group of children competing to see who has the most trading cards, or whose dad or mom is the most extraordinary. As a result, we dedicate ourselves to projecting images of success. We easily forget the crucified Christ and the cross.

Pope Leo, who is revealing himself to us as a wise pope, addressed thousands of young people at Youth Day precisely on the subject of fragility. He recalled that Psalm 90 also “presents to us the image of grass that sprouts; in the morning it flourishes” and then “in the evening it is cut down and withers.” These are two powerful references, “perhaps a little shocking,” he assured, but which should not frighten us, “as if they were ‘taboo’ arguments to be avoided,” because “the fragility they speak of is, in fact, part of the wonder that we are.” In fact, nature constantly regenerates itself, from its weaknesses—from droughts where thin stems break and dry up, from vulnerable winters where everything seems dead—only to be reborn in spring “in a thousand colors.”

We too, dear friends, are like this; we have been made for this. Not for a life where everything is firm and secure, but for an existence that is constantly regenerated in the gift, in love. And so we continually yearn for a “more” that no created reality can give us; we feel a thirst so great and burning that no drink of this world can quench it. Let us not deceive our hearts in the face of this thirst, seeking to satisfy it with ineffective substitutes. Rather, let us listen to it.

But the harshest consequences of quantifying life occur when productivity parameters are applied to people. When a poor person who lives by begging is treated worse than a pet by their peers. You have nothing, you are worthless.

How much is a person worth? This question may seem macabre and insane. But what do the phrases oft-repeated by the elderly and the sick suggest to us: “For what I do in this world, may God come and take me,” “I’m no longer good for anything,” “I’m a nuisance.” They quantify themselves and marginalize themselves. Rather than euthanasia, eugenics is being implemented, a purging of the unproductive, the “defective.” Trisomic children, those with Down syndrome, are almost never born. Among the eight siblings, there was one of the youngest with this characteristic.

Quantifying the value of life leads us to the throwaway culture, as Pope Francis said.

When faced with the challenge of quantification, when faced with questions and answers about our successes or failures, we could respond like Andrea, the oldest sister in that very large family. We could ignore the question. What’s important isn’t the number, but the identity. And identity doesn’t depend on productivity. The most honored sibling in this family is Maxi, born on August 14, the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe. He died a few days after birth. His baptism in the hospital was celebrated as a celebration. He was born into Christian life, never to die. Perhaps this is where the girl’s difficulty stemmed from when answering the question I asked her about the number of siblings. Whether to include Maxi in the figure? The best answer was “several.”