Place Your Smartphone at the Feet of the Lord

Sister Catherine Lucia Phoebe Addington, FSP invites us to break free from our dependency on our snartphones and find true freedom in Christ. 

This article was originally published in Spanish on Catholic Mom COMUNIDAD.

Teaching our Children by Example

There's a lot of talk right now about kids and screen time. Headline after headline heralds disturbing studies on smartphones and children's mental health, while social media proclaims opinions all over the place. In an environment of such intensity, it should come as no surprise that many mothers feel as if everyone knows what they are doing ... except for them. But in the midst of all the fuss, I keep noticing what's missing: Almost no one asks how we, adults, are doing with our own screens.

That omission hits home for me because of my vocation. I am a religious sister with the Daughters of St. Paul, a congregation of women consecrated and sent to communicate the Gospel in contemporary media culture. But despite my missionary calling, not to mention all the help and formation I’ve received from my community, I am still surprised to find myself doomscrolling way too long into the night from time to time. In my own way, I am living in my spiritual motherhood what many of you are living in yours: I feel unable to help anyone else when I haven’t managed to put my own oxygen mask on.

For most moms, healthy boundaries with technology sound like an unthinkable luxury. It’s not as if you can leave your phone behind and take a “day off” from parenting. What if you needed to take a call from school, or from a sick kid? I keep my phone on me too in case one of my sisters needs me. But I bet you’ve experienced the same thing I have: being constantly “available” actually makes us less available. When our attention is constantly fragmented, we aren’t really able to be present to our families, let alone to God.

Meanwhile, the burnout that so many of us feel is exactly the kind of vulnerability that our phones are designed to exploit. We often turn to our phones to take a “brain break,” only to end up more tired than we were before.

Putting our Priorities in Order

Normally, this is where an article like this would move into offering practical advice: five tips to cultivate boundaries, a new app to manage your screen time, a stricter rule to try. And some of that stuff does help. But honestly? Digital culture is always promising that we’re just one lifehack away from true wellbeing, and that’s exactly the kind of lie that I don’t want to absorb from the culture around us. Surely here, among fellow Christians, we can admit that we should stop trying to be our own saviors.

I have no idea what to do about any of this, but I know someone who does.

When Jesus stood up in his hometown synagogue at Nazareth, he said that he came “to proclaim liberty to captives” (Luke 4:18). I think most of us, deep down, think he is talking about someone else: someone poorer, someone more visibly broken than we are. We think he couldn’t possibly be talking about a woman with a busy calendar and a functioning life. But he’s talking about you too. He came for you, too.

That lack of freedom you feel toward your cell phone, toward your agenda, toward your own exhaustion ... that does not come from God. I don't have a five-step plan to undo it. What I do have is a question: Have you really asked God about it? There is always the temptation to spiritualize everything that weighs us down, independently deciding that all of this is simply what God wants for us in the moment. But have we verified it with the Lord?

That’s really my one and only suggestion. Ask him. Does he really want you to live like this?

I’d also invite you to do something that I’ve found useful: bring your phone to church sometime. Put it in front of the Lord, physically, and ask him how he wants to bring you freedom in this specific area of your life. (If you want, you can even ask your priest to bless your phone! Believe me, it makes a huge difference to know your device is dedicated to the Lord, and not only in your own hands.)

Ask the Lord for freedom, and ask him what that will look like for you. And trust yourself to remain in the silence that follows and to listen deeply.

Copyright 2026 Sister Catherine Lucia Phoebe Addington, FSP
Images: Canva