The Samaritan's Second Payment: What Caritas Lithuania's Hotline Still Needs
Caritas Lithuania's "Caritas Listens" hotline logged 67,308 minutes of calls to lonely elderly people in its first year — a real answer to a real crisis. But a phone call is episodic by nature, and Christ's own teaching on caring for a stranger doesn't end at the roadside. What the Good Samaritan does after tending the wounded man is the part of the parable this crisis still needs.
Somewhere in Lithuania, an elderly person picks up the phone on an ordinary afternoon — not because of a crisis, but because the day has passed and no one has spoken to them. The call to Caritas Lithuania's free hotline, "Caritas Listens," fills a silence that has become structural rather than occasional.[^1]
Pope Leo XIV named that silence directly this year, warning of "the growing loneliness and abandonment experienced by the elderly" as "a challenge confronting much of the modern world."[^2] The warning fits Lithuania's numbers: adults over 60 make up nearly a third of the population, and one in five reports chronic loneliness, according to the country's own statistical data.[^1] The same broader pattern — declining birth rates, emigration, elderly people living alone — runs across Eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, and China.[^3]
After one year, Caritas Listens had logged 67,308 minutes of calls from 86 trained volunteers: more than 46 days of continuous conversation.[^1] That is a genuine achievement, worth naming as one before anything else is said.
But a hotline call is, by its nature, episodic. Someone answers, listens, and the call ends; the next day starts again in the same silence. St. Thomas Aquinas makes the relevant point plainly: a lasting disposition is never formed by a single act, however good, but only through many repeated acts that come to operate from within a person as second nature.[^4] Loneliness that has become chronic isn't undone by one weekly phone call any more than a virtue is formed by one good deed. It needs a structure a person can return to, again and again, until connection is something they live inside rather than something delivered to them.
Christ already gave an answer to what that structure looks like, and it isn't just compassion in the moment. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the mercy doesn't end at the roadside. The Samaritan bandages the man's wounds — but then he carries him to an inn, pays the innkeeper two denarii, and tells him: "Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you for whatever more you spend" (Lk 10:35). The parable's model of neighbor-love has two acts, not one: an encounter that meets the immediate wound, and a handoff into ongoing, arranged care by someone who will actually still be there tomorrow.
That second act is what a hotline, by design, cannot supply on its own. A parish can. Sunday Mass, parish social groups, home-visit ministries, befriending programs built on real in-person visits — these are the innkeeper in Christ's parable, not an optional add-on to it. Caritas Listens should treat itself the way the Samaritan treated the roadside: as the first act, meant to end in a handoff. A caller who has phoned in three or four times should be connected, with consent, to a local parish or a befriending program that shows up in person.
Pope Leo XIV's exhortation Dilexi te places this kind of work in the Church's mission to the poor: real proposals, real change, and the hope born of genuine encounter.[^2] That encounter, at its most durable, happens in a body, in a place, among people who will still be there next week, not down a phone line. The hotline is the roadside. The parish is the inn. Caritas Lithuania has already done the first half of the parable. The second half decides whether the work compounds or simply repeats.
References
[^1]: EWTN News. (2026, July 22). As pope warns of 'pandemic of loneliness,' Caritas Lithuania offers a Catholic answer. (Source for the "Caritas Listens" hotline, its 67,308 minutes/86-volunteer first-year figures, and Lithuania's national loneliness statistics.)
[^2]: Leo XIV. (2025, October 4). Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi te of the Holy Father Leo XIV on Love for the Poor. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
[^3]: Martinson, M., & Muñoz Boudet, A. M. (2019). Aging in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Evidence from the 2007 and 2016 Living Standards Measurement Surveys. World Bank.
[^4]: Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 51, a. 3 (on whether a habit can be caused by a single act).
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