"Loneliness is the leprosy of the modern world" Mother Teresa

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
~ Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa  (1995)

Mother Teresa saw loneliness as leprosy of the West
News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), The Rev. Kendall Palladino Published 1:00 am EDT, Saturday, April 17, 2004
quote:
Ever since I first heard about Mother Teresa, I admired her. For this reason, I decided to join a team working with her in Calcutta in 1994. I will never forget her words to me because they changed the course of my life and helped me understand some of the needs in our country.
After a day working together, Mother Teresa spoke with our team. I told Mother Teresa that I planned to enter medical school after seminary to work with people with leprosy overseas.
Mother Teresa surprised me when she said, "Why do you want to do that?"
She continued, "There is a poverty in your country that is just as severe as our poorest of the poor."
I wondered what she could mean by that, since I had seen poverty that would make even our poorest in the United States look wealthy.
Mother Teresa went on to say, "In the West there is a loneliness, which I call the leprosy of the West. In many ways, it is worse than our poor in Calcutta."
The implication of her statement was that I should look first for the difference that I could make right around me. She said that we make a difference one person at a time. . . .
https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Mother-Teresa-saw-loneliness-as-leprosy-of-the-250607.php

"It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start."
~ Mother Teresa

"When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved.
Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by.
Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger."
~Mother Teresa
Teresa (Mother), Roger (frère) (1986). “Meditations on the Way of the Cross”, Burns & Oates

"Loneliness is the leprosy of the modern world."
~ Mother Teresa