According to a 2025 survey, the average American has between 1,600 and 3,000 photos stored on their smartphone. That’s not counting what’s backed up in the cloud. Just on your phone: somewhere between ten and twenty full photo albums, in your pocket, at all times.
When did you last look through them?
Often, the conversation around digital clutter ends there: with a guilty, overwhelmed admission that we are carrying around more than we need. Our Catholic tradition doesn’t leave us there, but instead offers tools to turn our convictions into conversion. As we undertake our Lenten observances of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, why not apply them to our digital lives? One way to put all three into practice is to embrace, with a distinctly Catholic flavor, an annual global initiative called Digital Cleanup Day.
Digital Cleanup Day
Digital Cleanup Day, observed this year on March 21, invites individuals and organizations to do exactly what it sounds like: clear out the digital clutter. Delete the apps you haven’t opened in years. Go through your photos (or at least an album or two). Unsubscribe from the email lists you never read. Consider how you want to reform your habits of digital consumption going forward.
This might sound like a mere self-help exercise. For Catholics, however, there’s something much deeper going on here, and the Church’s social teaching has given us a framework to understand it.
“The Cloud” Is Not a Cloud
Our digital data can seem immaterial, but “the cloud” is no cloud at all. It is made up of physical servers, in physical buildings, taking up an increasing amount of our planet and its resources. Every email languishing in an overwhelmed inbox, every duplicate photo that goes undeleted, and every streaming video buffered and forgotten has a material cost. For Catholics, care for creation means being acutely aware of our digital footprint.
While awareness is a necessary first step, the Church calls us to take action. Pope Francis named the pattern bluntly: “People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity, but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more” (55). Benedict XVI made a similar call, proclaiming that “technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption” (Message for the 43rd World Day of Peace, 9).
Questioning our digital consumption is not only about care for the physical world. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis also warned of “rapidification,” his term for how the pace and logic of our consumption can affect our interior life (18). Like any culture, the digital world can shape what we desire, what we think is normal to want, what we believe we need to hold onto.
What Are We Actually Holding Onto?
This is where Digital Cleanup Day becomes something more than a tech hygiene exercise. It becomes an examination of conscience.
Think about the photo albums again. Most of us would never fill our pockets with physical albums we hardly look through—the sheer bulk of them would force a reckoning. In the digital realm, however, we accumulate without friction and therefore without reflection. Pope Francis put his finger on this exact tendency: “Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious… Such evasiveness serves as a license to carry on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them” (Laudato Si’, 59). The result is not just clutter, but the spiritual habit of grasping, collecting, consuming, holding on. Those habits do not necessarily stay on our screens. They can form the kind of people we are offline, too.
The digital context may be particular to our time, but the human tendency to cling to material things has been a constant temptation for Christians throughout the ages. Jesus set a challenging example for us by sending his disciples out with nothing, not even an extra tunic (Luke 9:3). He also warned us plainly not to store up treasures on earth (Matthew 6:19). At the heart of the Beatitudes, he named the disposition that makes all of this possible: poverty of spirit (Matthew 5:3). Jesus invites us to a poverty that is not deprivation for its own sake, but a poverty rooted in the freedom that comes from genuinely trusting the Father to care for us, such that we do not need to grasp and hoard to be secure. Pope Francis, writing in that same spirit, reminds us that “a decrease in the pace of production and consumption can at times give rise to another form of progress and development” (Laudato Si’, 191). Letting go need not be framed only as loss, but as the beginning of storing up treasure in heaven instead.
We are in the middle of Lent. We are already asking: what do I need to release? What is keeping me from God? What habits have I substituted for the real thing? These spiritual questions apply to our digital lives just as much as anywhere else.
A Digital Examination of Conscience
If you feel invited to participate in Digital Cleanup Day, feel free to use the following examination of conscience to guide your steps. Always begin with prayer, asking for the light of the Holy Spirit in your own words. The goal here is not to set your own agenda, but to ask what changes, if any, God is asking you to make.
1. Begin with gratitude.Where has my digital life genuinely connected me to others, to beauty, to God? Name those gifts with real thankfulness—and let that gratitude guide what you choose to hold onto.
2. Move to awareness. Where do I feel grasping or anxious in my digital life? What do I compulsively check, collect, or hold onto? What would I hate to lose? Talk to God about those fears and listen to what he has to say.
3. Make an honest reckoning. What would it feel like to let some of this go? What does my resistance tell me about where I am placing my trust, rather than placing it in God?
4. Name your desires, and compare them with God’s. What kind of digital life do I want to lead? Is it consistent with the person God is calling me to be?
5. Make a resolution.Make one concrete commitment regarding an action that you feel God is inviting you to carry out. The team behind Digital Cleanup Day offers four simple and practical steps as possible starting points, each of which you can bring before the Lord for his input: (1) clean up your smartphone; (2) clean up your computer; (3) clean up your inbox; and (4) make new arrangements to change your habits going forward.
Let us pray. God of all creation, thank you for entrusting to our care the gift of digital technology. Help me to live my responsibilities well, being a good steward of my mind, heart, and soul as I navigate my digital life. Teach me to choose freedom over fear, detachment over accumulation, and trust in you over clinging to material or digital goods. Bless the resolution I have made, and give me all the graces I need to carry it out. Amen.
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AI usage disclosure: This post was drafted with editing assistance from Claude AI and research assistance from Magisterium AI.