The phone buzzes with a reminder that another “easy” online loan payment is due, larger than last month and heavier than expected. That sound has become familiar to many mobile owners, and it never brings relief. Excessive interest rates on online loans are not helpful—they are traps that quietly bleed borrowers dry.

I have always been uneasy about how these loans are presented as friendly and harmless. A few taps, a smiling icon, and money appears as if by magic. But the magic fades quickly when the repayment schedule arrives, bloated with charges that were barely noticeable at the start. What looked like short-term relief turns into a long-term burden that refuses to loosen its grip.

What troubles me most is the speed with which these loans turn modest needs into chronic poverty. Monthly payments eat into salaries before food, rent, or school fees are even considered. The borrower is forced to juggle priorities, often choosing the loan out of fear of penalties, harassment, or damaged credit records. It is a cruel inversion: money borrowed to survive ends up making survival harder.

These interest rates are not accidents or miscalculations. They are built into the system, calculated to profit from urgency and desperation. Many online lenders know their market well—people with limited access to banks, people facing emergencies, people tired of being turned away. The rates are high because they can be, and because regulation often lags behind technology.

There is also something deeply disturbing about how normal this has become. Conversations about loans now happen casually, almost jokingly, as if paying double or triple the amount borrowed is just part of adult life. I find that normalization is dangerous. When financial pain is treated as routine, outrage disappears, and exploitation starts to feel inevitable.

I cannot ignore the emotional cost either. Debt of this kind does not just drain wallets; it drains sleep, patience, and dignity. The constant arithmetic in the head—what to delay, what to skip, what to sacrifice—becomes exhausting. Over time, it reshapes how people see themselves, shrinking confidence and breeding quiet shame.

A touch of irony lies in the word “online.” These loans feel modern, fast, and smart, yet they revive an old practice that many societies once condemned: lending that thrives on imbalance and fear. Wrapped in apps and algorithms, the practice looks clean, but the effect on ordinary lives is anything but. Technology, in this case, has not softened greed; it has sharpened it.

The wiser path, to my mind, is restraint and skepticism. Borrowers should pause, calculate honestly, and walk away when the numbers already feel painful on paper. At the same time, stricter rules and clearer limits on interest rates must catch up with these platforms. Easy money should never cost a person their future, and refusing such loans may be the first real step toward staying afloat rather than sinking deeper.

THAT’S from Psalm 27,1 and is often used a Responsorial Psalm the readings of many Masses. It’s a verse that deserves to be written deep in our heart and mind to remind us, especially nowadays when we have a lot of atheistic, agnostic and heretical tendencies, that it is in Christ where we have the true guide in our earthly sojourn.

We need to strengthen our faith in him, nourishing it daily with many acts of piety if only to counter the strong forces around that tend to take us to another path that would actually lead us nowhere even if it promises to give us a lot of earthly perks.

And this nourishment should not only be a personal duty but also a social one, starting with the family which is the basic cell of society. Let’s always remember that as persons, we are not meant to live by our own selves alone. We are meant to enter always in relation with others, starting with God, and in fact, develop a culture of intimate communion with everybody else. That is the ideal meant for us.

In this regard, parents should realize the importance of the great responsibility they have of forming their children to be strong in the faith to such an extent that they would always feel the need to help their children not only to be well-fed, well-clothed, well-provided, but also and most importantly to be good and consistent Christians, even to the extent of making them canonizable saints.

Indeed, there’s a certain urgency to make the family today an effective center of formation. With all the growing developments and complicated challenges of our times, we cannot afford to sit pretty and just allow blind fate to take its course.

We need to remember that the family plays a very strategic role in the development of a person and of society in general. It should be able to handle the duties and responsibilities inherent to its nature and purpose.

We cannot deny the fact that many people have inadequate, if not erroneous understanding of what the family and its closely related institution of marriage are. In the US today, for example, they are now legalizing and are openly promoting the so-called same-sex marriage and open marriages.

It’s no wonder that we have many broken marriages and dysfunctional families nowadays with matching complicated consequences. Of course, the recourse to divorce does not solve the problem. It can even make things worse.

Everything has to be done to address this fundamental problem. And all the subsidiary institutions and offices—the parishes, government, schools, NGOs, etc.—should lend a hand.

Continuing formation and evangelization about marriage and family has to be pursued without letup. Of course, the Church can take the lead in this, but this can be done also by many other people in the secular field. In this regard, the laity should also take a lot of initiative, since this matter concerns them more than the clergy, and they have the experience and the competence to talk about this matter.

For one, couples planning to marry should be made to realize clearly that their marriage brings with it the duty to make their family the basic center of formation for their children. They should be prepared and equipped to carry out this delicate duty.

As the basic center for formation, the family that is led by the parents should know how to lay the foundations of the human virtues and the life of faith and piety of the children. It should be well-versed with the doctrine of faith and the traditions of piety so that as early as possible the children would have the right attitudes and outlook in life.