Fighting the Crowd

In last Sunday’s Gospel reading from Luke 5:17-26, the friends of a paralytic man had to fight against a crowd to lay their friend before Christ. Today we still need to fight against the crowd, and its dehumanizing force.

Years ago, in 1932, an American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about the problem of societies in Moral Man, Immoral Society. He argued that individuals can be motivated by a sense of compassion and justice, but that societies are not capable of such transcendence. On the contrary, societies resist understanding their hypocrisy, their oppressive structures, and their need for reform. In fact, they promote, through a variety of forums, a complacency in their members, subtly coaxing people from seeing the world in which we actually live.

I tried to discuss this point a bit in the homily.