Everybody Break into Small Groups

I’ve been reading Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, still the classic book on Hitler and the Second World War. It is fantastically depressing, but I think it is important to reread it every once in a while.

Hitler, the Nazis, and the Second World War are a good measure of just how wrong things can go in this world—by which I mean the social world. Things can be, over wide swaths of humankind, exactly upside down. The worst can be wildly popular, the best despised, the aggressor can be universally seen as the victim, the victim as the aggressor, everyone can believe the opposite of the truth, the average man can murder, and unspeakably awful things can happen to perfectly innocent people. It burns away many possible comfortable illusions.

Though I love politics as a spectator sport, I also believe very little can be accomplished in this social world. It is too shot through with evil. What is useful in politics is rather to try to prevent the social world from imposing on the rest of our existence—to prevent totalitarianism. Where good can be done is done in art, in artifice, in religious worship, and in personal relationships with those around us. These are the things that can and do build the true Utopia, the New Jerusalem.

As Jesus said, in Matthew 18, “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” This is often misquoted as “wherever two or more are gathered in my name"; but I think the upper limit is as significant as the lower one.

He was talking about personal relationships, between people who know each other, as opposed to large organizations on the social level. Similarly, surely there is a reason why, although he had hundreds of disciples, he chose only twelve apostles. And the apostles themselves understood that number as significant: when Judas departed, they chose one, and only one, to replace him.

I have also heard it said—perhaps by me—that communism can actually work, and can be a great system. But it only works in small groups of people who all know each other. Families, for example; or monasteries.

Timothy Leary too once said that everything that has ever been accomplished, for good or ill, has been accomplished by quite small groups of people.

Interestingly, extended families living together used to be commonly about that size—about a dozen. No doubt there was a reason for this. We need to do what we can to preserve families, but realistically, the real family is not available any longer to most of us in North America.

I think every Catholic or Christian congregation should be subdivided, as a matter of course, into smaller prayer groups of no more than about twelve people who meet for prayer, fellowship, and mutual support outside the Mass. This is the way it is supposed to work; and it is often done, in Protestant congregations. This is the way to heaven. This is the biggest unit that can reasonably be held against the general social evil, although there is no guarantee even here. Individually, we should seek groups of about that size.