What are we to make of World Cup Soccer fans? They are legion, are they not? Indeed, they constitute a spectacle as they celebrate futbol, the beautiful game, at its highest level. Now and then I suspect they are cheering for themselves as much as for their teams. Wrapped in flags, painted in every color, adorned with helmets and horns, oh my!

And let it be said, as well, that like political demonstrators, the super-charged fans are mostly peaceful. Except when they are not. In, yes, London police contended with rioters after France’s World Cup quarter-final defeat of Morocco. Meanwhile in Paris stringent security had prevented violence. Best to plan ahead!

Here in Southern California, though, there was nary a problem with the 70,000 fans filling Inglewood’s SoCal Stadium for every World Cup match. Good vibes won out. Not so down the freeway in upscale Newport Beach. The July Fourth weekend featured over 400 arrests. Police reported a viral “TikTok takeover.” Rowdy revelers tossed fireworks into crowds, indulged in vandalism, and engaged in frenzied fisticuffs. One local noted that “Newport has been branded as the place to go and go crazy” (Los Angeles Times A1, July 10, 2026).

Crazed crowds, to be sure, long pre-date TikTok. The gladiatorial games of Nero’s Rome led Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) to grim reflections. In his Letter VII, replying to a student who had asked what is most important to avoid, we read “My answer is this: a mass crowd,” and Seneca cited his own experience. “I never come back home with quite the same moral character I went out with.” He gives an example: a lunch hour “show” at the Coliseum. “In the morning men are thrown to lions,” but then it is “murder pure and simple.” The gladiators fight without helmets or shields, and the “spectators insist that each on killing his man shall be thrown against another to be killed in turn.” Seneca further cautions his student that “the larger the size of the crowd we mingle with, the greater the danger.”

However secular our own times, popular piety rather than staged entertainment gives rise to today’s greatest crowds. Iran’s volatile Islamic nationalism led millions of people to join, over several days, in the funeral rites of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader whom Donald Trump had assassinated. Not surprisingly, violence begets violence. These rites have occasioned calls for a revenge assassination.

And what of Roman Catholics? Our better angels, thankfully, were watching over the largest of papal crowds. On January 18, 2015, well over six million people in Manila joined Pope Francis for Mass on the Feast of Santo Niño. Perhaps, moreover, whole choirs of angels are present at the Hindu Kumbh Mela pilgrimages in India where as many as 30 million people gather for a single event. Even though they do not spin out in violence, we might well doubt the lasting effect these extravagant occasions have on the huge crowds who attend them.

Perspective becomes critical. In his “The Individuality of the Soul” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, IV, 81-83), John Henry Newman asks us to “survey some populous town” where “crowds are pouring through the streets; some on foot, some in carriages; while the shops are full, and the houses too, could we see into them. Every part of it is full of life.” Nonetheless, he continues, “every being in that great concourse is his own center,” and “no one outside of him can really touch him, can touch his soul, his immortality; he must live with himself forever.” Elsewhere in the same collection Newman urges that “If we be in a crowd, still be we as hermits in the wilderness.”

Had he chosen to do so, Newman could have enlisted Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471) in support of such advice. In his Imitation of Christ, Thomas cites an earlier writer (could it have been Seneca?) who confesses that “As often as I have been among men, I have returned less a man.” To this he adds that “Anyone, then, who aims to live the inner and spiritual life must go apart, with Jesus, from the crowd.”

There is, though, a paradox in such counsel. On the one hand, we are called to evangelize. Because so many before us have done so, we are now, far more than when the Apostle Paul wrote, “surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). But on the other hand, each of us, as his own center, must be open to God’s amazing grace.

Our Savior knew as much. At the miracle of loaves and fishes he fed 5,000 men, in addition to the many women and children who were with them. He well knew that the crowd wanted a king. But how precious few of their number would be with him at the Crucifixion. And what about us, gentle reader: Where do we stand? In the words of Colossians 1:24, are we willing to join in “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”?