Externals vs. internals

Catholic Light: A fatal flaw in Legionary formation

An exLC writes:

Hey Pete, hope you are well.
I want to comment personally with you on your comment [over at Ladon Cody's ExLC blog] that "Holiness comes from the inside. God alone knows who is holy and who is not. Externals can be deceiving. For instance, how many of us thought at one time that Maciel was holy?"

When I was still in the Legion, I commented with [John Doe], who was still in, and he told me that he commented with [another Legionary] back then and they agreed. The point is that Legion formation essentially was set up to work from the outside in. It made use of externals to build what they called the charitable or priestly heart. The idea was to practice external things: kneeling for meditation, opening doors for others, making little sacrifices at meals and tons and tons of other things, with the aim of internalizing them. The idea was not that those things would come from the heart, but that they would change the heart through simply doing them.

So many actions of every day and every moment were like magic formulas to be recited or practiced and, voila, a charitable heart! A holy priest! It is a huge internal flaw of formation in the Legion of Christ. A fatal flaw.

There is no recovering from something like this. There is nothing to save in LC formation because it is backwards.

Unfortunately, there is a whole sector of people in the Church who fixate on this type of externalization and are caught up in it, and call it holiness. It is only worth something if it does come from the heart, and then, if it produces no real fruit, it is still just a noisy gong, a clashing cymbal.

Can external acts be identified with charity, or can one infer that someone has the virtue of charity because they follow these rules setting forth certain actions? No. But can the following of such rules lead to the internalization of charity? What can be internalized is the [rational] order that these rules put forward. This is not true only of life in a religious community, it is true of life in any community, including the family. Being polite and external acts of consideration does not mean that someone has a loving, kind, or respectful heart, but if these acts are motivated by charity, then they will shape how charity is manifest and help increase charity. (Charity directs all acts ordered towards human goods to the ultimate good, God, and informs the other virtues.) It is not that the Legionaries were being formed "backwards" since one can assume that many of the seminarians were sincerely motivated by a zealous charity; rather, it is whether their understanding of charity was malformed in the first place by the Legionaries. (As shown by the LCs' private vow, wrongful obedience, and how what they deem to be "murmuring" is to be stifled, in the name of charity.)