I received the following email from a former Legionary who had been ordained with the order. I’ve removed the names of individual Legionaries to protect confidentiality:
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.
The writer said: “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.”
This reminds me of the “Program of Life (POL) we would write on our Spiritual Exercises and Renewal retreats. We would write about our root sin and its manifestations. We would choose a virtue to conteract that sin and write out a POL of how we would live this virtue. It included practical things. This would “change our hearts” and make us holy. Our Spiritual Direction was to center on how we were living our POL (or not). Is the Program of Life part of Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola or something the Legionaires added on?
I posted this in Life after RC, and after a little cleanup thought it flowed from this comment:
Fruits come first for the LCs- that is another core value of their ‘holiness.’ This ‘self-focused growth’ as the end-in-view of the operational control is not just at the core of the problem with relationship between LC and RC, but it is at the heart of the day to day problem internal to the Legion itself.
As an order it is the MOST centralized controlled group in the Church today. Territorial Directors are only local figureheads of the all-powerful, and unaccountable General Director. They are not elected in their own territories, but appointed by the GD. All information ascends, all trasparency which total for the members- is virtually nil for the inner circle at the top.
A genuine charism must first give witness, witness to a genuine spirituality that reside deeply in each member- THEN the fruits come. The goal is to give witness. However LCs are not set up to run that way- the goal is to get results and spirituality is instrumentalized for gain.
The goal of a robust spirituality coming from an authentic charism is the interiorization and conviction that gives witness, but for LC it is the total control of the actions of the members in miriad of endless norms regulated through the superior so that witness can be controlled by the organization, not humbly awaited as a genuine fruit of the Spirit.
Every action that is controlled by authority moves one one step away from interiorizing more deeply the virtue and wisdom that is intrinsic to the action- ie. real holiness and spirituality. One begins to live a false holiness vicariously through the superior, rather then from movements of one’s own conscience.
Very interesting comments, anonymous. And, at the core of what you are saying, is the need for personal freedom, isn’t it? We have to have the freedom to choose–both good and evil. If we don’t have the freedom to choose, then even the good we do lacks the ability to be efficacious.
Yes, Lauretta, and here is where I think with Pete’s post, you get the complete picture. It would show why, if the AV goes soft – as all signs indicate it will- the Legion may be headed for an even more damaging meltdown for its members than what was experienced with the MM scandals.
LC’s will have reform, i.e. more freedoms and less control, but it will only create voids in their world that will need to be filled, and with what? There is no spirtuality. Let me repeat there is no healthy spirtuality specific to LC only generic references remain to being centered on Christ. If so much is useless and are condemned to hold on to MM still as founder- you are stuck on sterile. It’s foundation history, the founders life, the world or norms and criteria are all proving in their own lifetimes a mirage, evaporating in the heat of the day. No peace come to one looking for a complete way, a founder’s way. There is good and there is evil, how will they ever be separated enough to bring peace of soul and ideals for the future.
A thought occurred to me as I was pondering all of the many things going on in the Church. Was it Leo XIII who had the dream about Satan having free rein on earth for 100 years?
Could much of what we have been experiencing in the Church be a fruit of that unleashing? I’m thinking of the sex abuse scandal, rejection on Humanae Vitae, spurious apparitions by the dozen, Maciel, liturgical craziness, etc.
Think of all that we have endured in the 20th century. Many of these phenomena have fooled even the Pope, Cardinals, and very learned, respected people in the Church.
That century is over–now it seems that the mopping up process is beginning.
How grateful should we feel that all of us still in the Church and loyal to the Church have made it through this trial. We have been abundantly blessed to have been given the grace to not be pulled away by any of these things–at least not permanently. A time to rejoice even in the midst of all this chaos.
While I agree with much that has been said I think the rejection of Humanae Vitae was a sign of the maturing faith of the people of God. It was not really received by the bishops and certainly not by the clergy of laity.
Are you saying, Kevin, that the people were right in rejecting Humanae Vitae? If you are, I would have to strongly disagree. As someone who has been interested in and studied marriage as well as prepared couples for the Sacrament, it is clear to me that the rejection of Humanae Vitae has done immense harm to marriage and to women. If contraception was so healthy for relationships, we would not have a 50% divorce rate in this country.
Oh dear– dissent = maturity. Yeah. Whatever. It’s really just selfishness cloaked in fancy talk.
We should stick to the topic. :)