The reading from the handbook today was concerned with the Legion's ability to be a source of unity and re-cohesion in society. As often happens in every written work, I think some of the most important things about the reading were things that were not explicitly said, but that are, nevertheless, necessary as a support to the arguments made. First of all, the idea that the Legion of Mary can be the source of re-cohesion in society at large is really saying that the members of the Legion are capable of bringing that eventuality about. It goes without saying that the member would have to be of a certain sort in order for the result to be achieved. The selection that we had today hints at the sort of members, who would be effective in creating a new cohesion based on faith. They would have to be members of the Legion, who possess or are striving to possess "heroic virtue."
What the Church mean when using the term "heroic virtue" when describing her saints? The Pope of Rome, Benedict XIV, basing his definition on the Fathers of the Church, defined heroic virtue in these terms: "In order to be heroic a Christian virtue must enable its owner to perform virtuous actions with uncommon promptitude, ease, and pleasure, from supernatural motives and without human reasoning, with self-abnegation and full control over his natural inclinations." What this means in practical terms is that the practice of the virtues (the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues) have to be become second nature. The person with heroic virtue acts according to virtue as his or her inclination without deliberation.
In this respect, St. Maximus the Confessor has some good insights. We think of deliberation as being part and parcel of the human exercise of free will. But, according to Maximus, deliberation (gnome, in Greek) is only the evidence of the vacillating nature of the fallen will. While it is true that the will seeks good and, in fact, seeks it infallibly, the will of the ordinary person has to deliberate between goods. The human will is not terribly good at discerning greater and lesser goods, and it often gets caught in vacillation between competing goods. This, for Maximus, is the state of having a "gnomic" will. In his estimation, gnome is a feature of the will that has been added through our fall into sin. The natural human will (which is the only human will that Christ possessed) was without deliberation. It simply discerned the highest good in every circumstance. Thus, a person with heroic virtue has, to one extent or another, recovered the freedom of the natural human will.
A person of heroic virtue is, then, naturally inclined to virtuous acts, rather than those led by the passions. Further, he or she does virtuous actions for supernatural motives, rather than earthly ones. In other words, he or she performs his or her actions for God and only for God. Specifically, such a person is animated by charity, the pure love of God and love for everything else in God.
The saints (those who possess heroic virtue) sometimes cause division, just as the Lord Jesus Himself caused division in a certain sense. It was He Himself, Who told His disciples He did not come to bring peace on earth. No, rather, He said, "From now on a man's enemies will be those of his own household." Nevertheless, in the main, saints bring unity and cohesion based on faith. Have you ever noticed that saints tend to occur in clusters, rather than all alone? Basil the Elder and his wife Aemilia (along with his mother, Macrina the Elder) raised a whole family of saints: Basil the Great, Peter of Sebaste, Macrina the Younger and the baby Gregory of Nyssa. Basil the Great also had his best friend, St. Gregory of Nazianzen. Or, another example, the saintly bishop of Mongrovejo in Peru, Toribio, had enormous influence over his niece, Bl. Maria Oliva de Oliva, his grandniece, St. Rose of Lima and the mulatto slave boy raised in their household, St. Martin de Porres. Some of the clusters are smaller, but still identifiable as clusters; for example, St. Isidore and his wife Bl. Maria de la Cabeza and St. John of Damascus and his adoptive brother St. Cosmas of Maiuma. We can very well ask ourselves, "just how big are these clusters actually?" After all, in the reckonings above, we are counting only canonized saints or those determined to be saints by the Church before the process of canonization.
In summation, the members of the Legion of Mary will only function as sources of the kind of unity and re-cohesion that we read about in the handbook if they possess heroic virtue or strive to possess it with earnest and duriment effort. In order to become such persons, we have to continually exercise our wills to push ourselves beyond our comfort zones, embrace pain dignified by faith, and do what we explicitly don't want to do for the love of God, only for God.
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