Page 78 - 聖母軍團員手冊（英文版，2014年5月-2022年1月更新版）

Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 77

CHAPTER 12 THE EXTERNAL AIMS OF THE LEGION 77
directed towards destroying. So it is imperative that a correct
pattern of peaceful patriotism be provided.
It is this spiritualised service of the community which the
Legion has been urging under the title: True Devotion to the
Nation. Not only is that service to be undertaken out of the
spiritual motive, but it and all the contacts arising from it
must be used to promote the spiritual. Operations which
produced advance but only on the material plane would
falsify the whole idea of True Devotion to the Nation. Bl. John
Henry Newman perfectly expresses that basic idea when he
says that a material advance unaccompanied by a
corresponding moral manifestation is almost too awful to
consider. The correct balance must be preserved.
Look, peoples of the world! If such be the Legion, would it
not seem as if it offers, ready for use, a chivalry with magic in
it to weld all men together in high enterprise for God: in
service far trans cending that legendary warfare of King
Arthur, who — in Tennyson’s beautiful verse — “drew the
knight-erranthood of his realm: and all the realms: together
in that Order of his Table Round: a glorious company, the
flower of men: to serve as model for the mighty world: and be
the fair beginning of a time.”
“Thus the Church, at once a ‘visible organisation and a spiritual
com munity’, travels the same journey as all mankind and shares the
same earthly lot with the world: it is to be a leaven and, as it were,
the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation
into the family of God.
The Council exhorts Christians, as citizens of both cities, to
perform their duties faithfully in the spirit of the Gospel. It is a
mistake to think that, because we have here no lasting city, but seek
the city which is to come, we are entitled to shirk our earthly
responsibilities; this is to forget that by our faith we are bound all the
more to fulfil these responsibilities according to the vocation of each
one.” (GS 40, 43)
“A practical answer to this need and obligation underlined in the
Council Decree is found in the legionary movement begun in 1960
and known as True Devotion to the Nation. The measure of success
already secured points towards vast possibilities of development. But
let us emphasise that what the Legion has to offer to the temporal
order is not exceptional knowledge or expertise, not outstanding
skills, not even great numbers of workers,—but the spiritual
dynamism which has made it a world force and which can be
harnessed to uplift any section of the People of God who have the
insight and good sense to employ it. But the initiative must come