Legalism

I think this expresses what I often imperfectly try to get across to people (even Catholics!) about Catholicism, and one of the things that attracted me to it:

In Principles for a Catholic Morality Timothy O'Connell is speaking on the characteristics of Old Testament law:

"All this leads to a last characteristic of Old Testament law: It generated a strangely beautiful and compelling sort of legalism. This term, reserved as it usually is for empty and fear-motivated ritualism, is generally conceived negatively.... But we ought to acknowledge nonetheless that a different sort of legalism exists. There is a posture that primarily evaluates actions not in terms of their objective and immediate significance, but rather in terms of their potential as symbols of love, that sees behavior less as a tool for the accomplishment of tasks and more as a word speaking the language of love. For one who adopts this posture, even the most apparently empty of actions is full of devotional potential. Such a person is a legalist, but a legalist of a tremendously rich, poetic, and saintly sort. For the best of the Jewish tradition, this is precisely the significance that the law always had."