Ask an Irish person what they know about Twentieth Century Catholicism within the country and very little of it is positive.
That is the power of a media that is addicted to cursing the faith and blaming it for every ill currently plaguing the nation, even after three or four decades of obvious secular power.
By the end of the Twenty First Century, one can envision much of that negativity dissipating to make way for a more appreciative awe for the achievements of great individuals such as Frank Duff, Alphonsus Lambe and Edel Quinn. Those stalwarts of the Legion of Mary are not alone, there were also the many missionaries from the Columbans and other orders who exhibited the same bravery and faith that inhibited the soul and actions of the great saint from which they derive their name.
Starting from humble beginnings in Dublin, the Legion of Mary grew to encompass presidiums in China, South America and Africa, surviving and even thriving amongst poverty, tyranny and violence.
Frank Duff was a civil servant who had a remarkable perception of theology and of its practical implications within the world. He had worked for Michael Collins and later for WT Cosgrave during the early years of the state. The Legion of Mary may have an image of being non confrontational, but when it came to proclaiming the gospel, Duff’s zeal for apostolic work was anything but. Fr. Thomas O’Flynn C.M. wrote in his book Frank Duff As I Knew Him:
He had unflinching honesty in asserting what he believed to be the truth. Sometimes at the Pauline Circle, the ecumenical group run by the Legion, I would wince at the fortrightness with which he put forward the teaching of the church to our separated brethren. But even if they did not always agree with him they respected him for his honesty.
He was a fighter, never afraid to defend his corner when the interests of the faith or the Legion were at stake. This courage was part of the psychological gear necessary for his task. When he was launching the new movement in the lay apostolate that later became known as the Legion of Mary he had encountered opposition: sometimes from people in high places. A pioneer in any walk of life needs courage. Frank Duff had it in plenty.
Duff was largely overlooked by the hierarchy in Ireland and one can only wonder how different the history of Twentieth Century Catholicism in Ireland would have been had he been listened to.
In a talk published on the Iona Institute website, Duff’s biographer Finola Kennedy wrote of how Duff broke the norms of secular culture in trying to help unmarried mothers to gain stability in their lives, housing them in his hostel The Regina Coeli. She wrote:
Duff’s special sympathy for unmarried mothers was at odds with the mores of the time when the consequences of an extra-marital birth were disastrous, rendering both mother and child social outcasts. He was probably close to the view of the writer George Moore who in his powerful novel, Esther Waters written at the end of the nineteenth century, tells the story of a mother’s fight for the life of her illegitimate son. Moore wrote, ‘Hers is a heroic adventure if one considers it – a mother’s fight for the life of her child against all the forces that civilisation arrays against the lowly and the illegitimate’.
Anyone who has ever visited Frank Duff’s house in Dublin will notice that in his living room, one finds copies of National Geographic, travel books and encyclopedias concerning every part of the globe and various dictionaries for other languages. The inception of the Legion coincided with the birth of international travel through airplane and also the missions of Irish priests, particularly the Columbans, to the Far East and elsewhere.
One of the most famous examples of these was Fr. Aedan McGrath SSC.
In his book Navan to China, McGrath tells the story of Chinese Legionaries who exhibited profound faith as he had witnessed on countless occasions since his first arrival there in 1930. One of the most striking of these was one where he says:
Under the most trying of circumstances, the Legionaries behaved splendidly in every way. On one occasion a drunken Army Official, who was suspicious of the Praesidia meetings, wildly broke into a junior meeting when the young girls were reciting the Rosary. As he strode into the room, swearing vengeance on all and sundry, not one little head turned: the Legionaries continued their prayers uninterrupted under the leadership of the young girl President! As he surveyed the scene, the officer’s face changed completely, he removed his cap, bowed his head reverently and quietly left the room - conquered by a group of little Legionaries praying to the Mother of God!'
How proud I was of the behaviour and spirit of my Legionaries both on this occasion and at other times when bombs and shells were dropping thickly all around the Mission.
McGrath also told of how in 1946, Pope Pius XII had sent word to the Chinese church to follow the model of the Legion of Mary so as to reach millions of Chinese people with the Good News. Pius XII was not naive however and told them:
You are going to be expelled sometime and in the meantime it is vital that you build up a framework which will caretake the Church in your absence, and that instrument lies ready for you in the Legion.
The Chinese bishops became familiar with the Legion handbook as a means of educating themselves with this new tool. The Chinese Communist Party were completely terrified of the Legion of Mary, it put women into positions of authority, it had no clear centralised structure and it seemed to be spreading like wildfire. Most terrifyingly, it carried with it the name of ‘Legion’ and other Roman inspired paraphernalia.
They tried to paint the Legion as a tool of Imperialism in order to deter Chinese people from joining it.
McGrath writes:
The legion was charged with being ‘reactionary’ at several ‘accusation meetings’ convened by the city authorities. The accusations were sustained, but the ‘reasoning’ at these mass meetings followed the line that ‘foreign priests’ were influential in organising the various groups of Legionaries and since foreigners were imperialists, the Legion was therefore a tool of Imperialism.
At this point in time, the Legion had reached 90 dioceses in China. Such was the disdain towards their success, that the Chinese Communist Party referred to Frank Duff as ‘Ireland’s greatest imperialist’.
Fr. McGrath ended up being imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese Communist Party for 32 months in 1951. In his recollection of his interrogations, he talks about how the Chinese police held one meeting in a church and demanded to know about what the Legion meant by ‘conquering the world’.
The Legion grew rapidly also in Hong Kong, where it was reported that 74 presidia were in operation in 1954.
One of the core motivations for Duff to found and build the Legion of Mary was St. Louis Mary de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary.
The Legion has three causes for canonisation, one of which was Alphonsus Lambe, who recognised the importance of De Montfort’s book when he travelled to Argentina. In her book Envoy Extraordinaire, Hilde Firtel writes:
Alfie breached a very thorny subject, namely the sentimental and unenlightened devotion to Our Lady that is occasionally found in Latin America. In Europe one hears criticism that some people have saved nothing of devotion to Catholicism save devotion to Our Lady. But this fact which is taken as true is taken as an excuse to deprecate devotion to Our Lady. This is to err in the opposite extreme.
Alfie proposed the remedy as acquainting the faithful with the ‘True Devotion’ of Saint Louis Marie De Montfort. This would give them a true picture of Our Lady’s role in God’s plan of salvation and would gradually rectify their ideas.
The centrality of De Montfort and the deep Marian spirituality of the Legion handbook are core aspects, which transmit profound theological truths to even the lay person.
Duff met a number of popes, but was largely unappreciated in his home country. Perhaps it was because of the uncomfortably prescience with which he could perceive the future for Ireland not just in spiritual terms but economic terms also:
Obviously all this constitutes a danger signal for us in Ireland. We have arrived at the point when taxation has become oppressive and We know it is going to get heavier. At what stage will it amount to a taking over of our ,entire lives by the State" Then there will be no more effort; no more initiative. An eminent man of our own times has said that it is impossible for a dishonest people to become a great nation. I would amplify this thought and say that a people which does not give value cannot hope to keep the Faith.
The mere contemplation of such a nest of problems is enough to paralyse. Solution must be attempted in a spirit of pure faith. The crisis is as great as any of the classic ones of the past. So Legionaries of Mary will, quite naturally, turn to her who is the help of Christians, the destroyer of all heresies, the woman of perpetual succour, to whom recourse has never been made unavailingly.
Duff foresaw that Ireland’s poor catechesis would eventually lead the slide towards atheism:
It has always been imagined by us that the Irish people have a unique regard for the Mass. Therefore it is a shock to encounter proofs to the contrary. I have now covered a good deal of the surface of the country and I tell you our experience in regard to daily Mass, which surely is the test of appreciation. The attendance is miserable in proportion. Yet in the smaller places there is nothing doing at that time and the majority could attend. I specify one case where we had a priest with us and offered a week-day Mass to a village which normally has one on Sunday only. Not a single local person turned up for it. Other places would be better but not much better. Does that sort of thing afford justification for our alleged love of the Mass?
Quite evidently that degree of religion is not going to stand up to the adverse influences which are every day thickening and marshalling themselves. Therefore we find ourselves at a crisis point of religion. The thought forces itself upon me: Is it possible that the tragedy of France and so many other countries is going to reproduce itself in Ireland? We are walking on a slippery slope at the moment. That cannot continue. It improves or it deteriorates-usually the latter.
It was not possible to save France. Portugal. Spain. Italy. Holland. all of which have lost the Faith in the main. Acute French observers coming here soon after the Second World War declared that they saw a remarkable likeness between the Ireland of that time and the France of two hundred years previously: the same characteristics and the same weakness. Two hundred years ago would have been the period in which France would have prided itself on being the most Catholic country in the world that is immediately preceding the French Revolution. The Revolution did not create all thy hollowness and the hatred of religion which then appeared. It only revealed what was there. It was like taking off a mask.
Spain and Portugal spread the Faith over great tracts of the world's surface but those supreme services to the Church did not mean that the keeping of the Faith was guaranteed to them in perpetuity. They plunged into the most hideous phase of anti-religion which could exist and set themselves to propagate it over the world. It could not be said that the people in those country is put up any fight worth while against that horror. After a little flurry of resistance they abandoned themselves to the irreligion which their governments decreed. Even though the more violent aspects of atheism have worn off, the percentage of belief and practice there is negligible and it cannot be claimed that things are improving.
Does that likeness of conditions discerned by the French observers suggest that we will in due course slide into what they have become? We would be insane if we just shrugged off that possibility.
The Legion of Mary was an antidote to all of this. In many countries across the world, it has been a successful antidote. In Ireland, there is still time for it to be so.
Legionaries across Ireland can still be found today, visiting hospitals, feeding the homeless and handing out miraculous medals on streets.
Duff may have had a profound impact on the rest of the world, but he had a special place in his heart for Ireland, including Joseph Mary Plunkett’s poem I See His Blood Upon the Rose with accompanying artwork at the back of the Legion of Mary handbook.
He saw that the mission of the Legion in Ireland was similar to that of the St. Columbanus and the apostles before them, to go purify within before going out into a chaotic world:
These poured out from their little Isle into that continental wilderness. They invaded nearly every part of it. They rebuilt the lost Faith, built it better than it was before because this time it depended on conviction and not on State scaffolding. They may be said to have made modern Catholicism. That was the Peregrinatio pro Christo.
They would have viewed their mission in a very different way from that in which the Apostles looked on theirs. Much more was known about the world than in the year 33. Christianity moreover had taken root. It might have been laid waste over most of the world but those monks would have seen that as a mere temporary calamity which must be repaired. Certainly ( the Faith was not suffering in Ireland. It was new there and boiling with fervour. The monks were providentially ready for a supreme adventure of that kind.
100 years on from its foundation, the Legion of Mary still has the potential to show the vision and determination that Duff embodied and that has sustained millions of Legionaries, many in secret in China, North Korea and elsewhere.
On this, Our Lady’s birthday and the Legion’s Centenary, we pray:
God our Father,
You inspired your servant Frank Duff with a profound insight into the mystery of your Church, the Body of Christ, and of the place of Mary the Mother of Jesus in this mystery.
In his immense desire to share this insight with others and in filial dependence on Mary he formed her Legion to be a sign of her maternal love for the world and a means of enlisting all her children in the Church’s evangelizing work.
We thank you Father for the graces conferred on him and for the benefits accruing to the Church from his courageous and shining faith.
With confidence we beg you that through his intercession you grant the petition we lay before you.
We ask too that if it be in accordance with your will, the holiness of his life may be acknowledged by the Church for the glory of your Name, through Christ Our Lord, Amen.
A beautiful piece of writing by Frank Duff.