The centenary year of the Legion of Mary has made many Irish people sit up and take notice of the fact that the lay organisation provided some of the most astounding successes of the Irish church in the Twentieth Century.
Amassing tens of millions of members, providing care and spiritual support for millions more, the organisations trumps the falsified image of the Irish church as an insular and stagnant entity.
In China and North Korea, hundreds of thousands of members were either harassed, imprisoned or even killed for their faith by the Communist authorities. Irish priest Fr. Aedan McGrath was brutally treated by the Communists. Terrified of his influence over the Chinese Church that they wished to crush, the Communists declared that Legion founder Frank Duff was the ‘reactionary guardian of the interests of the ruling class’. McGrath was jailed for almost three years, enduring horrific treatment in the meantime.
Another famous Legionary in China was a native, Cardinal Ignatius Kung.
Ordained in 1930, Kung became a bishop in 1949. As bishop, he took over the mantel of promoting the Legion of Mary after Nuncio Antonio Ribero was expelled and prevented from continuing his work there. Kung realised that the Legion was necessary in order to promote an asymmetric ecclesiastical structure to compete with a large scale Communist takeover that would obliterate any visible Catholic worship. To make matters more complicated, the Communists setup the counterfeit ‘Patriotic Church’.
Kung resisted the establishment of this fake church and was arrested for it in 1955. Upon arrest he defiantly exclaimed:
Long live Christ the King, Long Live the Pope
Interned for five years, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1960.
Kung and McGrath had known each other in China and in fact Kung was very encouraging towards McGrath’s work both before and after the Irishman had come to Shanghai. The Legion grew rapidly, with the alarmed Communists declaring that Legionaries were:
running dogs of the U.S. imperialists under the cloak of religion, and an anti-revolutionary, subversive organization
Many Legionaries, including Shanghai Legion President Francis TS Shen, were executed by the Communists. Others faced decades of hard labour. The Communists had smelled the power of the Legion, they had seen Cardinal Kung rally 3,000 young men to their cathedral with 1,000 women praying the Rosary. The demonic spirit that infests the Communist mentality sensed the holiness of Kung and of the wider Legion and sought to remove it.
In 1957, Fulton Sheen wrote of Kung:
The West has its Mindszenty, but the East has its Kung. God is glorified in His saints
In 1979, Pope John Paul II had him declared a Cardinal in secret. In 1991, he was able to receive his red hat in person after his eventual release, following 30 years of imprisonment.
His bravery, fortitude and faith in the face of the Communist machine were exemplary of the Legion’s mission and its quiet hope in Our Lady’s assistance with our prayers to Our Lord.
They are a reminder that the Irish church’s history in the Twentieth Century is much deeper than the shallow caricatures of self loathing Irish journalists who seek to rewrite the past in order to assuage their own guilt about their secular country’s less than admirable present.