BIOGRAPHY: Frank Duff: A Life Story By Finola Kennedy. Continuum, 288pp. £12.99
‘THE
OBJECT OF the Legion of Mary is the glory of God through the holiness
of its members developed by prayer and active co-operation, under
ecclesiastical guidance, in Mary’s and the Church’s work of crushing the
head of the serpent and advancing the reign of Christ.”
Thus the first
sentence, under the heading of “Objects”, in
The Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary , revised in 2005.
Founded in 1921, today the Legion has more than four million active
members and 10 million auxiliary members in almost 200 countries.
Its
founder, Frank Duff, was brought up in a solidly upper-middle-class
family; his father was a civil servant, and he and his siblings became
civil servants and doctors. His father’s ill health and early retirement
denied Duff, the eldest son, a university education, and in 1908 he
entered the Civil Service, where he worked on the Land Acts that were
transforming Irish society. He described them as “a revolution
infinitely more complex than the conquest of England by the Normans or
Ireland by the Danes”.
He later had substantial input into the 1923 Land
Act, and, although disappointed in his hopes of promotion, he remained
in the Civil Service for 26 years.
He became involved with the
Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Pioneer Total Abstinence
Association of the Sacred Heart through work contacts, and out of these
lay Catholic organisations developed the Legion of Mary, originally
focused on visiting the sick and poor, and encouraging devotion to the
Virgin Mary.
It expanded its interests and its membership rapidly, and
over time it included in its numbers many influential people in Irish
society, including senior civil servants, trade unionists, politicians,
lawyers and doctors.
Duff opposed industrial schools (he spoke of
the NSPCC “shovelling children into industrial schools”); wanted and
arranged for unmarried mothers to keep their children (the Regina Coeli
Hostel, which he established in 1930, was dedicated to this purpose);
believed homeless men and women deserved accommodation (the Morning Star
Hostel, which he established in 1927, was dedicated to this purpose);
believed women to be as capable of leadership as men (many of the
officerships in the Legion, both in Ireland and worldwide, were held by
women); and was largely ecumenical in his approach to other religions
(he established a number of cross-religious organisations in the 1940s).
In all of these respects, he was well ahead of his time.
This new biography of Duff by Finola Kennedy, author of the hugely influential and informative
Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland (2001), follows in
the footsteps of a small number of other biographies, all by members of
the Legion.
Kennedy tells us scrupulously in her introduction that she
herself is a member of the Legion, and was Duff’s god-daughter. She
concludes her acknowledgments with the Legion slogan,
“Totus Tuus ” (“Totally Yours”), the beginning of a favourite
Legion prayer.
We are alerted to the fact that what we will be reading
is an insider’s view of both Duff and the Legion.
Writers in
Kennedy’s position have to try to interrogate the intellectual and
social framework that underpins the Church, a framework that has no
meaning for many Irish people and has had dreadful consequences for
some.
Although the book is thoroughly researched and well written,
Kennedy’s assumption that readers will share her unquestioning
acceptance of Catholic norms is ill founded and severely limits the
potential analytical scope of a study that covers most of the 20th
century, a period of enormous change in the Church and in Irish society.
She
does not examine or challenge the Irish culture of extreme deference to
clerical authority, which poisoned large sections of Irish society by
preventing robust questioning of fundamental issues affecting their
lives, and which imploded only with the growth of the women’s movement
and the recent sex scandals involving clergy.
It is possible to describe
and admire Frank Duff’s idealism, practical efficacy and achievements
without accepting that his total subservience to the Irish clerical
philosophical framework, which emphasised obedience and distrusted lay
initiatives, was justified. It should also be explicitly acknowledged
that the Legion of Mary, while engaged in many useful social
initiatives, had proselytism as one of its main objectives.
The
attitude to the Legion of the Dublin diocesan hierarchy, first in the
person of Edward Byrne, archbishop of Dublin from 1921 to 1940, and
later John Charles McQuaid, his successor, is typical of the arrogance,
hauteur and often fabulous stupidity demonstrated by some members of the
hierarchy, not just in the 1920s and 1930s but, in some cases, to this
day.
One would have thought that a lay Catholic organisation with a
mission to help the poor and a special devotion to the Virgin would have
enlisted the support and formal endorsement of its local prelates
almost from the moment of its inception.
Instead, Duff’s repeated
requests for endorsement of the organisation’s constitution and handbook
met with refusals even to meet him, when there was any response at all.
The pope endorsed the Legion of Mary two years before the local
archbishop condescended to do so.
Duff is probably best known to
Dublin people as the man who led the campaign to clear the Monto –
Montgomery Street – area of the city of brothels, and to provide
accommodation and religious instruction to the prostitutes who worked
there.
The chapter in the book dealing with the argument between Duff
and McQuaid about McQuaid’s censorship of Duff’s writings about the
Monto is riveting in its exposure of McQuaid’s adamantine belief in the
importance of his own power and authority, and his contempt for
theologically untrained lay people.
Unfortunately, Duff accepted
McQuaid’s strictures in a spirit of Catholic “obedience”, his unvarying
response to critical or obstructive interventions by the hierarchy. It
is a pity Kennedy did not quote more from the relevant correspondence,
the better to remind us of the levels of superiority assumed by McQuaid
right through his episcopate, ending with his (mistaken) assurance to
his congregation that Vatican II would entail “no change in the
tranquillity of your Christian lives”.
Kennedy tells us that the
Legion archive holds 33,000 letters written by Duff in his lifetime,
which have been digitised. She uses them liberally throughout the book,
and conveys a strong sense of Duff’s personality: determined, creative,
obstinate, passionate about his religion and its promotion,
compassionate, organisationally gifted.
But we see no dark side, except
sadness when he is discouraged or exhausted. Although we are told he had
a temper, there is no hint of it in the quoted letters. It would be
interesting to see how other researchers might handle this voluminous
correspondence.
This biography is an affectionate tribute to a
friend and hero of the author, and a well-researched, if uncritical,
piece of work about an interesting man who had far-reaching ideas and
effects on Irish society.
It is to be hoped that the wonderful Legion
archive, used extensively and productively in the book, is available to
other scholars who may wish to explore the man and the organisation.
Catriona
Crowe is head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland
and chairperson of the SAOL Project, a community-based programme for
women in treatment for drug addiction in Dublin’s north inner city