Saturday, August 20, 2011
Frank Duff: A Life Story Finola Kennedy Continuum, £14.99
ONE of the difficulties today facing any reviewer tasked with assessing the role, status and contribution of anyone in Irish public life since independence is that the contagion of the present inevitably seeps backwards. One effect of this is that a judgement made about a person even as recently as 10 years ago might well take on a toxic tinge in 2011.
The scandal of the Magdalene laundries, along with that of paedophile priests, is already having this kind of deleterious retrospect effect. We find ourselves asking not just what higher ecclesiastics were up to but also what were senior politicians and civil servants doing, or not doing. And then there were lots of other prominent public figures.
Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, falls into this latter category. He was born in Dublin on June 7, 1889, into an Ireland that was part of Queen Victoria’s United Kingdom, and into a Catholic Church ruled by Pope Leo XIII. Duff died in Dublin on the November 7, 1980 at the age of 91. He was born just before the fall of Parnell, and when he died Charles Haughey was taoiseach. So the thread of Duff’s long life was, as the author reminds us, “interwoven with the history of modern Ireland”. But how do we unpick that thread? And through which prism do we view him, his role and contribution? And what of the Legion’s legacy?
Founded in 1925, it became, in Ms Kennedy’s apt description, “a home-grown multinational” which today has an estimated four million active adult members, with 10 million auxiliary members in more than 170 countries and a presence in almost every diocese of the Catholic Church.
In its handbook, the Legion is described as an organisation of lay Catholics “at the disposal of the bishop of the diocese and the parish priest for any and every form of social service and Catholic action which these authorities may deem suitable for legionaries and useful for the welfare of the Church”.
I had one such handbook back in the 1960s when I was a member of the Legion for a short period. That ended when it was discovered that an interest in the piano was taking precedence over any prescribed Catholic action on my part.
For someone who, primarily through the Legion, had a distinct influence on the evolution of modern Irish society, Duff is a strangely neglected figure, especially by historians. The author grapples with this anomaly. “Duff’s neglect by the historians may hinge on the fact that he was a layman at a time when the historical role assigned to the laity was ‘to pray, to pay and to obey’.”
She advances two other reasons why Duff was “blotted out” of the record (a) “he was a marginal figure for decades as far as the Church authorities in Dublin were concerned”, and (b) “many historians viewed the Church predominantly in terms of bishops, priests, nuns and brothers”.
His difficulties with the redoubtable John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin from 1940 to 1972, have been chronicled elsewhere. The imperious McQuaid would brook no challenges to his authority, and certainly not from a layman. He did Duff no favours.
The latter, to his credit, tried to break the mould in two senses. He championed the apostolate of the laity at a time when McQuaid and his episcopal cohorts treated the laity as a herd of meek sheep, and he saw that one of the great weaknesses of Irish Catholicism was that it was understood and practised as “an individualistic religion”.
His efforts on both fronts yielded only very limited success. To his lasting credit, though, his was “one of the few contemporaneous voices critical of industrial schools”.
The dominance of a clerical Church, and the identification of the Catholic Church with the clergy was not alone an Irish phenomenon. It was widespread in the centuries prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Given the subsequent neglect of the documents and insights of that Council, not least here in Ireland, it is a moot point if we have moved very far at all from a clerical church to what Robert Kaiser (who covered Vatican II with distinction for Time magazine) recently called a “people’s church”.
Thirty-one years on from Duff’s death, Catholicism is still “not being practised sufficiently as a social religion”. In one of the last articles he wrote before his death earlier this year, former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald bemoaned the failure to develop in this country a vibrant civic morality. Given the control the Church exercised over education, and the fact that the elite of politics, business, banking, accountancy and the law were mainly the products of posh Catholic schools, this failure may yet be seen as a far more damaging blow to the Church’s credibility than even the paedophile scandal.
If we have a seriously fractured culture in this country — and the present frightening crisis in which we are enmeshed surely leaves no serious doubt about this (especially when you add in the evidence from the various tribunals of inquiry) — then the Legion and its founder cannot be divorced from this. The more you hype the role and contribution of Frank Duff, the more searching the questions that remain to be asked.
We may fairly conclude that the raison d’etre of Duff’s life was the creation of a moral community founded on Christian principles. However, the real source of these principles is Jesus Christ and his life and witness recorded in the New Testament — not Mary.
The danger of an excessive preoccupation with and devotion to Mary — Mariolatry — risks shifting the focus away from the true fountainhead of Christianity. The Protestant reformers of the 16th century were (rightly) hostile to the glorification of Mary that had become so much a part of the Roman Catholic tradition.
The organisation that Duff (who was a civil servant) founded might have been a far more effective presence in Irish life if, like the proponents of liberation theology in South America, it had clearly recognised the socio-political dimensions and implications of the gospels. While one must not underestimate the commitment, work and witness of individual legionaries, the overall impact of the Legion was marginal.
The moral community that Duff envisaged never came to pass. The Legion was applying Band-Aids in a period when radical surgery was needed to rescue the body politic from the fetid morass poisoning it. All that said, this is a very fine biography and Duff has been fortunate in having such a sympathetic yet fair and meticulous biographer as Finola Kennedy, who was a lecturer in UCD and the Institute of Public Administration, and also a member of the 1995 Review Group on the Constitution and the Commission on the Status of Women.
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