The Legion of Mary is based on devotion to Mary;
the Mother of God.
They pray the Mysteries of the Rosary with the old and
the sick,
it's members being totally ordinary people
whose dedication to Our Lady and to praying the Rosary
is the motivating force; teaching others how to pray the
Rosary too, meditation on the life of Jesus,
because we go to Jesus through His Mother.
It is all for the glory of God and His Church.
The Legion of Mary is a lay apostolate of the Catholic
Church, founded by Frank Duff in Dublin, Ireland in 1921,
and it it spread from there to all corners of the earth.
At the time, the social conditions in Ireland were dire for
large sections of society, The Legion's first occupation and
project was homelessness and prostitution, the latter mostly
caused by poverty.
Duff defied the Church's archbishop who was heavily
influenced by the Church's infiltration of Jansenism;
the archbishop had great hostility towards these women,
but Duff, on the contrary; reached out to them like a true
Christian, he established a safe house for them, followed by a
hostel for homeless men.
These hostels are still up and running to this day, saving the
government a lot of money, because they get no state funding.
In The Regina Coeli hostel for homeless women and unmarried
mothers Frank Duff wanted the mothers to keep their babies, and
to get help and support to learn how to raise their children.
This did not conform to the unwritten (and maybe even written)
moral rules of civil society of this era, which stigmatized
unmarried mothers to such an extent that their babies were taken
away from them in order to "save them from the stigma of growing
up with an unmarried mother".
He had a lot of opposition from the Archbishop , who tried to censor
him due to him working at the rehabilitation of former prostitutes
but he also had some support from within the Church.
Most of all, Frank Duff established the fundamental principle in
The Legion of Mary, that as Catholics, we are all called to be saints,
that our own sanctification is fundamental, it comes before anything
else.
At the time, living conditions were hard for many, education was
only for some, and the general awareness was low, people
were doing the best they could.
In total contrast to this immense work of Frank Duff's Christian
charity, there was at this time in Ireland State owned and state
managed institutions for unmarried mothers, they hired religious
Sisters to do the daily running of them, and no doubt they were not
joyous places to be, abuse and rough treatment occurred there, as it
occurred everywhere, all kinds of abuse was rampant at the time,
(most of all within the walls of family homes),
in general; it was tough.
The Sisters carried out the work of the State, a State which deemed
the unmarried mothers to be nothing more than whores, unworthy of
even keeping their babies, and their babies were taken from them
and sold to wealthy families, often American ones.
The entire society did this to the unmarried mothers; first they had
been disowned and thrown out by their own families; their own parents;
then the state continued to degrade them.
But when Irish society started to change, everything was the fault of
the Catholic Church and nobody else.
The brainwashing through the media; RTE, and newspapers, has been
going on for a long time, most Irish people do not reflect too much on it,
they believe the narrative presented to them.
To the extent that the horrendous act of killing one's child in abortion
has been normalised, our sensibilities has been severely blunted, and
people follow the thread; Catholic Church; bad bad bad...
And now the State demands of The Legion of Mary, who to this very
day still runs 2 hostels in Dublin, totally independently with no state
funding, (saving the state of an enormous amount of money),
26 million euro for the State's redress scheme to the victims of the mother
and baby homes.
There is no coherent reason or explanation given by the government for
this, only that they feel that since the Legion of Mary promulgates and
practices Catholicism, it is "guilty by association", because anything
Catholic is synonymous with evil in their opinion.
When I came to Ireland in the 1980s, many Irish people kept saying
that Ireland was "backward", they thought so because the majority
went to Mass.
No Ireland was not "backward" then, Ireland was poor and life was hard,
but Ireland is backward now.
