Servant of God, Frank Duff
Born 7 June 1889 – Died 7 November 1980
Founded the Legion of Mary
On 7 September 1921
Frank Duff’s Message
There are a couple of basic questions that we need to ask about Frank Duff and the process for the Cause of his beatification.
Why do we want Frank Duff beatified?
What he stood for is what is important.
One pivotal purpose in the beatification of a man or woman is to make their message heard loudly throughout the Church. We might get some idea why it is good to promote the beatification of men and women from the words of Frank Duff himself.
He writes:
“We must read the lives of the saints. God’s purpose in bringing about the canonization of saints was to provide a headline which would draw us on to goodness and heroism. Saints are the doctrines and practices of holiness made visible. If we frequent their company, we will soon imitate their qualities.”
Evangelization is surely making the teaching of the Gospel and the Christian way of life visible and accessible to as many people as possible.
What are the main elements in his message and spirituality?
Let me stress just one or two points in his message. The first published work of Frank Duff was the pamphlet entitled “Can We Be Saints?” His answer was a resounding Yes.
Everyone, without exception, is made and called to be a saint and the means are readily accessible to all in the everyday living of the Catholic life.
That is their very first job – to try to be a saint. If we are not really trying to be saints then to that extent we are wasting the gift of our lives. It is no good, he used to say, to ask men and women to be good, you have to ask them to be heroic. He founded the Legion of Mary as a school of sanctity.
For nearly all his life, Frank lived in close, daily contact with the men and women who lived in the hostels he founded. He cared for their material needs and tried to ease the profound pain at the heart of their lives. But above all he wanted each one of them to go to Heaven and so he provided them with access to all the means that the Church offers them. Frank looked up to each individual because he saw Christ in them.
I knew Mother Teresa reasonably well during my ten years in India and met her often at various places on my travels. Frank Duff had the same regard and love of the poor that she possessed and above all wanted them to live and die in the state of sanctifying grace.
He wanted everyone, to be authentically holy. In short, he believed with all his mind and heart in what the Second Vatican Council referred to as the universal call to holiness.
For Frank the universal call to holiness necessarily includes the universal call to evangelization or mission. There is endless joy in being an instrument, with God’s grace, in bringing even one soul to Heaven. Frank sought to bring all souls to Heaven or at least as many as possible. I think it could be argued that his desire for the salvation of souls was the deepest thrust in his spirituality.
The salvation of souls dominates the life of every saint. Frank found it difficult to imagine how you could save your own soul without seeking to save the souls of others.
The desire to save souls defines also the reason why he founded the Legion of Mary. He adapted the prayer attributed to St. Francis Xavier for the Conversion of the Whole World as follows:
“O Lord all hearts are in Your hands. You can bend as it pleases You the most obdurate and soften the most hardened. Do that honor this day to the blood, merits, wounds, names and inflamed hearts of Your beloved Son and His most Holy Mother by granting the conversion of the whole world. Nothing less, my God, nothing less, because of Mary, their Mother; because of your might and Your mercy.”
Frank Duff was great in the small things, and heroic in doing the commonplace, and his purpose in al things great and small was his immense desire to love God and to be an instrument with and through Mary and the Holy Spirit in the conversion of sinners and the salvation of souls.
Fr. Bede McGregor O.P.
His message is radically rooted in the Gospeland the Tradition of the Church. This is why it is so important.
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Frank’s parents  
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Early Years
Francis Michael Duff was born on 7 June 1889.
He was the eldest of seven, two of whom died as children.
He attended both Belvedere and Blackrock Colleges and was a gifted student. However, due to his father’s premature illness, money was in short supply and a university education was no longer an option.
Frank joined the Civil Service taking first place in the entrance examination. He was assigned to the Department of Finance, devised a system of calculus which was subsequently adopted by the Treasury in London. He was a keen cyclist, played tennis and enjoyed a good social life.
He was affected by the chasm he saw between the society he moved in and the poverty, hunger and squalor he witnessed.
He attended an enclosed retreat and was impressed by what he heard. Accustomed to reading copiously he started reading more spiritual and theological books about God, and the saints.
Besides the physical needs of the people he encountered, Frank saw that many neglected the practice of the faith and needed encouragement. In 1914, in parallel to this work with the St Vincent de Paul Society, Frank commenced his own personal apostolate visiting tenement houses where he received a kindly welcome.
Proselytism was rife in Dublin at the time. SVP member, Joe Gabbett and some women set up an alternative food center for those in need. Frank involved himself in this work.
Frank joined the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart. In 1915 he joined the Third Order of the Carmelites and made the first of 49 pilgrimages to St Patrick’s Island Lough Derg.
In 1916 he wrote a booklet “Can We Be Saints”, his thesis being “in the heart of every right thinking Catholic, God has implanted the desire to become a saint.” That same year the Easter Rising took place and a turbulent period of history followed by the War of Independence in Ireland from 1917 to 1921.
In 1917 he found a second-hand copy of “True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary” by St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, the contents of which he found difficult to come to terms with at first. In 1919 he went to Mount Melleray Cistercian Abbey and read a book entitled “The Knowledge of Mary” by Fr. de Consilio, that opened up a new world for him. It gave him a theological knowledge of Our Lady which was assumed in St Louis de Montfort’s book.
Frank Duff served in several Government departments until 1932 when he retired from the Civil Service to give his complete attention to the Legion of Mary, which, after the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, was expanding worldwide.
First Works of the Legion
The first work of the Legion of Mary was the visitation of the South Union Hospital (now incorporated as part of St James’s Hospital), Dublin, to a section
of the Hospital frequented by few, if any visitors to patients suffering from cancer.
There was at the time in Dublin an area of ill repute known worldwide as Monto, a no-go area for law and order. In large run-down tenement houses resided
many girls who plied the trade of prostitution.
Legionaries decided to make a visit to this area
and despite initial fears were made welcome by those living there. Twenty-three of the thirty-nine girls agreed to give up that way of life after
attending a weekend retreat in the convent of the Sisters if Charity in Baldoyle.
Thanks to the good offices of the then Minister for Local Government, W.T. Cosgrave, a premises was procured in Harcourt Street Dublin, into which the girls moved at the end if the retreat which became known then as Sancta Maria Hostel.
This was followed in 1927 by the Morning Star Hostel for homeless men and by Regina Coeli Hostel in 1928 for mothers and their children and homeless women.
Frank Duff at the Second Vatican Council
In 1965 Frank Duff was invited to the Second Vatican Council and when his presence was announced, the whole assembly of 2500 Bishops broke into spontaneous applause.
Frank Duff had the opportunity to renew several contacts and establish new ones on the Legion’s behalf. While he was in Rome he gave 32 formal talks to different groups of bishops. He also gave a number of interviews to newspaper reporters, wrote several articles and 200 letters.
His greatest experience was his private audience with the Holy Father Pope Paul VI.
His Holiness thanked him for his services to the Church and expressed his appreciation for all that the Legion of Mary had done. Frank Duff assured the Holy Father that the primary ambition of the Legion was to keep in closest union with the Church.
The Council, Frank Duff said, had risen to new heights in regard to Mary in the Church. Referring to the Constitution on the Church “Lumen Gentium” he said “Mary is inseparable from the Catholic Church. You cannot take her out and yet leave the Church intact. It would cease to be the Catholic Church. Her position is primary.” Then he added “In another of its tremendous strokes the Council insists that all apostleship is but an extension of the motherhood of Mary; it is part of her giving of Christ to the world. It follows that nobody can take part in apostleship or persevere in it except with her.”
Cyclist and Photographer
Frank, like most Irish men of his time, used a bicycle to get around. But he also used it to test his own endurance. For instance on Sunday, 31 May 1914, he cycled 155 miles from 8:00 in the morning to 11:20 in the evening. He was then on the eve of his 26th birthday. After his mother’s death in 1951, he almost died himself and took to the road on his bicycle to force air into his lungs. This led him to take up cycling as his preferred holiday option with two major expeditions each year and several minor ones. He came to love the Irish countryside and especially its coastal beauty spots and he would record all worthwhile vistas on his Leica cameras to be revisited on the screen later with audiences small and large. In November 1980, at the age of 90, he planned a cycling weekend which was to take place along the north Dublin coast. His bicycle was ready in the hall downstairs and his packed bag was on the carrier ready for the start next morning. Sadly it was not to be as on the eve of his planned departure, he died.
I met Frank Duff just in the last ten years of his life.
What struck me about him was the interest and care he took with each individual he met. He was a man of wisdom, he could be forthright in manner, he was kind, practical and had a wonderful sense of humor. He was a good listener and a man of real humility. Those qualities were interspersed with a deep prayer and sacramental life.
He was man who shunned publicity. He preferred to remain in the background. An example that comes to mind in at the open-air Mass marking the Golden Jubilee of the setting up of the Legion, he was to be found anonymously among the large congregation present.
One commentator described Frank Duff as a “philosopher, theologian, biblical scholar, possessor of vast knowledge on medicine, science and mathematics and a great communicator – able to express complex ideas in simple terms.” He was to my mind all of those things.
In my opinion, one of the great legacies that Frank Duff left was a realization of the obligations and responsibilities given to each person at Baptism, calling all to evangelization. Through the Legion of Mary he left a workable means of seeing Christ in all, an organization with rules which works on a democratic basis but fully in accordance with the Church, in union with Our Blessed Lady. It works quietly in the 170 or so countries in which it is established to date.
Sile Ni Chochlain, Concilium Legionis Mariae
An avid reader
Frank Duff was a regular reader of the National Geographic and Time magazines. His reading of these magazines and other periodicals kept him well informed about current affairs.
He showed particular interest in reading about the dedication of those who in the interests of science and learning went on assignments to foreign and remote areas to study various aspects of life. The sacrifices and the hardships they endured appealed to his interest in adventure.
He liked to use their example of heroism as an ideal for legionaries who might think of devoting part of their lives to working in some far-flung area of the world in the interest of evangelization. He expressed it as follows in the Legion of Mary Handbook “That Christian commission drastically drives us out to people everywhere ... to those remote … to the forgotten sort … to the dwellers in caves and caravans … to the avoided places … to the icy wastes, to the sun baked desert, to the undiscovered tribe, out into the absolute unknown, to find if there is someone living there, right to the ends of the earth where the rainbow rests!”
This thinking would have influenced his interest in sending out the early Envoys to set up the Legion in lands outside Ireland.
Prayer for the Beatification of the Servant of God Frank Duff
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.
Favors attributed to the intercession of Frank Duff should be reported to:
Legion of Mary,
De Montfort House
Morning Star Avenue
Brunswick Street
Dublin 7, Ireland