Frank Duff and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul

Concilium Allocutio January 2011

By Fr. Bede McGregor O.P.

Spiritual Director to the Legion of Mary

Frank Duff and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul

When God calls a person to a particular task in life, He also gives them the gifts of nature and grace to fulfil that task. In his providence God gives the person the kind of formation required for his mission in life. The principle is abundantly clear in the life of Frank Duff. In October 1913 at the age of 24, Frank Duff joined the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. This action marked a profound change in his interior life and external activity. At that time according to his own words: ‘I was completely wrapped up in amusement, particularly, sport. I tried my hand at everything - swimming, running, cycling and tennis. These things I worked at giving most of my spare time to them.’ Several colleagues in the Civil Service invited him to join the Society and he says: ‘the idea of going into the Vincent de Paul Society, of taking up religious work did not appeal to me at all. I was just the ordinary type of absolutely worldly young fellow. Then I made the acquaintance of course at the time of a number of members of the Vincent de Paul Society, and I liked them but was not drawn’.

However, a colleague in his own department in the Civil Service, a man called Jack O Callaghan succeeded in bringing him into the Society. And Frank Duff comments: ‘he succeeded where others had not succeeded, and that was because I liked him so much. In other words, the motives were not 100% pure - but the normal natural motives that God uses.’ He was to later assert in the Handbook that the first task of the legionary was to establish friendship with others because this was the context of the greatest influence. The Legion apostolate was a ministry of friendship.

From his very first meeting as a member of the Society he was completely won over and began to take the spiritual life with the utmost seriousness. At first it meant giving two nights a week, one to the meeting and then another to the work assigned to him. But in a very short time he was giving seven nights a week to the apostolate. He became totally immersed in the lives of the poorest of the poor. It is hard for us today to get any idea of the extreme poverty of those days. Frank Duff says: ‘Nobody could realise how bad the poverty was. For instance, in the published statistics it was stated that 90,000 of the people of Dublin lived at that time in single rooms in tenements. That will give you some idea of the dire conditions of life among the greater part of the population of the city.’ Most families lived in a single room and our Founder says he often met 13 to 14 people living in one room. With the appalling poverty came problems of depression, illness of many kinds, drunkenness, and often incidents of crime and sometimes violence. Spread over many years before the foundation of the Legion and for several years afterwards Frank Duff visited thousands of these poverty stricken homes on a regular basis. It proved to be a most profound and lasting education for our Founder and he passed it onto the Legion and enshrined it in many of the great principles contained in the Handbook. The beginnings of the Legion are rooted in the truly immense experience of our Founder. For example, if Frank Duff declares home visitation to be a primary work of the Legion, it is because he knows from vast personal experience the apostolic fruitfulness to be gained from it. It was also from sheer dint of experience that he learned the limitations of giving material relief and trying to meet the spiritual needs of the poor and destitute at the same time. The lessons he learned from his habitual presence to the poor are endless and we will have to come back to many of them in later allocutios this year.

But the new life of Frank Duff was not simply an intense increase of unbelievable activity. Alongside and within his apostolic activity there was an extraordinary development of his spiritual life. During the Lent immediately after he joined the Society he began to go to daily Mass and receive Holy Communion and continued this practice for the rest of his life. He began to say the daily Rosary and the Seven Dolours Rosary too. During his lunch break from work he made a Holy Hour in the Convent of Marie Repatrice and then again after work he slipped into a Church and made another holy hour before beginning his apostolic work. He began to say the Little Office of Our Lady and then progressed to the praying of the whole Divine Office in Latin and he never neglected this even for a single day for the rest of his life. In total he was giving 4 to 5 hours to prayer every day. He also gave significant time to spiritual reading, especially the lives of the Saints. He began to make frequent Retreats. Every year he started to go to Lough Derg. The quality of his Christian life can only he described as heroic. Extraordinary commitment to prayer and an equally extraordinary commitment to active apostolic work are the hallmarks of the charism of Frank Duff but both of them were expressed in a delightfully human and unostentatious way with great humour and unfailing courtesy and self effacement. He became a man of extraordinary pastoral charity. The salvation of souls became the absolutely primary interest and goal of his life. We will have to spend much more time unpacking the impact of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul on our Founder in the months ahead.