Allocutio at October 2015 Concilium Meeting by Fr. Bede McGregor OP

The Gift Of The Rosary To The Legion
**************************************

The Legion Handbook is like a good jeweler’s shop that is full of precious gems. Sometimes these gems are hidden in simple sentences that can be easily passed over. One such sentence is as follows: ‘What breathing is to the human body, the Rosary is to the Legion meetings.’ To mine the riches of this sentence we have to go back to the day of Pentecost as described in the Acts of the Apostles. There we see the infant Church praying with Mary and waiting with her for a fresh coming of the Holy Spirit. That is the secret of every authentic ecclesial movement or apostolic gathering.

Pope Benedict explains it this way: ‘If we are to understand the mission of the Church, we must go back to the Upper Room where the disciples remained together, praying with Mary, the ‘Mother’, awaiting the Spirit that had been promised. This icon of the nascent Church should be the constant source of inspiration for every Christian community. Apostolic and missionary fruitfulness is not principally due to programmes and pastoral methods that are cleverly drawn up and ‘efficient,’ but is the result of the community’s constant prayer.’ Then he adds something that reflects the teaching of St. Louis Marie de Montfort and the Handbook: ‘Where Mary is, there is the archetype of total self-giving and Christian discipleship. Where Mary is, there is the Pentecostal breath of the Holy Spirit; there is new beginning and authentic renewal.’

Let us go back to the very first meeting of the Legion of Mary on the evening of the 7th of September 1921. The first legionaries prayed together with Mary and invoked the Holy Spirit. The prayers they prayed that night were the same as those of the St. Vincent de Paul, except that the Legion spontaneously and without premeditation added the Rosary. This was to be profoundly significant for the whole spiritual life of the Legion. As Frank Duff was later to say: ‘The Rosary is irreplaceable in the life of the Legion.’ Why is that so? Because the Rosary is praying with Mary and like her focusing our whole attention on the fruit of her womb, Jesus. The Rosary is the humble but effective way of putting Jesus at the very center of everything about the Legion, at the center of her prayer life and all her apostolic work. The Rosary is Mary’s way of making the Legion absolutely Christocentric.
St. John puts it this way: ‘The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at the heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium. It is an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial Magnificat for the work of redemptive Incarnation which began in her virginal womb. With the Rosary, the Christian people sit at the school of Mary and are led to contemplate the face of Christ and experience the depth of His love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the hands of the Mother of the Redeemer.’ So the Rosary enables the Legion to become an authentic school of Mary that puts us in living communion with Jesus in all the mysteries and under the guidance of his Mother.

Let me give just one more reason why the Rosary is irreplaceable in Legion meetings and in her whole spirituality. It concerns the role of the Holy Spirit in the Legion. Just as the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, so must he be the very soul of the Legion. He must have a place of primacy in the Legion as he has in the life of Jesus and His Mother. This is especially true because the Legion is totally committed to the work of evangelization and evangelization will not be possible without the action of the Holy Spirit. He is the primary agent in all evangelization in all its forms and down to the last detail. It is him who teaches us everything about Jesus and the Gospel and He enables us to preach that Gospel. As Blessed Pope John the sixth says: ‘The Holy Spirit puts on his lips the words that he could not find himself and at the same time the Holy Spirit disposes the soul of the hearer to be open and receptive to the Good News and to the Kingdom being proclaimed.’ Let me add as an aside that after many years of reading nearly all the published and unpublished works of Frank Duff our founder, nothing is clearer to me than his profound understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church and the Legion and his extraordinary devotion to the person of the Holy Spirit. But what has all this talk of the Holy Spirit to do with the Rosary?

Let me just quote some lines from the Handbook: ‘The appreciation of the Holy Spirit will not be maintained except there be a reasonably frequent returning of the mind to him. By including just that glance in his direction, every devotion to the Blessed Virgin can be made a wide open way to the Holy Spirit. Especially can legionaries so utilise the Rosary. Not only does the Rosary form a prime devotion to the Holy Spirit by reason of it being the chief prayer of Our Lady, but as well, its contents, the twenty mysteries, celebrate the principal interventions of the Holy Spirit in the drama of Redemption.’ What I think Frank Duff is saying is that in the school of Mary one thing we must surely learn is the primacy of a true devotion to the Holy Spirit. We will try to unpack the meaning of that assertion in another Allocutio.

Let me conclude by suggesting that we must not keep the gift of the Rosary to ourselves and our meetings. We must engage in a Rosary apostolate. If we truly have the spirit of Mary we will encourage all those we meet to pray the Rosary. I think of Our Lady of Fatima exhorting the three little seers and through them all of us to pray the Rosary every day. I also love the image of Mary praying the Rosary with Bernadette at Lourdes and remember that whenever we pray the Rosary she prays it with us. Let us frequently thank Our Lady for giving the gift of her Rosary to the Legion. Amen

**********************************