November Allocutio 2024

Prayer

Fr. Paul Churchill, Concilium Spiritual Director

I am privileged to be the Spiritual Director of the Legion of Mary on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Concilium Legionis Mariae. And like you all I wish to thank Paddy Fay for his excellent history of Concilium from the start. It has the added merit of freeing me to say something else important.

While in some parts of the world it seems the Legion is thriving, in others it is struggling, not least in the Western world. So how is the Legion to continue there and indeed regrow itself and reignite the faith? That is the challenge of this moment and into the future.

When Mother Teresa of Calcutta was once asked what her secret was, she answered, “My secret is prayer!” Her words remind me of those similar words, quoted by a young Frank Duff in Can we be Saints borrowed from the great Teresa of Avila: Pray, Pray, Pray!

And of course, we had the very words of Our Lord yesterday at Mass when he encouraged us to pray and not lose heart, “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them!” “When he delays …” And sometimes he does delay. But numerous witnesses tell us that that delay can be the building up a huge deposit of fruits in heaven. Ask Saint Monica or the Blessed Elizabeth Leseur. I recall a Jesuit priest telling us that at one time they were very concerned about the lack of vocations in a certain part of the world and they prayed and they prayed. Then suddenly they had 100 vocations. In our world of so many discouragements those words of Christ and the example of so many saints encourage us not to falter but to start with prayer and keep having recourse to it.

Prayer from the heart always reaches God. But it also changes us. If it is superficial prayer—that gives up easily—it will not change us much, if at all. But the person who prays and stays with it, slowly learns an intimacy with God that allows God’s own life to flow through him and slowly and imperceptively his witness in life affects others for good. Or it can spur a person onto action and outreach. It can give courage to the timid. It helps forgiveness, it teaches compassion. It helps us correct the many flaws in our own personalities.

It is obvious that Our Lady was a woman of deep prayer. Her Magnifical is a gem and shows someone who has learnt how to pray. And when she told us “to do whatever he tells you” at the wedding feast of Cana it can also be read as applying to prayer. Prayer can feel as plain and tasteless as water. But just as water keeps us alive physically, we need prayer so as to stay spiritually alive. And just as we are not conscious of the water in our system we may also not we conscious of prayer’s benefits in us. But if handed to God it can become the wine of great spiritual life for ourselves and for the Church and for society, producing great fruits.

Listen to Frank Duff. “Their (i.e. saints) good deeds were only valuable because they sprung from prayer; they bore the same relation to prayer that the trunk of a tree bears to the roots; good deeds are a visible part of prayer, and good deeds cannot live without prayer.” Those words are another form of those words of Our Lord when he said, “The branch cannot bear fruit by itself. You can do nothing without me!” I will continue with Frank. “Let us sound once more the note which we began a little while ago. The cause of all this pitiful failure is this: there is not enough prayer”.

So when we look at the local situation and seek to help the message grow and help souls, prayer, by changing us first, strengthens our reserves for helping growth out there. And let us not forget that our safety net is God who hears our prayers and will give the heavenly response when he knows it is best. But let us not doubt that he will. And so we must persevere in our prayers for the growth of God’s Kingdom in souls and in our own first. We must pray for vocations. And we must ask for new members of the Legion of Mary by incessant prayer. If we do they will come. We have his word for it, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you”.

I return to Frank Duff: “We like to see results, and usually we do not see the result of prayer. So we reduce our prayers to little or nothing satisfying ourselves that we are doing plenty of practical work for our neighbour”. He reminds me of the case of Teresa of Avila who, when a younger nun gave up praying on the excuse that as she had so many sins she was unworthy of prayer. This lasted for 18 months until one day she saw clearly that the devil had fooled her. She had cut herself off from the Vine! Once she realized the trick of the devil she returned to prayer allowing no excuse to stop her and she reformed the Carmelites driven by her prayer life. Keep coming to God in prayer, no matter what.

Our Legion meetings have prayer embedded in them. But let us also embed it in our personal lives. Amen.