The Greatest Gift the Legion has to Offer

Whenever the Pope speaks the worldwide Legion listens with love. Last week I was reading the homilies and addresses that Pope Benedict gave to the Bishops of Latin America meeting in Brazil and I could not help thinking of the Legion and in particular its founder Frank Duff. He said to the Latin American Bishops ’ that the greatest gift that the Church can offer Latin America is the Catholic Faith.’ Is this not true of the Legion too? The greatest gift that the Legion can offer to the peoples of Africa, Latin America or Asia or Oceania, or indeed Europe is our Catholic Faith. After many years studying the writings of Frank Duff and listening to people who knew him personally and over a long time I am convinced that the most important and precious thing to him was his Catholic Faith. He was absolutely certain that he could not offer a greater gift to another person than the Catholic Faith. He knew the faith, loved the faith, shared the faith, and lived the faith whatever it might cost him up to his last breath. He saw the loss of faith as the greatest of all tragedies. So he founded the Legion not only to help people keep the faith but also to share it with others. And no legionary can do a greater thing than to be the instrument under God of planting the seed of faith in another person. It would be good to ask ourselves how important to us is our Catholic Faith. Is it absolutely more important to us than anything else in the world ?

Flowing from the gift of our Catholic faith comes the task of evangelisation. The Holy Father said that evangelisation must be the top priority of the Church in Latin America. He said that the antidote to hedonism, indifference and proselytism was a spiritual renewal of the Catholic Faith and a new and vigorous evangelisation. And at the heart of this new evangelisation must be the Person of Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict had the clear intention of re-establishing Jesus, true God and true Man, as the centre of the Latin American Church. A strong effort of evangelisation is the real response to the attacks against the family, to the crimes against life, to the abandonment of the Catholic Faith in favour of the Pentecostal sects. Is this not the way of the Legion? We are not in the business of simply condemning the evils in our society today but in positively presenting the truths of our Faith and the Person of Jesus. Is this not the way of Mary ? She gives each one of us Jesus and with everything in her power she presents what Jesus stands for. She is the Mother of the Good News, the Star of Evangelisation. For the Legion, evangelisation is not only a priority among others it is, together with the personal sanctification of its members, its only purpose and goal.

Let me quote another passage from a homily of Pope Benedict which I think could be so well applied to the Legion: ‘The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead she grows by ‘attraction’: Just as Jesus Christ ‘draws all to himself’ by the power of His love, culminating in the sacrifice on the Cross, so the Church fulfils her mission to the extent that, in union with Christ, she accomplishes every one of her works in spiritual and practical imitation of the love of her Lord.’ So too the Legion seeks the conversion of souls through the attraction of love and friendship and not through aggression and manipulation. It is in the spirit of Mary that we offer Jesus to others. Nothing is further from the spirit of the sects and proselytism than the spirit of the Legion. How the Legion loves the tone and content of all that Pope Benedict is saying to the whole Church while speaking to the Church in Latin America. Our evangelisation is to speak the truth of our Catholic Faith in love and personal friendship through Mary.

There is another little phrase that Pope Benedict uses that could be taken straight out of the Handbook. He tells the Bishops that the mission of the Church is ‘the saving of souls one by one in the name of Jesus’ . How often our founder and the Handbook stress the supreme importance of every single soul and the immense love we must lavish on each one of them especially those who seem to be most abandoned. In other words, we must seek to share in the love which Jesus and His Mother have for each soul, one by one. The Good Shepherd calls his sheep by name, one by one He leads them.

By way of conclusion may I encourage all Legionaries to pray the concluding prayers of the Legion for the gift of greater faith, more slowly and meditatively. Nothing characterised Mary more than her faith and nothing should characterize us legionaries more than our faith and a willingness to share it in every possible way open to us. We disfigure the Legion if we are not actually and not just in theory or aspiration, evangelising.