Frank Duff, Holy Layman

Heroic Fidelity to the Divine Office
Shortly before his death on 7 November 1980, layman Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, addressed a group of deacons preparing for ordination to the priesthood in Thurles, County Tipperary. He shared with them something of his own life of prayer as a lay apostle. His example is a catalyst and an inspiration for all priests. This is what he said:

Now perhaps you will forgive me for being personal. I absolutely hate it, but if I am not to talk to you to some extent out of my own background, I really have no other claim to address words to you at all. I am not a professor of religion, and I am certainly no peritus in that department. The only thing which I have to point to is considerable experience. Therefore, willy-nilly, I have to refer to it.

I have believed intensely in the spiritual order and I have never sacrificed it to the other. I have said the Divine Office since 1917 without missing a single day or a single hour, and think I could say, a single line of it. Likewise I have said daily the Rosary and the Seven Dolours. I have never missed daily Mass in that time, except in circumstances of absolute physical inability.

It is my conviction that anything useful that has come along has proceeded from that stressing of the purely supernatural. I think it meant that I was depending on the Lord and His Mother, and not on myself. I would say that one important result followed: that I was saved from vulgar pride. When there was development I was not tempted to ascribe it to my own abilities. Of course, one has to pay a price as well, the Christian price of torment and suffering. If unwilling to face up to that, avoid the priesthood.

Next we come to the question of Our Lady. She is completely indispensable.