By JAMES MONTI
The months of May and June could well be described as a veritable season of sacraments. For decades this has been a particularly popular time for the reception of First Holy Communion, Confirmation, priestly Ordinations, and weddings. These days of the Church year are planted thick with countless personal anniversaries of sacraments received.
In a Church of a billion souls, this truly extraordinary event we call a sacrament has become so commonplace that we can easily lose sight of the enormity of what each sacrament confers. And there is always the possibility that the recipient of the sacrament will respond to the graces it bestows in such an exceptional way that he or she will ultimately change the world.
A bishop placing his hands over the head of an ordinand to confer Holy Orders might well be ordaining the next “Curé of Ars.” A priest blessing a couple during the rite of matrimony may perhaps be witnessing the exchange of vows between the Church’s next Louis and Zelie Martin. Might the fruit of their union be another St. Therese, or another St. Ignatius of Loyola?
It was no different a century ago. To the pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Cahir, Ireland, the First Holy Communion rite on the morning of Ascension Thursday, June 1, 1916, must have seemed “routine.”
A few seemingly trivial details are recorded about one of the first communicants that day, a girl of eight and a half with long hair cascading beneath her white Communion veil down to her waist, with a wreath that her mother had woven for her from the blossoms of the Alpine flower edelweiss — the latter an allusion to the fact that at the girl’s Baptism, through a veritable comedy of errors, the parish priest had mistakenly bestowed upon her the name “Edelweiss.” This remained her baptismal name, but her family simply called her Edel.
A couple of years earlier, a maid employed by Edel’s father Charles Quinn to assist his health-impaired wife Louise in her chores had noticed that the child had made it her habit to curtsy whenever passing before a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. All too often such childhood manifestations of piety tend to evaporate like a morning mist by the time children grow into their teenage years. But not always.
None of those present at Edel’s First Holy Communion could have anticipated that by her early 20s she would develop a devotion to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and Holy Communion so intense and so pervasive that on Sundays she would be attending five or six Masses in a row. On a holy card given to her best friend she wrote, “I could assist at Mass all day.”
Edel’s sister Leslie recalled her family feeling somewhat embarrassed that Edel would spend almost all of Sunday morning at church, from the very first Mass to the last, motionless for hours on end, her head bowed in deep prayer.
But this was no mere stunt of human endurance. For Edel was in love — profoundly in love. In a poem addressed to Christ that she had scribbled down in a notebook as a teenager, she begs our Lord to come to her “each dawning day,” telling Him that she is waiting for Him “full of love and ardent longing,” and professing that this daily desire for Him — clearly a desire for daily Holy Communion — would endure “till my heart be still forever” (Mary Peffley, Woman of Faith: The Life of Edel Quinn, p. 60).
Edel’s friend Mary Walls said of her that attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion were for her an utter necessity. Ruby Roberts, a woman who came to know Edel in her later years, attested, “Going to Holy Communion seemed to be her greatest desire in this life” (Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Positio super Virtutibus, 1988, p. 675).
Edel’s soul also feasted on a rich fare of good Catholic literature.
The words of the English Catholic author Mother Mary Loyola (+1930) certainly rang true in Edel’s case: “. . . the books you make your companions will surely mould you into their likeness…a book is a strong tower, nay, a very church, with angels lurking among the leaves” (Home for Good, 1915, pp. 258-259).
Edel was the ultimate Catholic “bookworm,” reading well into the night books about the spiritual life, our Lady, and especially the Holy Eucharist. Edel’s own sentiments about the latter are echoed in the following passage from one of her favorite books, From Holy Communion to the Blessed Trinity, by Fr. Marie-Vincent Bernadot, OP (+1941):
“The soul that has communicated with fervor…feels itself enkindled with an ardent desire, an insatiable hunger for the sacred Host. Even though daily Communion brings great joys each morning . . . there is a perpetual thirst for Communion” (1931 English edition, p. 32).
Edel revealed to another acquaintance, Roger Giraud, that it was from receiving Holy Communion that she derived the strength to take on the most difficult tasks. And her short life was to be one of many difficulties. When her family was suddenly brought to the brink of financial ruin, Edel was compelled to postpone her hopes of entering a Poor Clare convent and instead get a job.
Edel’s first employer, a Dublin industrial agent who later became a priest, was to remember the “timid knock” at his door on a Monday morning in 1926 that alerted him to the arrival of a shy young woman not quite 18 seeking employment as a secretary.
After hiring Edel on the spot and discovering how gifted she was, he soon realized that she was going to need a better salary than he could offer her to support her parents and four younger siblings. So he introduced her to a friend of his, Pierre Landrin, a French businessman in need of a secretary for his construction supply firm in downtown Dublin, the Chagny Tile Works.
Pierre came to admire Edel not only as an ideal secretary but also as a person, and under her gentle influence became a practicing Catholic. He was later to observe, “She was a young woman who breathed purity, who radiated purity” (Positio, p. 505). What Pierre did not know was that this purity and the shy reserve that he had noticed when he first met her were also signs of a secret she was keeping within her heart. So when on September 1, 1927, he took Edel to one of Dublin’s finest restaurants and in the course of their meal revealed that he wanted to marry her, she had no choice but to tell him that she was already “spoken for” — that she had “promised herself to God,” to become a Poor Clare nun.
In a letter to Pierre written a week later, she explained further, “. . . I, however unworthy, had one Love, and one only, Our Lord.”
Having turned down Pierre’s marriage proposal, Edel graciously offered him instead the gift of a rich spiritual friendship expressed in a remarkable exchange of letters between the two that continued for about six years. By now Edel had settled into a daily routine that began with stations of the cross at a church seven minutes from her family’s home in Dublin’s Monkstown district followed by morning Mass at another church.
Intent never to be late for work, she then literally ran to the Seapoint train station to catch a Great Southern Railways commuter train into the center of the city. A fellow commuter dubbed her the “Seapoint Sprinter.”
As early as 1925, another commuter named Muriel Wailes had noticed Edel, recalling that the latter would keep to herself rather than join in the boisterous conversations of others on the train. Muriel could scarcely have imagined then that Edel and she would later become friends and co-workers in a new Marian apostolate that was to transform their lives, the Legion of Mary.
It is believed that Edel attended a Legion of Mary meeting for the first time in 1928, and immediately decided to become a member. So totally did Edel embrace the Legion’s commitments to Marian consecration as formulated by St. Louis de Montfort (+1716) and to a life of spiritual and corporal works of mercy principally in the form of house visits to needy souls that she would later be described as the living embodiment of the apostolate’s instructional manual, the Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary.
Long Journeys Alone
In 1932 Edel’s dream of becoming a nun was shattered when a hemorrhage revealed that she was suffering from advanced tuberculosis. Eighteen grueling months in a sanitarium did nothing to improve her condition. Two pilgrimages to Lourdes wrought no physical cure, but did help to prepare her for the superhuman task of leaving her native Ireland in 1936 to introduce the Legion of Mary in equatorial East Africa.
Although desperately ill with shortness of breath and fits of coughing, over a span of seven and a half years she managed to traverse the savannah and jungles of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique, and the island of Mauritius as the Legion’s envoy.
As Fr. Michael Finnegan, a Holy Ghost missionary who knew her, explained, “She traveled thousands of kilometers upon the road, long journeys alone in savage regions, with ferocious animals all about, bad roads, without water, and where incidents were possible at all moments” (Positio, p. 513).
Through all this the Holy Eucharist remained her mainstay. According to a Loretto nun who knew Edel, “It seemed that she considered the entire day as a preparation to Communion; even her work had to be a preparation to Communion” (ibid., p. 684).
It was in the early evening of May 12, 1944 that our Lord came to take Edel Quinn, only 36, to Himself. In the words of one of Edel’s favorite authors, Mother Mary Loyola, “Coming out of the darkness of this world, we shall see Him standing there awaiting us. He has been our welcome Guest times without number during the days of our pilgrimage; the hour has come for us to be His” (Welcome! Holy Communion: Before and After, 1904, p. xv).
Postscript: In 1994 Edel Quinn was declared venerable by Pope St. John Paul II. The author is at present writing a full-length biography of her.
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