RITE & REASON:The founder of the Legion of Mary, was at odds with the mores of his day with his attitude to industrial schools and unmarried mothers
VIRGINIA WOOLF observed that a painter could penetrate to the character of a person without the necessity of writing 300-400 pages. If I could paint, I asked myself, how would I paint Frank Duff?
Of all the images which I retain of him, that which made the deepest impression was of Duff, hand cupped behind one ear, listening, intent in conversation with a boy named John Mahon who had grown up in the Regina Coeli hostel, opened by Duff for homeless women and their children.
John had an abnormally large head as a result of hydrocephalus. The occasion was the funeral of a legionary who had worked full time as a volunteer in the Regina Coeli. Duff was intensely absorbed with John. It is an image I could not forget.
In the first week of the Regina Coeli’s existence in 1930, 15 women were admitted to the hostel. Soon after opening, a pregnant woman sought admission.
Her entry to the hostel, remaining there subsequently and keeping her child, led to the inauguration of the “Mater Dei” aspect of the hostel, a type of hostel within a hostel, specifically organised on the basis of units for mothers and children.
Thus began a revolutionary system for assisting lone mothers to keep their children.
Duff’s special regard for unmarried mothers was at odds with the mores of the time when the consequences of an extra-marital birth were disastrous, rendering both mother and child social outcasts.
Duff disapproved of the housing of unmarried mothers in a section known as the “Healthy Yard” in the South Dublin Union, describing the unmarried mothers who came to this place in large numbers as “many simple decent girls from the country”.
Nor was Duff an advocate of industrial schools where children could be sent as young as two years of age. In fact his was one of the few contemporaneous voices critical of industrial schools, as pointed out by Dr Eoin O’Sullivan of Trinity College Dublin in his evidence to the Commission on Child Abuse.
Duff also queried the role of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the too-easy committal of children to the schools without sufficient effort to remedy family poverty.
Writing on the subject of industrial schools, Duff attributed difficulties encountered by the children when they left these schools as being due to “the absence of the children’s mothers during a period of life when such is necessary to the children”.
He referred to a nun whom he considered one of the best superiors of these schools but who had confided in him that “she does not believe in the schools, but only acquiesces in them as a necessary evil”. He cited the results that had flowed from the work in the Regina Coeli. “They live the ordinary life of the community; attend the ordinary schools and churches and move about in the city as they are brought up by their mothers.”
For Duff the love and care of children was based on respect for them. In a talk which he gave to parents of pupils in the Dominican school once located in Eccles Street in Dublin, he said “from the very moment of their birth treat your children as real people to whom respect is due as the primary and essential basis of association. Listen to their questions, encourage them, and take the trouble of replying adequately to them; this can be made the better half of their education.”
It would be interesting to guess how he might have responded to the observation of Karl Marx that he could forgive Christianity much because it first taught the worship of the child.
Dr Finola Kennedy is an economist, commentator, and author whose latest book Frank Duff: A Life(publishers, Continuum) will be launched by Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin at Blackrock College next Tuesday