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Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 210

210 DUTIES OF OFFICES OF PRAESIDIA CHAPTER 34
Director, on whom the duty primarily falls of inspiring the
members with those qualities, is the very mainspring of the
praesidium. He will attend the meetings and he will, together
with the President and the other officers, take care that the
rules are kept, and the Legion system carried out both in the
spirit and the letter. He will guard against all abuses, and he
shall uphold all due legionary authority.
If his praesidium is worthy of the name, he has within it
the special zeal and possibilities of his parish. But it depends
on him for its work, which should be of a worthy and difficult
kind. It depends on him for spurring on, because interior
reluctances and external barriers have to be broken down. It
looks to him to be the animating principle of its spirituality.
So much, in fact, depends on him that Pope Pius XI puts it
thus: “My fate is in your hands.” It would be a sorrow if even
in a single case that sense of trust should be mis placed; if even
one little band, wishful to do its best for God and Mary and
souls, should be left straying, truly a flock without its
shepherd! What would the chief shepherd say of such a one,
to whom he also had looked to be “the soul of the
association, the inspiration of all good undertakings, the
source of zeal”? (Pope Pius XI)
The Spiritual Director will regard his praesidium as a
novice-master would those placed under his care, and will
seek incessantly to develop their spiritual outlook and to elicit
in them acts and qualities proper to a legionary of Mary. It
will be found that these spiritual qualities will rise to the
heights to which they are sum moned, so that the Spiritual
Director need not fear to make his call one to supreme virtue,
or to place before his members work requir ing heroic qualities
to perform. Even the impossible must surrender to grace; and
grace is for the asking. But likewise, he shall insist upon an
unvarying fidelity in the minor details of their duty as the
essential foundation for great achievement. Though character
may be shown in the big moments, it is in the small moments
that it is made.
He will see to it that his members do not approach their
work in a spirit of self, and will thus ensure that they will
return neither elated by success nor depressed by apparent
failure, prepared, if bidden, to return a thousand times to the
most disagreeable or most depressing duty.