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Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 60

60 THE LEGION APOSTOLATE CHAPTER 10
outlook of the priest, and providing points of contact with
the people and intimacy of control. Security depends on this
complete union of priest and people.
But the essential idea of apostleship is an intense interest in
the welfare and the work of the Church, and such interest
there can hardly be without some feeling of participation.
Thus the apostolic organisation is a mould which produces
apostles.
Wherever these qualities of apostleship are not sedulously
culti va ted, it is certain that the next generation will have a
serious problem to face in the lack of all real interest in the
Church, and of all sense of responsibility. Out of this infantile
Catholicism what good can come? And where is its safety but
in a complete calm? History teaches that such a nerveless
flock is readily stampeded even unto the destruction of its
own pastors, or else, that it is devoured by the first fierce pack
of wolves which comes upon the scene. Bl. John Henry
Newman states it as a principle that “in all times the laity
have been the measure of the Catholic spirit.”
“The great function of the Legion of Mary is to develop the sense
of a lay vocation. There is a danger that we lay folk may identify the
Church with the clergy and religious, to whom God has certainly
given what we too exclusively call a vocation. We are unconsciously
tempted to regard the rest of us as an anonymous crowd who have a
chance of being saved if we perform the prescribed minimum. We
forget that our Lord calls his own sheep by name (Jn 10:3); that — in
the words of St. Paul (Gal 2:20), who, like us, was not physically
present on Calvary — ‘the Son of God loved me and gave himself up
for me’. Each of us, even if he be only a village carpenter as was Jesus
himself or a humble housekeeper like his mother, has a vocation, is
called individually by God to give him his or her love and service, to
do a particular work which others may indeed surpass but cannot
replace. No one but myself can give my heart to God or do my work.
It is precisely this personal sense of religion which the Legion fosters.
A member is no longer content to be passive or perfunctory; he or she
has something to be and to do for God; religion is no longer a side-
issue, it becomes the inspiration of one’s life, however humanly
commonplace. And this conviction of personal vocation inevitably
creates an apostolic spirit, the desire to carry on Christ’s work, to be
another Christ, to serve him in the least of his brethren. Thus the
Legion is the lay substitute for a religious order, the translation of the
Christian idea of perfection into the lives of lay folk, the extension of
Christ’s Kingdom into the secular world of to-day.” (Mgr. Alfred
O’Rahilly)