Edel Quinn(1907–1944)

Edel Mary Quinn was born at the Greenanes farmhouse near Castlemagner, north County Cork, on 14 September 1907, eldest of four children of Charles Quinn, a National Bank cashier of the Castlemagner branch, and Louise Burke Brown. The household moved frequently with the father's small bank postings: from Castlemagner to Cahirciveen in Kerry (1908-09), to Killarney (1909-11), to Clonmel in Tipperary (1911-17), and finally to Tralee (1917-23). The childhood ran through the Catholic professional middle-class Irish town of the late Edwardian and post-war years: the bank manager's house at each posting, the Loreto and Mercy convent schooling that ran with the moves, and the Catholic-Irish-domestic-piety of the post-1907 Irish Catholic Mass-and-confession Sunday observance. She was schooled at the Loreto convent at Enniscorthy from twelve and at the Loreto Abbey at Rathfarnham in Dublin from sixteen to nineteen.

She moved to Dublin at twenty in 1927, took a secretarial job at a Dublin chocolate-and-confectionery firm (the De Selby chocolate manufactory in Cabra), and began the period of religious observance that defined the rest of her life. She had been a Marian-and-Eucharistic devotee of the Catholic Children of Mary sodality from her schooldays; in 1927 at twenty she joined the Legion of Mary, the Irish lay-Catholic devotional and missionary organisation that Frank Duff had founded at the Myra House meeting at Francis Street, Dublin on 7 September 1921. The Legion was, by the late 1920s, the Irish lay-Catholic missionary organisation, with about a thousand local *praesidia* (small twelve-member local cell groups, the foundation organisational unit of the Legion) operating across Ireland and a but rapidly growing diaspora membership across Britain, Canada and the United States.

She was twenty-five in 1932 when the chronic chest-pain-and-coughing illness she had been carrying through the previous two years was diagnosed at the Dublin Mercer's Hospital as advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. The senior consultant gave her between six and eighteen months. She was sent for the standard TB sanatorium course at the Newcastle Sanatorium in County Wicklow, where she spent the next eighteen months on the bed-rest-and-fresh-air-and-rich-food regimen that was the standard pre-antibiotic TB treatment of the period. The disease stabilised but did not clear; she came back to Dublin in early 1934 with a remaining lung capacity and a medical prognosis that gave her perhaps five further years of life. She resumed the Legion of Mary work at the Cabra parish *praesidium* and in 1936 was offered, at the Frank Duff meeting in October of that year, the mission of going to East and Central Africa as the Legion's *envoy* (the travelling-and-organising officer who would extend the Legion's *praesidium* network across the Catholic missionary territories of the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland and Mauritius).

The senior medical opinion was that the African mission would kill her within months. The senior Frank Duff and senior Legion Concilium debated the assignment at three successive meetings across November and December 1936; she accepted the mission against the medical opinion on the written submission that she would rather work for the Legion in Africa for whatever months she had than rest in Dublin for years. She sailed from Marseille on the Mombasa packet *Llandovery Castle* on 24 October 1936 at twenty-nine and reached Mombasa on 23 November. The eight years that followed were the African missionary period of her life. She travelled by senior train, senior lorry, senior bicycle, senior small boat and (when no other transport was available) senior foot through the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, founded over six hundred local Legion *praesidia* across the African Catholic-mission territories, and ran the ongoing senior correspondence with the Frank Duff Dublin Concilium across the period as the detailed organisational record of the Legion's first African continent-wide presence.

The senior TB returned at scale in early 1944 after eight years of suppressed-but-not-cured disease. She was admitted to the Mater Misericordiae Sanatorium at Nairobi on 1 May 1944 and died at the sanatorium on 12 May 1944, thirty-six years old. The small Nairobi Roman Catholic Bishop John McCarthy concelebrated the funeral Mass at the St Family's Cathedral, Nairobi on 14 May 1944; she is buried at the Missionary Plot of the Nairobi Catholic Cemetery on Langata Road. The senior post-1944 cause for her canonisation was opened by the Dublin Archdiocese in 1956; she was declared *Venerable* by Pope John Paul II on 15 December 1994; the cause has continued through the Roman Congregation for the Causes of Saints to the present day. The senior Frank Duff Legion-of-Mary biography of her, *Edel Quinn: A Heroine of the Apostolate* (1953), is the foundational devotional text of the modern Legion of Mary movement. The Quinn name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic of *Ó Cuinn* (descendant of Conn, the chief or head), the foundational east-Munster-and-south-Ulster surname of the medieval Cinéal Eóghain; she carried it from a Castlemagner bank cashier's family into the foundation senior African missionary period of the modern Irish-Catholic lay apostolate.