Edel Mary Quinn
Also known as Edel Mary Quinn
Life
Edel Mary Quinn was born on 14 September 1907 in Castlemagner, County Cork, the eldest of five children of Charles Quinn, a bank official, and Louisa Burke Browne. The family moved frequently with her father's postings. Educated by the Loreto and the Ursulines, she finished her schooling in France and worked from the age of nineteen as a secretary in Dublin.
Around 1924 she fell in love with a young man named Pierre Landrin but quietly resolved instead on a religious vocation, intending to enter the Poor Clares. In 1932, on the eve of entering, she was diagnosed with advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. After eighteen months in a sanatorium without recovery she instead threw herself into the Legion of Mary, which she had joined in 1927.
On 24 October 1936, against the warnings of doctors, the Concilium of the Legion accepted her offer to go as Envoy to East Africa. She landed in Mombasa in December 1936 and made Nairobi her base. Over the following seven and a half years, traversing thousands of miles by road, lake steamer and battered car, she founded hundreds of praesidia and curiae of the Legion of Mary across Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland (Malawi) and Mauritius, working with extraordinary energy despite haemorrhages, fevers and chronic exhaustion.
She collapsed and died of tuberculosis in Nairobi on 12 May 1944, aged thirty-six. She was buried in the Missionaries' Cemetery in Nairobi alongside the priests and sisters who had welcomed her work. Bishop John McCarthy of Zanzibar said she had 'more missionary experience than any single missionary' he had known.
Her cause for beatification was introduced in 1957, and on 15 December 1994 Saint John Paul II declared her Venerable. A miracle attributable to her intercession is still required for her beatification.
Patronage
- missionaries
- those with chronic illness
- the Legion of Mary
- Africa
- Ireland
Suggested prayer
Eternal Father, I thank you for the grace you gave to your servant, Edel Quinn, of striving to live always in the joy of your presence, for the radiant charity infused into her heart by your Holy Spirit and for the strength she drew from the Bread of Life to labour until death for the glory of Your name in loving dependence on Mary, Mother of the Church.
Confident, O Merciful Father, that her life was pleasing to you, I beg you to grant me, through her intercession, the special favour I now implore ..........., and to make known by miracles the glory she enjoys in Heaven, so that she may be glorified also by your Church on earth, through Christ Our Lord, Amen.
Sources
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