‘What is the use of life and health if we cannot throw them away for so great a King and Lord?’ asked St Teresa of Avila, and her words could stand as a kind of headline for the life of Edel Quinn, whose cause for beatification has lately been introduced. For it was a woman fighting a losing battle against tuberculosis who blazed the Legion of Mary’s trail over much of Africa. Yet you could meet Edel and not notice anything particular about her, a Dublin typist going to daily mass, spending her free time for the legion; there are thousands more hke that. And this gives special interest to her beatification cause; that she was so much of the ordinary stream of Irish Catholicism and achieved such extraordinary results makes her appear a kind of patron and pace setter for the contemporary lay apostolate.

Edel Quinn was born in Kanturk, Co. Cork, on September Hth, 1907.