I have this rule that when I do these November Saint posts I stick strictly to those who have the title of Saint or Blessed. However, since it is a rule that I impose on myself, it is one that I can break without fear of penalty. Having read some inspiring stories of those who are earlier on in the canonization process, today I will tell the story of Venerable Edel Quinn.
Edel was born in September 1907 in County Cork, Ireland. At a young age, she felt a call to the religious life and joined the Legion of Mary as a teenager. She wanted to join the Poor Clares, but was diagnosed with tuberculosis and ended up spending eighteen months in a sanatorium instead. Her condition unchanged, she gave herself entirely to the work of the Legion helping the poor in the slums of Dublin.
In 1936, at the age of 29 and dying of tuberculosis, Edel became a Legion of Mary envoy. She traveled to Aftica to be a missionary and establish the Legion of Mary across hundreds of miles of African jungle. When she arrived in Africa, Catholic leaders told her that her idea would prove a failure. Edel persisted, full of hope. "The impossible has happened elsewhere - why not here?" she asked.
Fighting her illness (her health was never good), in seven and a half years Edel established hundreds of Legion branches and councils in Tanania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Mauritius. Her disease finally took her life on May 12, 1944, in Nairobi, Kenya. She is buried in the Missionaries' Cemetery where her tombstone reads: "She fulfilled this mission with such devotedness and courage as to stir every heart and to leave the Legion of Mary and Africa itself forever in her debt."
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