Episodes

The conversation is recorded and ready. We have moved its release to after Our Lady’s Rosary Festival (Belfast, 12–18 October), so that the whole Legion family can give the festival its full attention. It goes out once the week of the festival is over.

“I would have very much been the seed that fell on the rocky path… a short, sharp burst of growth, spiritual development, but because there was nothing underneath it, there was no structure, there was no good soil underneath me, I would wither and I would drift back into my secular life again.”

The fifth conversation is hosted by Jasmine Cano, of the Our Lady Queen of Apostles Praesidium — a different room and a different night from the guest’s, so the questions are asked from the outside.

Structure, and the accountability of a duty owed every week. The “checkpoints” that make it harder to drift. And a room of people he counts, in his own words, as “an additional 15, 20 siblings.”

Ciaran belongs to the praesidium behind this podcast. He speaks warmly of what Frank Duff draws from St Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion in the Handbook — “very theologically insightful and enriching” — and of what the room itself gave him: “a chance to connect and listen to other like minded Catholics who are passionate and fervent about their faith.”

For the first time, the chair changes hands. Richard Harrington — the legionary whose own story filled Episode 02 — takes the host’s seat. The man who answered the questions is now the one asking them, and he asks them as someone who walked into the Legion at almost the same moment his guest did.

Every praesidium prays, week after week, for people who have drifted from the practice of their faith or are going through a hard time. For seven months Ciaran was one of the people being prayed for, and he did not know it. This is what that looks like from the inside — told by a man who now sits on the other side of the room, praying for the next one.

The 31st of July is the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola — a soldier laid low by a cannonball who rose a saint, founder of the Society of Jesus. To him the Church owes the motto Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam: “for the greater glory of God.” We could think of no truer day for this conversation.

A transplant from County Meath, Richard has made his home in Belfast these past three years — a city he has grown to love more than home itself.

Richard returns to the podcast in Episode 04 — this time in the host’s chair, in conversation with Ciaran Wright.

The 31st of May is the feast the Church gives to the Visitation: Our Lady setting out in haste across the hill country to her cousin Elizabeth, carrying within her the unseen Christ. It is the first apostolic act of the Christian age — and the very pattern of the Legion. We could think of no truer day to begin.

The conversation was recorded as Fr Martin prepared to take up a new pastoral charge and hand the office of Spiritual Director to a successor — a record of two decades of formation, before that season ended.