Foundation of The Christian Brothers and Presentation Brothers
In 1808, seven of the staff including Edmund Rice, took religious vows under the authority of Bishop Power of Waterford. Following the example of Nano Nagle's Presentation Sisters, they were called Presentation Brothers. This was the first congregation of men to be founded in Ireland and one of the few ever founded by a layman. Gradually a transformation had taken place amongst the "quay kids" of Waterford, largely attributed to the work of Edmund and his Brothers, who educated, clothed and fed the boys. Other bishops in Ireland supplied Edmund Rice with men, and these he prepared for the religious life and for a life of teaching. In this way the Presentation Brothers spread throughout Ireland.
However, the communities were under the control of the bishop in each diocese rather than Edmund Rice, and this created problems when Brothers were needed to be transferred from one school to another. Rice sought approval from Pope Pius VII for the community to be made into a pontifical congregation with a Superior General. Ultimately he obtained this, and as Superior General he was then able to move brothers across diocesan boundaries to wherever they were most needed. In the 1820s further difficulties emerged owing to the expansion of the society and its becoming two distinct congregations. From this time on they were called Christian Brothers and the Presentation Brothers. The motto of the Christian Brothers was: 'The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord forever' (Job 1: 21).
In 1828, the North Richmond Street house and schools in Dublin were established by Rice, the foundation stone being laid by the politician Daniel O'Connell. The building housed the Brothers' headquarters for many years and the present residence incorporates the original house built by Rice, who lived here for several years beginning in 1831.
Read more about this topic: Edmund Ignatius Rice
Famous quotes containing the words foundation of, foundation, christian, brothers and/or presentation:
“A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy; research, the progress; ignorance, the end. There is, by heavens, a strong and generous kind of ignorance that yields nothing, for honour and courage, to knowledge: an ignorance to conceive which needs no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“I’ve almost gained my heav’nly home; My spirit loudly sings;
The holy ones behold they come, I hear the noise of wings.
O come, angel band, Come and around me stand.
O bear me away on your snowy wings, To my immortal home.”
—T. Haskell, minister and hymn-writer. Published in Christian Harmony. “Angel Band,” l. 5-8.
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)