Roman Catholic Orders and Missions

The Oxford Companion to Irish History The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Further reading

Christian Brothers

The Oxford Companion to Irish History | 2007 | Copyright

Christian Brothers, the Irish Catholic lay teaching order founded by Edmund Rice (1762–1844), who opened a school for poor boys in Waterford in 1802, followed shortly by schools in other Irish towns. In 1820 his community was confirmed by papal brief as the ‘Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools of Ireland’, Rice being elected first superior‐general, and its constitution owing much to that of the 17th‐century De La Salle order. Eventually schools were founded in England, Australia, and elsewhere.

Curriculum and school routine were imbued with religious doctrine and observance, which inhibited the order from connection with the national school system. At the instigation of Daniel Murray, the politically moderate arch‐bishop of Dublin, several schools entered the system for a few years, only to withdraw in 1836. Despite correspondence between government, the national commissioners, and the order over decades, the commissioners failed to find a way of modifying their rules to accommodate the ethos of the Christian Brothers' schools, which entered the system only after political independence.

The schools were strongly nationalist in tone (Pearse was a pupil), and played a major part in the revival of the Irish language and in the education of many of the leaders of the independence movement and of post‐independence Ireland.

Kenneth Milne

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