History
Edmund Rice’s founding charism gave birth to two congregations: the Congregation of Presentation Brothers and the Congregation of Christian Brothers.
In the early days, when Edmund first began to attract followers to his way of life, these formed themselves into a small group of companions. They lived together in community and began to follow an adaptation of the Presentation Sisters’ Rule. The Holy See had already approved of this Rule when Edmund and his followers began to use their adaptation of it in 1809 to guide their first faltering steps along the path of religious life.
The granting of the Apostolic Brief in 1820, allowed the infant Congregation to become an Pontifical Institute - a defining moment for all of the early brothers. The majority accepted the Brief and went on to become the Congregation of Christian Brothers. Today there are Irish Christian Brothers in 17 different countries.
A few Brothers, notably Michael Augustine Riordan, continued to live by the Presentation Rule. They continued as the Presentation Brothers and became a Pontifical Institute in 1889.
Like the Irish Christian Brothers, the Presentation Brothers have followed the missionary example of the great Irish missionaries Brendan and Colmcille, responding as they believe Edmund Rice would have, to different needs as they encounter them in different regions and different circumstances.
The main foundations have been: U.S.A. 1843; England 1876; Canada 1910; West Indies 1946; Ghana 1968; Peru 1969; Geneva 2007; Nigeria 2007; Slovakia 2007.
Read more about this topic: Presentation Brothers
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“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)