BLESSED AMONG BROTHERS

THIS is the day we all prayed for. Every school day on every continent, Christian Brothers boys, like me said a special prayer for the beatification of Edmund Rice. It was a wild aspiration, like the conversion of Russia or world peace, and we never expected our prayers to fall on sympathetic ears. That they have now been answered ought to seem a triumph, even a miracle. Instead, the answer comes at a time when, in Ireland at least, the prayers are hardly ever heard. Edmund Rice and the order he founded have lost the extraordinary place they once held in Irish life. They belong to a time whose passing it is hard to mourn.

Like most visionaries, Edmund Rice would probably not have recognised what became, after his death, of the institution that he founded. Beginning in 1802, he established schools for the destitute, motivated by a determination to bring the benefits of education to those who would not otherwise have known them. But the Christian Brothers were soon re shaped into one of the Catholic church's most potent weapons in the struggle for control of an emerging Ireland. They became, in the middle of the 19th century, the means by which the church set out to defeat the British government's plans for a non sectarian primary school system.

In order for them to play this role, Edmund Rice's vision had to be quietly abandoned. The pupils the church most wanted to attract away from the State national schools were not the destitute but "the sons of the better class of, the Roman Catholic population". The alternative they offered them was, for a rising lower middle class, an irresistible combination of two attractions. One was the assertion through rigid Catholicism and resentful nationalism of a narrow but secure Irish identity. The other was a fiercely pragmatic determination that no intellectual or ideological qualms would stand in the way of modest but assured social advancement. The Brothers' promise was that their pupils would be ambitious enough to get better jobs than their parents, yet conservative enough to retain their parents' values.

THE cost of keeping that promise was paid in violence and repressed sexuality. The early successors of Edmund Rice were themselves troubled by the prevalence of corporal punishment in their schools. As early as 1861, the Superior General, Brother Michael Riordan sent a circular to all members of the order, lamenting the fact that Brothers who could not win their pupils' trust by force of personality were resorting to "the humiliating alternative of enforcing submission by coercive measures. The subject being of too painful a nature for lengthened detail, we prefer to throw a veil over its naked deformity; but nevertheless we cannot omit strongly exhorting you to exhibit and practice towards these poor children that paternal solicitude peculiar to God's chosen servants."

From time to time, there were attempts within the Brothers, who always had within their ranks a cohort of extraordinarily decent and dedicated men, to move the institution back towards Edmund Rice's original impulses of compassion and away from violence and repression. In 1920, the Superior General, Patrick Hennessy felt it necessary to remind his members that "the fondling of boys, the laying our hands upon them, is contrary to the rules of modesty and is decidedly dangerous." In 1930, his successor Brother J.P. Noonan, tried to outlaw corporal punishment, calling on his members to "aim at its complete abolition in our schools and anticipate legislation which would make it illegal."

But the Brothers could hardly be better than the society they had created. It is, but a slight exaggeration to say that the Christian Brothers had created a country in their own image. The growth of Irish nationalism in the late 19th century was fuelled to a very large extent by the success of the Christian Brothers in creating a pool of educated lower middle class men who had little to hope for from the existing social order and much to gain by its passing.

"Ireland", said Eamon de Valera in 1944, "owes more than it will probably ever realise to the Christian Brothers. I am an individual who owes practically, everything to the Christian Brothers." In his memoirs, Todd Andrews, a figure almost as important as de Valera in the creation of independent Ireland, explained why the State owed so much to the heirs of Edmund Rice: "Without the groundwork of the Christian Brothers' schooling, it is improbable that there would have been a 1916 Rising, and certain that the subsequent fight for independence would not have been successfully carried through. The leadership of the IRA came largely from those who got their education from the Brothers and got it free."

If this claim seems far fetched, the figures largely bear it out. The extent to which, in the Easter Rising, Christian Brothers boys elbowed aside the Jesuit boys who had imagined themselves as a ruling class in waiting, can be gauged by comparing two schools on the northside of Dublin. The Jesuit Belvedere College supplied five ex pupils to the ranks of the rebels; the Christian Brothers O'Connell Schools supplied 125. Seven of the 14 men executed as leaders of the Rising were Christian Brothers boys. Three of the five members of the IRA executive elected in 1917, including the chief of staff Cathal Brugha, were in the same category. Of the seven man Cabinet appointed by the Dail in 1921, five - Kevin O'Higgins, Austin Stack and Arthur Griffith as well as de Valera and Brugha had spent their schooldays praying for the beatification of Edmund Rice.

And in the new State the Christian Brothers schools became a testing ground for narrow ambitions. In the Synge Street Yearbook for 1947, for instance, Todd Andrews, then managing director of Bord na Mona, wrote an obituary for the school's recently deceased headbrother:

"BOYS attending Synge Street came from modest homes. They had no influence, no contacts, no background, the auspices were not favourable for their advancement in fields of professional endeavour. Brother Roche foresaw the changing times and the shift of power from the alien to the native.. . He applied his vitality to equip his pupils to take their part in forming the new regime that was coming and actually came as he left Synge Street."

The idea that Edmund Rice might have imagined himself to be about something more profound than equipping the children of the lower middle class for the dour competition for cushy jobs in a claustrophobic society hardly seemed to matter. In a sense, the Christian Brothers were too successful for their own good. An institution which drew its moral purpose and self image from Edmund Rice's idea of reaching out beyond the bounds of respectable society had become itself one of markers of those very boundaries. An order which had started with the idea of serving the outsiders had become the ultimate insider, lodged in the heads of those who held and those who hoped to hold power.

Edmund Rice's followers made themselves such an indispensable part of a narrow, nationalist society, that, in spite of the good intentions of some of their leaders, it was impossible to re assert his radical values. And by the time change became inevitable, it could only be a decline. The Brothers were so closely identified with a repressive past that fewer and fewer even of those drawn to a life of religious service saw them as a cause worth serving. An institution that had seemed inextricable from Irish life all but collapsed within a decade. Perhaps with the passing of its power, the time is, after all, right for the beatification of Edmund Rice. Even if he has not yet joined the company of the saints, his memory has at least been released from the mundane and sometimes tragic reality which for so long held it in thrall.