Who was Edmund Rice? The life & times of our founder.

Who was Edmund Rice?

“…It's symbolic, somehow, of Edmund engaging with people and enabling them to flourish, to get out of this, that which holds them back, to liberate them. That word can be used. Edmund didn't use that word, but we can say he was a liberator in a way, whether it be through the children who came to the schools. And often now we use the words “liberating education”, because he had an effect. He didn't realise it at the time, but he had an effect that was part of educating a whole set of generations of Irish people that never would have had education. Part of that was a sense of their own nationhood that developed out of that. It's no accident that the majority of volunteers in the Irish Rebellion of 1916 were from Christian Brothers schools, not from the Jesuit schools or the other schools. Now, I don't think we'd call Edmund a revolutionary politically, although he sort of knew both sides. But he had to deal with and exist in a British-controlled setup and technically was operating against the law by setting up a religious order in Ireland. That was he was contrary to the law and Prime Minister Wellington knew that, but he was never acted against…”

Br Sean McManus sat down with us and shared his insights of Edmund Rice. This conversation was recorded in December 2022.

“People talked about Edmund's integrity, people talked about his compassion and his energy. I don't know that we can all have his energy, but there was a wholeheartedness about what he was doing and that was channelled then through into education. And this was his way of making people flourish, enabling them to flourish, to get beyond the things that block them. And that's valid today in good education...”

~ Br Sean McManus on Edmund Rice, 2022