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Becoming a Brother
The Christian Brothers hear "Move To The Margins!"
The Call to People
at the Margins of Society
This is one of the major directions the Christian Brothers worldwide have chosen to follow. The "cutting edge" of the Order is most obvious in the countries of the Third World in which the Brothers and their co-workers have moved in the past couple of decades. For example, there are Brothers and lay co-workers in South Africa. As every country, even those usually considered affluent, has marginalised groups of people, Brothers all around the world are looking at all their ministries and asking "How
is this ministry responding to people at the margins?"
Groups like the Christian Brothers that were established long ago to provide health care and education for people who would
otherwise have to go without, have become, in a sense, victims of their own success.
For example, the people who were educated by the Brothers and Sisters in the past have for the most part done well, and their grandchildren and great grandchildren are now not usually among the marginalised of our society. The Orders feel a pressure to remain faithful to their traditional "clientele", the families they have helped educate perhaps for generations and who have helped them; but there is also a pressure to reach out to today's less fortunate ones, those who seem to be missing out, caught in a sort of "underclass" of deprivations and disabilities.
Thus, in the case of the Christian Brothers, while they maintain their traditional schools, some over a century old, they also look
to the establishment of annexes to provide education for youngsters who seem to be unable to manage in the usual school setting.
The good news is that in the annexes, the boys and girls find a new sense of hope and a sense of purpose in life.
Too often these days families and individuals in families come under more stress than they can manage, so the Brothers have also
become involved in providing crisis accommodation in refuges for youngsters. And when the immediate crisis has passed, in providing medium and longer-term accommodation.
So we are living in exciting times.
If a generation ago the word BROTHER
made you think SCHOOL MASTER,
these days BROTHER
is more likely to suggest BROTHER!
While the Australian society that we know espouses social justice as an ideal, it is true that many people are still missing out on
quite basic provisions. The Edmund Rice Foundation has been established by the Christian Brothers
to fund initiatives that seek to alleviate the poverty that is an affront to human dignity, especially of the youth of this country.
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