Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice

Life

Edmund Rice was born on 1 June 1762 at Westcourt, near Callan, County Kilkenny, the fourth of seven sons of a tenant farmer at a time when the Penal Laws still placed severe restrictions on Catholic education, worship and inheritance in Ireland. Educated quietly at a so-called hedge school and afterwards by an Augustinian friar, he was sent at seventeen to Waterford to apprentice with an uncle in the ship-chandlering trade.

A shrewd and successful businessman, he built up a considerable fortune supplying provisions to the trans-Atlantic merchant fleet at Waterford. In 1785 he married Mary Elliott; she died less than four years later in a riding accident, leaving him a young widower with a disabled infant daughter. The double sorrow turned him decisively toward God.

For the next decade Rice combined business with serious charitable work — visiting prisons, supporting widows, ransoming sailors held on debt-charges — while quietly considering whether to enter a continental monastery. The advice of Bishop Hussey of Waterford and of Pope Pius VI's encouragement, conveyed informally, pointed him in another direction: to remain a layman in Ireland but to dedicate his wealth to the education of the poor boys of his city.

In 1802 he sold his business and opened his first school in a converted stable at New Street, Waterford. Two associates joined him; in 1803 they moved into a purpose-built house and chapel at Mount Sion. From this small beginning grew, in 1808, the Society of the Presentation, and in 1820 the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a pontifically approved institute of religious brothers devoted exclusively to the free education of Catholic boys.

Under Rice's leadership the brothers multiplied across Ireland and into England. He served as Superior General from 1822 to 1838, when failing health obliged him to retire. He died at Mount Sion on 29 August 1844 in his eighty-third year. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 6 October 1996.