Founders Week

Founder’s Week 2025:  Each year our 13 Xaverian Brothers Sponsored Schools (XBSS) in the United States celebrate a special week in the history of the Congregation of the Brothers and in the lives of our schools.  Called Founder’s Week, it commemorates the death of the Founder of the Xaverian Brothers, Theodore James Ryken, on November 26, 1871, and culminates with the December 3^rd Feast of St. Francis Xavier, the venerated Spanish missionary after-whom Ryken named his Congregation.  In practice at our schools, the week begins with the Sunday following the 26^th, this year celebrated from Sunday, November 30^th, through Sunday, December 7^th.

Founder’s Week gives us opportunity to reflect on how God allowed his grace to work through the life of a willing, though somewhat ordinary, flawed man intent on bringing a vision to life.  Ryken, born in Holland, August 30, 1797, was orphaned as a child and was raised by a pious uncle.  By trade, a shoemaker, he spent his early adulthood as a catechist, and inspired by the religious fervor of the age, he wanted to create a religious institute of men who would carry God’s word to missionary lands.  By 1837 he had written a plan for that institute, and in 1839 with Pontifical approval, Ryken founded the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Francis Xavier in Bruges, Belgium.  An initial impulse to work with native Americans gave way to the recognition that there were great needs among the local impoverished youth of Europe and among immigrants to the United States.  Xaverian ministry here began in Louisville, KY, in 1854.

The Congregation had a slow and shaky start, with financial challenges for the first two decades and nativist bigotry in America, but by the time of his death, Ryken could be pleased that there were 133 Brothers and nine communities working among the poor in Belgium, England, and the United States.  In 1860, twenty-one years after he had founded the Congregation, it was clear that his financial management skills could not meet the challenges that beset the community, so Ryken stepped out of the role of Superior General and for the remaining twenty years of his life served humbly as a member of the Congregation he had created and farmed vegetables for the Brothers’ local school.

Through Founder’s Week, we celebrate that we at Malden Catholic are the legacy of Ryken; that each year now over 12,000 students receive a Catholic education in the tradition of the Xaverian Brothers at our 13 Sponsored U.S. schools; that Xaverian Brothers ministries are also at work in South Sudan, Congo, and Kenya.  Ryken was a man known for his plodding persistence.  His achievements seemed not to derive from extraordinary talents or abilities but from unfailing faith in God, from answering a call, and from a willingness to be a humble instrument of God’s activity through him.  Today, too, the Brothers and those who share partnership in their mission try to find God in the common, ordinary, unspectacular flow of everyday living.  As heirs of Ryken, let us be bold in allowing our faith and trust in God to guide our steps.

We invoke Ryken in the Malden Catholic Prayer with which we begin many of our school days:

God of all, we ask your blessings on this day.

We pray that we may become men and women of simplicity…… humility ……., compassion……….,  trust………, and zeal.

Let our work today and everyday be a reflection of your love.

May all that we do serve to strengthen the Malden Catholic Family and the world.

Lord, help us to imitate the model provided by Theodore James Ryken and the Xaverian

Brothers, so that we too may fall in love with serving one another

and in doing so build your kingdom on earth.

All this we ask through the intercession of St. Francis Xavier. Amen.

 

Brother Thomas Puccio, C.F.X., H’18, Ed.D.