Xaverian Brothers Sponsored Schools

The Xaverian Brothers or Congregation of St. Francis Xavier (CFX) are a religious institute founded by Theodore James Ryken in Bruges, Belgium in 1839 and named after Saint Francis Xavier. The institute is dedicated to Roman Catholic education in Belgium, England and the United States.

Theodore James Ryken was born in 1797 in the small village of Elshout, North Brabant, the Netherlands, to ardently Catholic middle class parents. Orphaned at a young age, Ryken was raised by his uncle.

Ryken was trained as a shoemaker. He felt a calling by God which drew him to work first as a catechist, followed by helping manage an orphanage, and later by caring for cholera patients in the Netherlands.

At age 34, Ryken went to North America, where he served as a catechist among the missionaries to the Native Americans. During his three-year tour, he conceived the idea of starting a congregation of brothers to work alongside the missionary priests. On returning to Europe, he set about planning to found such a society in Belgium, a country eminent for missionary zeal.

When Ryken returned to the US in 1837, he decided that the children of Catholic immigrants were more in need of instruction than were those of Native Americans. Bishop Rosati of St. Louis, Missouri encouraged him to found a congregation of laymen to teach all classes of youth. Six other bishops sanctioned his plan to bring religious teachers to the United States.

Ryken served a term of probation in the novitiate of the Redemptorist Fathers to prepare to go to Rome to receive the permission and blessing of Pope Gregory XVI for his mission. He modeled the religious garb of members of his institute after that of the Redemptorists. The spirit of the Xaverian Brothers, on the other hand, can be traced to the influence of Rev. Isidore Van de Kerckhove, the Jesuit confessor and counselor of Ryken; De Kerckhhove drew up the original rules of the order. Although many religious institutes were being founded at the time as part of a Catholic revival that succeeded the fall of Napoleon I, Ryken had a different vision. He wanted to found a missionary institute rather than a congregation that would address the needs of a specific region.

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