Renewing the Brotherhoods

A brother is not a father in the Roman Catholic Church--and establishing the distinction perennially bothers the brothers. Currently meeting in Rome to stress their identity and work toward reform, Vatican Council style, are general chapters of two of these little-understood congregations: the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and the Christian Brothers of Ireland.

Even some reasonably well-educated Catholics still think of brothers vaguely as "male nuns," California's little old wine makers, or as spoiled priests who didn't quite make the grade, visually because of not knowing enough Latin. Brothers are laymen who take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, live in community, but have no ecclesiastical functions; unlike priests, they do not say Mass or hear confessions.

Profits from the Winery. Most of the traditional religious orders of priests, such as the Benedictines or Dominicans, also have brothers; they are generally second-class citizens of their communities assigned to such menial tasks as running telephone switchboards or monastery kitchens. But there are also 28 modern orders composed primarily or exclusively of brothers, who are (with one exception) not bossed by priests, run their own worldwide networks of schools and hospitals, and are as eager as Jesuits to get Ph.D.s.

The largest of these congregations is the 18,000-member Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded in 1680 by France's St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle. They operate eight colleges and 96 high schools in the U.S.; the schools in California benefit from the profits of the famed Napa Valley winery. Next in size are the Marist Brothers (10,400) and the Irish Christian Brothers (3,900).

Dressed Like Women. More than most churchly organizations, the brothers' groups have good reason to reconsider their rules in the light of the Second Vatican Council. A majority of the congregations are less than two centuries old, and their constitutions generally reflect the rigid piety of the Council of Trent more than the counsels of Christ. The Brothers of the Christian Schools are constitutionally forbidden to accept girls into their schools or teach in institutions not run by the congregation. They must give absolute obedience to their superiors, and until recently spiritual training in the brotherhoods operated on the principle that rote made right. "They dressed us like women and treated us like little boys," complains Irish Christian Brother Richard Unsworth of Montebello, Calif.

The brothers themselves have plenty of ideas of reform. One common complaint is lack of democracy and excess of gerontocracy. Superiors are appointed rather than elected, often are considered ready for authority only at an age when laymen would be considering retirement. "You had to have six strokes to qualify for office," complains one brother. To emphasize their vocation as laymen, some brothers would like to abandon their religious robes; others hold that brothers should now be ordained as priests or deacons to help solve the church's worldwide shortage of clerics. But chastity is not a burning issue--"marriage and monasticism are mutually exclusive," says a Benedictine brother.

Spirit of the Founders. In the midst of a great society that has declared war on poverty, the brothers are also reconsidering what it means to be poor. Marist Brother Kevin B. Donohue of Washington's Catholic University suggests that the brotherhoods' spirit of poverty would be better defined as simplicity. Although most of the congregations were organized to educate the poor, at least half the students in U.S. schools run by the brothers are white, middle-class Catholics.

Although vocations are few and far between in Europe, the congregations in the U.S. have more than held their own--which to some brothers is ample proof that they have not yet lost their vitality or their usefulness to the church. They believe that current questions about the role of the brother can only lead to what Irish Christian Brother John Brickell of Chicago calls "a deeper understanding of our vocation rather than any change in its nature."

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