Page 14 - March On! God will Provide by Brother Aubert

Xll FOREWORD
the one major Superior living outside the War Zone,
Brother Isidore had to assume many responsibilities in
the general government. He carried the future of the
Xaverian Brothers on his shoulders and he knew it.
Brother Isidore had put aside, temporarily he thought,
his delving into the life-story of Theodore Ryken. Usu­
ally he could "make" time, but the work piled up. At
the General Chapter after World War I, he was one of
those chosen to rewrite the Constitution of the Xaverian
Brothers so that it would be in accord with the new Code
of Canon Law. Practically all the work involved in this
revision was wished off on the chairman, Brother Isidore.
Finally with his advancing years-he died in 1935 in
his eighties-he realized that he would never write that
biography but he consoled himself with the hope that
some day someone would do what he had been forced to
leave undone.
And although Brother Isidore perhaps never heard
about it, someone was actually at work. Brother Ferdi­
nand de Muynck of the Belgian Province, at the request
of Brother Paul, the Superior General, was writing his
recollections of the Founder and the early days of the
Congregation. This hardy old warrior began on or
about Dec. 9, 1928, which was his eighty-first birthday
and kept at it steadily until he had produced a 45,000
word manuscript, partly in Flemish and mostly in French.
Those officially assigned to read Brother Ferdinand's
story of the Founder and the early days, shrugged it off
as "his story" rather than "history." No one thought
enough of it to provide an English translation, and that
was unfortunate because Brother Isidore would have
drooled over every word of it.
Few Xaverians outside the Belgian Province knew of
the reminiscences of Brother Ferdinand, so much so that
when the editors of an Encyclopedia of the Missions-