Page 15 - March On! God will Provide by Brother Aubert

FOREWORD xlll
we had gone into what was then the Belgian Congo in
l93l-asked for twenty lines of prime source material
on the Founder of the Xaverian Brothers, we could not
provide the data.
In 1939, the centennial year of the founding of the
Congregation, the American Provincial, Brother Ed-
mund, unearthed in the American archives a bundle of
letters addressed to Theodore J. Ryken. what aroused
his curiosity was a notation on the outside wrapping:
"Brought from Bruges after the extraordinary General
Chapter, 1895, by Brother Bernardine under instruc-
tions from Brother Alexius, Provincial." When Brother
Edmund read the letters, he realized that he had stum-
bled on a very appropriate "find" for the centennial
celebration: eleven letters which Ryken had obtained
when he visited the United States in 1837-1838. Seven
were from bishops and four from priest-members of
religious Orders, all of whom approved the Ryken pro-
posal to found a Brotherhood to labor on the American
mission. There was a twelfth letter, one written by the
Prior of },Iont des Olives in Alsace, vouching for Brother
Ryken's exemplary conduct as a Trappist novice and
assuring him that he would be welcomed to profession
if and nhen the monks could reassemble. These Trap-
pists as a result of the anticlericalism stirred up in 1830
in the rvake of the July Revolution were abandoning
their monastery.
Using these letters as background material, Brother
Edmund wrote the retreat conferences for the summer
of 1939, and once again the life of Ryken and his un-
written biography loomed up as the conspicuous miss-
ing link in the history of a Congregation celebrating its
centennial.
These Ryken letters had been "discovered" before.
In 1926 Brother Justin Higdon, C.F.X., had used photo-