Ireland had been the home of 47 monasteries of friars, both priests and lay brothers, of the Franciscan Third Order Regular, which were centers of learning.
John Loughlin, the first Bishop of Brooklyn, issued a similar invitation to the Brothers to operate schools for the boys of his diocese in 1858.
[9] In the early 1920s, the camp was the site of an anti-Catholic demonstration by the Ku Klux Klan, which conducted a cross burning on its grounds.
The bishop refused this request, as the community had been introduced into the diocese for the care of parish schools, and he feared that in the event of its members becoming priests this work would suffer.
[11] From the time of their founding, the Brothers had lived as a religious congregation of diocesan right, which put them entirely under the authority of the Bishop of Brooklyn, who served as their Superior General.
In 1989 Pope John Paul II issued a Decree of Praise, which established the Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn as an Institute of Pontifical Right.
[12] At present the Brothers help to staff Catholic high schools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and Raleigh, North Carolina.