The decision was inspired by an event, when as a parish priest he was called to administer the last rites to a dying boy named Jean Baptiste Montagne.

From that moment, Champagnat decided to start training brothers to meet the faith needs of the young people of France.

The Marist Brothers are involved in educational work throughout the world and now conduct primary, secondary and higher education schools, academies, industrial schools, orphanages and retreat houses in 79 countries on five continents: Europe, Africa, The Americas, Asia, and Oceania.

There are approximately 2,500 brothers in 79 countries on 5 continents, working directly and sharing their mission and spirituality with more than 72,000 lay Marists, and together educating close to 654,000 children and young people.

The Marist Brothers are divided into two main administrative units, either "provinces" or "districts", depending on size.

Today, Marist brothers own and run many technical colleges in the Central and Western Pacific, educating young men in nations ravaged by war (such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea).

The stated purpose, according to the official club records, was "to alleviate poverty in Glasgow's East End parishes".

[citation needed] The North American provinces are: In Latin America, "Maristas" are also very active in the following countries: Chile, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela and other countries as well.

It was issued by the 22nd General Chapter and stated that "Abuse is the very antithesis of our Marist values, and undermines the very purpose of our Institute.

[16] The Marist Brothers then offered less in compensation to Fijian survivors, than they had in New Zealand, leading to accusations of racism.

[17] From June 2014, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, initiated as a royal commission of inquiry by the Australian Government and supported by all of its state governments,[18] began investigating the response of Marist Brothers to allegations of child sexual abuse in schools in the ACT, NSW and Queensland.

[27] Other cases, documented in the report, included those related to Brother Chute who, in 2008, was convicted of 19 child sex offences against six of his former students during the period 1985 to 1989.

48 claims had been made of abuse that occurred from 1959 to 1990 at 6 different schools, while 40 students at Marist College Canberra laid complaints during the period 1976 to 1990.

[28] Separately, in August 1996, Brother Gregory Sutton pleaded guilty to a total of 67 child sex offences in relation to 15 students at schools in New South Wales.

[28] In September 2018, Australian Marist Brother Gerard McNamara, 80, was sentenced to nine months in prison for molesting five boys at St Paul's Catholic College, where he served as principal between 1970 and 1975.

[29] In May 2020, McNamara began serving a second stint in prison after pleading guilty to indecent assault of more than 15 male students between 1970 and 1975.

[30] Marist Brother Claudius Pettit, real name Malcolm Thomas Petit, was convicted of child-sex abuse of a boy at a Wellington school in the 1990s.

[38] The trial for the second defendant commenced in March 2019,[39] who declared in court that the institution knew about the abuses but took no action so he "felt protected by the Marists".

[40] He was sentenced to 21 years and 9 months in prison for sexually abusing four children,[41] with the Marist Brothers paying 120,000 euros to each of his proven victims.

[47] Abuse cases in Marist facilities in Chile included several involving diocesan priests Cristián Precht Bañados and Miguel Ortega of the Archdiocese of Santiago.

[49] Precht had been incardinated in the Archdiocese of Santiago, and gained national recognition in the 1980s when he served as head of the Church's Vicariate of Solidarity human rights group that challenged ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet to end the practice of torture in Chile.

Among the 498 were 47 Marist brothers[53] from the dioceses of Burgos, Cartagena, Girona, Lleida, Palencia, Pamplona and Tudela, San Sebastián, Solsona, Terrassa, Teruel and Albarracin, Urgell and Vic.