Xaverian Brothers

Theodore James Ryken was born in 1797 in the small village of Elshout, North Brabant, the Netherlands, to ardently Catholic middle class parents.

He felt a calling by God which drew him to work first as a catechist, followed by helping manage an orphanage, and later by caring for cholera patients in the Netherlands.

[2] When Ryken returned to the United States in 1837, Bishop Joseph Rosati of the Diocese of St. Louis, Missouri, persuaded him that the children of Catholic immigrants were in even more need of instruction than Native Americans.

Although many religious institutes were being founded at the time as part of a Catholic revival that succeeded the fall of Napoleon I, Ryken had a different vision.

On June 15, 1839, Ryken, then 42 years old, settled in a rented house on Ezelstraat in the centuries-old city of Bruges, Belgium.

[3] By 1841, the community had grown beyond the space available in the little house on Ezelstraat; with a loan from a sympathetic banker, Ryken purchased a large estate in a neighboring section of Bruges called "Het Walletje", for the moat that surrounded it.

A boys' sodality was opened at Het Walletje, followed shortly by a primary school in the same place; the work of catechizing was taken up at the Church of Notre-Dame, and some attention was given to the training of deaf-mutes.

Ryken willingly turned over his office to a younger man, and spent the last eleven years of his life as a simple member of the institute he had established.

Baltimore was made the center of Xaverian activities in the United States, and in 1876 a novitiate was opened there at the site of Mount Saint Joseph College, where it still stands.

A small Rosary-making club formed by Xaverian Brother Sylvan Mattingly in Louisville, Kentucky in 1949 grew to be the largest Catholic Rosary making group in the United States.