About

This is a record of a journey to Ireland from July 1-10, 2010. The participants? Regina and her husband, Sean. Regina is the Director of Mission Integration at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. Sean is a physician and by avocation a finger-style guitarist. (They both have Irish roots: Regina’s family came over from  Cavan, Dublin, Galway, and Mayo, and Sean’s from Kerry, Cork, Longford — and Krakow!). Because Regina works for the Christian Brothers, she is undertaking this trip to visit the Irish sites associated with the founder of the Christian Brothers, Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice (1762-1844). Blessed Edmund was exceptionally humble, even by the standards of sainthood, and so we have very little material written about Edmund in his own lifetime, let alone a memoir or commissioned biography–we know less about Edmund’s day-to-day life than we do about some saints who lived hundreds of years earlier. To understand his founding charism, then, it is all the more important to visit the schools he founded; the rooms where he lived; the village of his birth; the port where he flourished as a merchant and as a young family man, the quays and streets and byways he walked.  So that’s why we’re making the trip. Pray for us, Blessed Edmund, that the road rises to meet us — and that we stay on the Left!