LITTLE BROTHERS OF MARY (Marist Brothers of the Schools). - A male lay institute whose purpose is the instruction and education of youth in colleges and schools, founded by the Ven. Marcellin Champagnat (v.) in 1817.
Under the reign of Louis XVIII first and then of Charles X, the Brothers, whom the people called Bleur from the color of their first habit, and later Marists because of the special devotion that the new Institute professed to the Most Holy Mary, established themselves more and more, and after the school of La Valla those of Marlhes, of St-Saveur, of Bourg Argentat and others were founded in the Loire region, and the formation center was transferred from La Valla to l'Hermitage, about 3 km. from St-Chamond. In the anticlerical and revolutionary disturbances of 1850, when religious were abandoning the clerical habit and hiding, Champagnat instead carried out the clothing of the postulants and ordered that the Salve Regina be sung every morning, a practice that still today opens the day of the Marist Brothers. But already in 1831 the Institute crossed the borders of the Loire and established itself in the Dauphiné; in 1836 in Burgundy, in 1838 in northern France and in other departments. In June 1840, at the death of Champagnat, the Little Brothers of Mary numbered 280 in 47 houses with 7,000 pupils.
Under his immediate successor Brother Francis (1840-60), the Institute reached such a development as to absorb similar institutions, such as the Brothers of Christian Instruction (1842) and the Brothers of Vivier (1844). After the Falloux law of 1850, official recognition of the Institute was deemed indispensable, and it was obtained that same year by decree of the President of the Republic. In 1858 the general administration was transferred from l'Hermitage to the new seat of St-Genis-Laval in the suburbs of Lyons. To Brother Francis also belongs the merit of having collected and printed in 1853 the Guide des écoles, the pedagogical and didactic code sketched out by Champagnat. Rome granted the decree of praise on 9 Dec. 1859 and definitive approval on 9 Jan. 1863. After that the Institute continued its expansion throughout the world despite the persecutions in Mexico and that of the Spanish revolution (1936), in which as many as 172 Little Brothers of Mary fell.
Such vigor of development is due to the methods introduced by Champagnat, namely: a) a spiritual didactic method in accustoming children to the thought of the presence of God and to the maternal love of Mary; b) a pedagogical method that makes teachers and pupils brothers, making of the school a great family from which, absolutely, from the very beginning, afflictive punishments were banished. The fusion of the methods then existing into the simultaneous-mutual one, the adoption for reading of the phonic system in place of the syllabic (1828), the introduction of the singing lesson as a teaching discipline, the preventive method and the activistic method of "formation-action," used in the formation of the Brothers for their educational mission, were true innovations due to Champagnat. Another characteristic note of the Marist Brothers is the development among them of the missionary spirit. It may be said that this impulse kept Marist Fathers and Brothers united at the beginning, so much so that they set out together for Oceania as early as 1836. Brother Hyacinthe was the first martyr of the Institute (1847). The missions of Oceania were followed by those of the Cape Colony (1867), the foundation of Sydney (1873), of New Caledonia and New Zealand (1876), of Samoa and Fiji (1888) and above all that of China (1891), where four Marist brothers were killed in Peking in 1900, five at Nantchang in 1906, and the last was shot by the communists on 21 Apr. 1951. The missions of the Belgian Congo, of Madagascar, of Ceylon, of Rhodesia, of Niassa, and the more recent ones of the Philippines, of Malaya, of Mozambique and of Japan also flourished. The Institute is today divided into 31 provinces, with 719 schools or colleges, and numbers 12,728 members, including those in formation, with 220,000 pupils.