Edmund the Patron of honest businesspeople with a social conscience. At the present moment in world history we are very conscious of the vast economic downturn that is affecting every country. We are appalled at the reckless greed and dishonesty of some in the business and banking world who have brought this about. We desperately look for exemplars of integrity in the business world, and we look to our holy religion to provide models. I suggest that we need look no further than Blessed Edmund Rice.
He was known as a model of fair dealing in his many years as a businessman. He gave many a loan to people who could never approach a bank. His hand was ever open to the poor and he became executor of many charities so that the widow and the orphan might receive what was rightly theirs in many wills and bequests that were often contested by a bigoted and heartless bureaucracy. In his life as a businessman, Edmund had acquired a good working knowledge of the law. Time was of the essence to poor people.
Often Edmund paid out in advance to these poor people from the meagre funds of the Brothers, hoping to claim the money back later from the unreformed and unsympathetic Commissioners of Charitable Donations and Bequests (CCDB). Even as a very old and sick Christian Brother, he undertook many arduous stagecoach journeys from Waterford to Dublin to champion the rights of poor people deprived of their legal and monetary rights. At one stages the Commissioners threatened to seize all the properties of the Brothers as collateral. In February 1839 Edmund wrote: "I am obliged to set off for Dublin this evening. It's well if this work does not kill me." All matters had not been resolved by Edmund's death in 1844, but at a meeting in Dublin Castle on 13 June 1845, William P. Matthews, Secretary of the Commissioners, conceded:
Already, groups representing the Brothers in the United States and Australia have organised ‘working breakfasts' among businessmen and professionals who are past-pupils of the Brothers. During the course of the meeting an input is made on caring ethics in business on the model of ‘Edmund Rice, Businessman'. A discussion ensues, and a collection is taken up for various projects for the poor, sponsored by the Brothers and their Associates, in inner cities in the so-called First World and in deprived areas in Africa, South America and India. There is a growing enthusiasm for this movement. It only goes to show how relevant Edmund Rice and his values are for today's world.
Donal Blake cfc
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