•Early Days   •Marists Today   •Timeline

Cerdon, Southeast France

The Early Days

We do this not childishly or lightly or for some human motive or the hope of material benefit, but seriously, maturely, having taken advice, having weighed everything before God…

The beginning work of the Society of Mary was in the Bugey Mountains in southeast France, preaching the Gospel in the snowy winter months when the people were not farming the land.

The Marists first school in the U.S. was a military academy.

From there, Marists founded schools to educate the youth. And when the Holy Father was looking for missionaries for the islands of the western Pacific Ocean, the Society responded.

The Marists came to the United States in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, to serve the needs of French-speaking minorities in Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California. In the U.S., Marists were part of an immigrant Church struggling to survive and prosper in a sometimes anti-Catholic land.

They opened a school in Georgia where Catholics were a very small minority. They undertook missions to the rural poor, especially the Catholic minorities in West Virginia and Georgia; and some Marists focused their energies to support poor working people struggling to secure just wages and safe working conditions.

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