Br. Cerinus David

Born on June 1, 1843, in Catelbar, County Mayo, Ireland, Edward McDonnell and his family emigrated to the United States where at age twenty-five, he sought entrance to religious life at the Brothers' Novitiate at Carondelet. There, in 1868, he received the habit of the Brother and the religious name of Brother Cerinus David. His first teaching assignment was to St. Vincent's Academy in Jefferson Parish, New Orleans, where he served until the school closed in 1875. He was then assigned to Cathedral School in Mobile, where he began a life long friendship with Father Ryan, the poet-priest of the South. From 1884 to 1909 he served at St. Malachy's School in St. Louis, Missouri, (for twenty-five years), at the Orphanage in Feehanville, and at Christian Brothers College in Memphis. In 1909, cancer of the stomach caused him to retire to the Community of Ancients in Glencoe, Missouri, where he died in 1912 at the age of sixty-nine, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for forty-four years.