Formerly known as ‘The Holy Ghost Fathers’, the Spiritans are an international Catholic missionary religious order founded in France in 1703. The Spiritans identify service of those most in need as the preferred focus of the congregation’s mission. In an effort to secure English-speaking priests for the foreign missions, the Spiritans moved to Ireland and in 1860 founded Blackrock College. Today, through their patron body, the Spiritan Education Trust (SET), they act as patron to five second-level fee charging schools. Fee charging schools represent 8% of the 723 second-level schools in Ireland and cater for 7% of the total enrolment. In October 2007 the Department of Education and Skills announced that no new fee charging schools would be granted state recognition. Criticisms of fee charging schools as agents of educational inequality and social class division are extensively documented. At the same time the public domain is characterised by an absence of literature that examines the contribution that fee charging schools make to Irish society. This qualitative intrinsic case study, shaped by a constructivist-interpretive paradigm, explores the understanding and nature of the Spiritan mission of service currently offered in second-level fee charging Spiritan schools, from the perspective of principals, patron and parents. The perception that these schools, by the nature of their socio-economic composition and through their fee charging structures, serve the rich as opposed to the poor, is also addressed. Employing semi-structured interviews, survey questionnaire and documentary analysis, the ‘insider’ researcher acts as a facilitator of multi-voice reconstruction. This study reveals an uneasy tension surrounding Spiritan patronage of fee charging schools. Findings indicate a rich tapestry of opinion and perspective among participants in relation to their perception of the Spiritan mission of service and suggest that the nature of the service offered tends to be narrow as opposed to integral. Findings also indicate a commitment from key stakeholders to exploring creative ways of responding to the challenge to bear witness to the espoused Spiritan mission to serve the poor in an integral manner. This research concludes with a series of recommendations, arising from the findings, which are intended to act as a stimulus for further reflection among the stakeholder groups. This research also contributes to a public understanding of how a particular religious order conceives of its mission in a contemporary context.