Saint John Baptist de La Salle

Saint John Baptist de La Salle was a French priest who gave up his office as a canon and his family fortune in order to devote himself to free schools for poor children. He founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools and is the patron saint of teachers. The Church commemorates him on April 7, the anniversary of his death.

He was born on April 30, 1651, in Reims, the eldest child of a wealthy family. In 1667, while still in his teens, he took possession of a canonry at the cathedral there. He was studying theology in Paris, but when by 1672 both of his parents had died, he returned to Reims to care for his younger brothers and sisters. He was ordained a priest on April 9, 1678, and two years later received a doctorate in theology.

In 1679 he met Adrien Nyel, a layman who had come to Reims to open free schools for poor boys, and agreed to help him. He soon saw that the weakest point of these schools was the teachers themselves, poorly prepared and lacking in zeal. He began to train them, invited them to his table, and in 1681 took them into his own home. In 1683 he resigned his canonry, and when famine struck Champagne at the turn of 1684 and 1685, he gave his fortune away to the poor.

Out of this community grew the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Its members do not receive priestly ordination: they are religious who give their whole lives to the school. In 1688 the Brothers took up work in Paris. In their schools children learned to read in French, not in Latin, and worked in classes rather than one by one with the teacher. De La Salle also founded seminaries for country schoolteachers, Sunday schools for young working people, and a home for boys who had come into conflict with the law. He set down the principles for running the schools in a handbook for teachers, and for the Brothers he composed a rule and meditations.

From the beginning the work met with opposition. The masters of the fee-paying schools brought lawsuits against the Brothers, and the schools in Paris were closed by court rulings. In 1702, after a canonical visitation, the archbishop of Paris removed the founder from the direction of the community. At the hardest time De La Salle went to the south of France and wondered whether he himself was not harming his own work. In 1714 the Brothers summoned him by letter to return, and he obeyed.

He spent his last years at the house of Saint-Yon in Rouen, which the Brothers had run since 1705. In 1717 the chapter elected Brother Barthélemy superior general, and from then on the founder lived as one of the Brothers. He died at Saint-Yon on Good Friday, April 7, 1719.

In 1725 Benedict XIII approved the institute and its rule. Leo XIII beatified John Baptist de La Salle on February 19, 1888, and canonized him on May 24, 1900. On May 15, 1950, Pius XII proclaimed him the heavenly patron of all teachers and educators. Since 1937 his relics have rested in the Brothers’ generalate in Rome.