SAINT JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE

St. John Baptist de la Salle

Feast day: April 7
Patron: of Teachers



Born at Rheims, France, April 30, 1651;
Died at Rouen, France, on April 7, 1719;
canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1900;
Named patron of teachers by Pope Pius XII in 1950;
feast day formerly on May 15.

John-Baptist de la Salle was the eldest of ten children of a wealthy and noble family. He was destined for the priesthood at age 10, tonsured the following year, and was actually made a canon of Rheims cathedral 11 years (1667) before he was ordained a priest in 1678, following his seminary training at Saint Sulpice in Paris. He seemed set for a brilliant ecclesiastical career for he was striking in appearance, well connected, refined, and scholarly. Soon after his ordination, however, he met Adrian Nyel, a layman who was opening a school in Rheims for poor boys in 1679.

He found himself drawn more and more into the project. First he rented a house for the seven masters and fed them at his table. In 1681, he invited them to share his own home in order to instill in them the high educational ideals forming in his own mind. Two of his own brothers left soon after, then five of the school masters. The endeavor seemed about to fail.

Finally, John-Baptist decided to devote himself to the mission. In 1683, he resigned his canonry and distributed his family inheritance for the relief of the famine-stricken in Champagne. Thus freed of other obligations, he dedicated himself to the education of the poor. After a false start, he realized that the first problem was the provision of teachers, so he himself began to train laymen as teachers. He called the twelve young men he gathered together the "Brethren of the Christian Schools' (which did not receive papal approval until 1725). La Salle's original intention was to have priests in his institution to take charge of each house, but when his designated successor Brother L'Heureux, whom he was about to present for ordination, died unexpectedly, he doubted whether he design had been according to God's plan. It was ultimately decided when he drew up the rule in 1695 that they should all in fact be laybrothers and no priest could become a Christian Brother. This work went on simultaneously with opening schools.

Saint John-Baptist de la Salle established the first teachers' colleges because parish priests continually sent him young men to train as teachers before returning to schools in their own villages. He sought to inspire his teachers with "a father's love for their pupils, ready to devote all their time and energies to them, as concerned to save them from wickedness as to dispel their ignorance. There were no such teachers for the poor."

In 1688, he took over a free school in Paris and started teacher training colleges in Rheims (1687), Paris (1699), and Saint-Denis (1709), and established a junior novitiate in 1685 for boys aged 15 to 20. In Paris he also introduced Sunday-schools. In 1700, the brothers opened a school in Rome. By that point they had opened schools in Avignon, Calais, Languedoc, Provence, Rouen, and Dijon.

In 1698, he began teaching the children of those who had come into exile in France with the deposed King James II of England. This brought his ideas and techniques into contact with a more influential sector of society. He was also the first to set up a reform school for delinquent boys at Dijon and even taught prisoners. Today about 20,000 of his brothers, the Christian Brothers, are still teaching throughout the world.

The successful growth of the new congregation provoked violent opposition from professional school-masters and others. In 1702 his enemies managed to get him dismissed, but all his teachers threatened to leave with him, so John-Baptist managed to keep control of his brethren.

His system of education, outlined in The Conduct of Christian Schools (Conduite des ecoles Chretiennes, English translation, 1935), was a milestone in the schooling of the young, with its use of the "simultaneous method" (as opposed to individual instruction) and its teaching through the mother tongue rather than Latin. John-Baptist believed that to teach the poor in Latin (as was the custom) was absurd. They needed to be taught to write and read their own language, and given religious and vocational training.

Matthew Arnold said of this book that later works on the subject hardly improved on its precepts and had none of its religious feeling. La Salle, who had studied at Saint-Sulpice under Louis Tronson, also wrote several works of value on prayer and meditation, including Meditations for Sundays, which was influenced by Bérulle.

Later, spurred by the Jansenists, an attack on teaching anything but manual labor to poor students caused his schools in Paris to be closed, but the storm subsided and they reopened.

John-Baptist resigned in 1717 and retired to Saint Yon, Rouen, where he lived as the humblest of brothers. He suffered from asthma and rheumatism, but would give up none of his habitual austerities. He died on Good Friday at Rouen. In 1937, his relics were translated to Rome