St. John Baptist de La Salle: The Canon Who Sat Down

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HTM009: In 1679, a twenty-nine-year-old canon of Reims Cathedral sat across from a handful of poor schoolmasters he had invited home to teach them table manners, and he was disgusted. He said so later, in words that survive him: he ranked these men below his own valet, and the thought of living among them was unbearable to him.

Forty years later he died as one of them.

Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle — the wealthy young cleric who sponsored a charity school as a favor and ended up giving away everything he had. When the schoolmasters kept quitting, he fed them. When that wasn’t enough, he moved them into a house in 1681 and moved in himself, against the horror of his own family. When they pointed out that trust in providence comes cheap to a man with a guaranteed income, he resigned his canonry and in the famine winter of 1683 sold his inheritance and gave it to people who were starving.

What he built afterward had no name yet. Men who taught as a full vocation rather than a stepping stone to ordination, living under vows as brothers, with no priests among them at all — a rule he enforced so strictly that he kept his own priesthood outside the community and never let a brother be ordained. The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools was founded in 1694, and the man who founded the Christian Brothers kept it exactly what it claimed to be: teachers, and nothing grander.

The classroom is where he is still felt. He had his brothers teach in French rather than Latin, so a boy who would never see a university could read what mattered in his own life. He grouped students by ability instead of tutoring them one at a time while the rest sat idle. He demanded order and silence. He wrote out twelve virtues he expected of the teacher himself — gravity, silence, humility, prudence, wisdom, patience, reserve, gentleness, zeal, vigilance, piety, generosity. In 1685, at Reims, he opened what is generally counted as the first teacher training college in history, so the method could outlive any one man.

It nearly destroyed him. The licensed schoolmasters and the Writing Masters’ guild of Paris sued him again and again for schooling children who could not pay, and church authorities there stripped him of authority over his own institute. In 1712, worn out, he simply left for a mountain retreat at Parménie, where an illiterate woman named Sister Louise pointed him back toward the brothers. In 1714 they invoked the vow of obedience he had bound them to and ordered their own founder home.

He stepped down in 1717, spent his last years teaching novices their letters at Saint-Yon, and died on Good Friday, April 7, 1719. Pius XII named him the patron saint of teachers in 1950. His schools now run in seventy-nine countries.

Is there a table you’ve been avoiding?

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