St. John Baptist de la Salle

St. John Baptist de la Salle was born on April 30, 1651, in Reims, France, the eldest son of a wealthy and well-connected family. Marked out early for an ecclesiastical career, he was named a canon of the cathedral of Reims at sixteen, studied at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and was ordained a priest in 1678, later earning a doctorate in theology. Nothing in his comfortable beginnings suggested the radical path his life would take. That path opened almost by accident, when he was asked to help organize a charity school for poor boys in Reims. Drawn step by step into the work, he came to see the education of the children of artisans and the poor as his God-given mission. He took the rough, untrained schoolmasters into his own home to form them, resigned his canonry, and during the famine of 1683–84 gave away his personal fortune to the poor. Around this community of teachers he founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools (the De La Salle Christian Brothers), a religious institute of laymen — deliberately not priests — wholly consecrated to teaching. De la Salle proved one of the great innovators in the history of education. He championed teaching whole classes together rather than tutoring pupils one by one, insisted on instruction in French rather than Latin, grouped students by ability, and opened what are considered among the first teacher-training colleges, along with Sunday courses for working young men and programs for delinquent boys. The work drew fierce opposition and lawsuits from fee-charging schoolmasters, and internal trials as well, all of which he bore with patience and deep trust in Providence. He died at the Brothers' house of Saint-Yon in Rouen on Good Friday, April 7, 1719. Canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1900, he was declared the special patron of all teachers of youth by Pope Pius XII in 1950. His feast is kept on April 7, and his relics are venerated in the Sanctuary of St. John Baptist de la Salle at the Brothers' generalate in Rome, while the schools of his institute continue his mission on every continent.