Saint John Baptist de La Salle: Our Founding Story
The life of our Founder is perhaps best understood as a story of one man's openness to God's providential will, an openness that took many years and countless decisions to cultivate. His biography is not filled with amazing tales of the miraculous, nor would one discover the accounts of great adventure or dramatic moments of epiphany that one might associate with the lives of saints. Rather, De La Salle was a man whose steps toward heroic virtue could be at times unsteady and unsure.
John Baptist De La Salle was born on April 30, 1651 in Rheims, France during the reign of Louis XIV, the so-called "Sun King". The eldest of eleven children, De La Salle was raised in the midst of privilege and modest wealth, and eventually made known his intention to enter the priesthood. While a teenager, De La Salle was made a canon in thecathedral, a position of great honor and financial benefit, and one that placed him on a course for high ecclesiastical power. But his life took an unexpected turn with the death of both of his parents before his ordination. He left the seminary to take care of his younger brothers, but eventually returned for his ordination and the resumption of his climb to high church rank.
In March 1679, a chance encounter with a stranger would change De La Salle's life. Adrien Nyel, a layman and an administrator of social services for the poor, met the young priest at the doorway of a convent the two men happened to be visiting. De La Salle was recruited by Nyel to assist with the opening of a parish school for poor boys. It was a reluctant first step on a journey that led De La Salle to new places he never envisioned for himself, including the founding of many more schools for poor boys and a religious community of lay teachers--men he called "Brothers"-- to conduct those schools.
Led by God from one commitment to another, De La Salle gradually found himself immersed in the world of the poor and their desperate need for education. Challenged by his Brothers to rely on Providence, he resigned his canonry in Rheims and, over the next thirty years, would establish throughout France a wide array of institutions to meet the needs of the poor: primary schools, teacher training centers, boarding schools, and homes for delinquents. Although regarded as something of an educational innovator because of his insistence that children be taught practical subjects and religion in their native tongue (and not in Latin) and because of his use of the simultaneous method of instruction (and not private tutorials), De La Salle was, above all, a visionary who regarded schools as communities of faith. Teachers are "ambassadors of Christ" and "ministers of grace", he later wrote, who stand in a providential and privileged relationship with their students.
Near the end of his life, De La Salle reflected on his early years noting that if he had known then of all the challenges that lay ahead, he might never have taken the first step. Among the difficulties he encountered were the departure and deaths of many of his Brothers, lawsuits brought by those who ran competing schools, and tensions with some in highest levels of the French church. In April 1719, as De La Salle lay dying, the Archbishop of Rouen stripped him of his priestly faculties owing to some minor point of contention. On Good Friday, when asked by a Brother if he accepted his sufferings, the Founder replied: "Yes, I adore in all things the will of God in my regard." These were the last words of the man whose untiring faith and zeal inspired a modest revolution in Christian education in his day, and whose vision some 320 years later continues to stir the hearts of educators the world round.