Saint John Baptist de La Salle

Into that injustice stepped a canon of Reims Cathedral, a man of noble birth, who dared to go against the tide of his time: he gave up his lucrative canonry, gave up his family’s fine mansion, gave away his vast fortune to the poor, and went to live with poor schoolmasters, opening a network of completely free schools for the children of struggling working people.

His revolution in education reshaped modern teaching, and the Church has always honored him as patron of all Christian educators.

At eleven he received the tonsure and clerical dress. At sixteen he was made a canon of the Cathedral of Reims, a highly honored position with a generous income, assuring him a brilliant future in the Church hierarchy. In 1670 he entered the famous seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris to study theology at the Sorbonne.

At twenty-one, the young seminarian had to set aside his studies in Paris and return to Reims to take on the role of head of the family, managing the family property and raising six younger brothers and sisters. He fulfilled his family duties while persevering in his theological studies in Reims.

On April 9, 1678, Holy Saturday, John Baptist de La Salle was ordained a priest, and two years later he brilliantly defended his doctoral thesis in theology. Every honor, even a bishop’s miter or a cardinal’s hat, seemed within easy reach of the young priest, a nobleman with a doctorate.

At first, Father de La Salle agreed to help only as an act of charity from the outside. He stood as guarantor, rented a small house and paid the teachers to open the school. Later, in his spiritual memoirs, he admitted honestly:

“If I had known then that the help I first gave would eventually lead me to spend my whole life with poor schoolmasters, I would have pulled back from the very start! For at that time I considered primary schoolmasters lower than the servants in my own house!”

He saw with his own eyes the coarseness, lack of morals and ignorance of the schoolmasters of the time: they treated teaching as just a makeshift way to earn a living, had no teaching method, and were bad-tempered and beat their pupils. And the poor pupils were grubby and unruly, growing up like weeds in the street.

He sat at the same table with them, taught them good manners, guided them in prayer and passed on to them sound methods of teaching. His family, feeling their noble honor gravely insulted, fiercely objected and tried to drive the schoolmasters out of the house.

He made a revolutionary decision: members of the institute would never be ordained priests, but would always remain only “Brothers”, so that they could give their whole lives without reserve to the human and Christian education of poor children. Their simple black habit, with its white collar bands and short sleeveless mantle, became a familiar sight at school doors.

First was teaching in the mother tongue: at that time, schools required pupils to learn to spell and read in Latin first, which made it very hard for poor children and led many to drop out. Father de La Salle was the first to insist on teaching pupils to read and write in their own French first, and only afterwards in Latin.

Next came the simultaneous method, teaching by class: before his time, a teacher taught pupils one at a time, while the others sat idle or made trouble. He pioneered dividing pupils of similar levels into separate classes, with the teacher explaining the lesson to the whole class, who listened and discussed together.

Seeing that the quality of education depends on the teacher, he founded “training schools for teachers” (forerunners of today’s teachers’ colleges) in Reims and Paris to form teachers in both skill and character.

He also opened technical and commercial schools for young men, Sunday evening classes for workers, and the first reform school in Rouen for young offenders sentenced by the courts. Most basic of all, every De La Salle school was completely free for the children of the poor, and open to all.

In his last years his health failed from asthma and chronic rheumatism. He moved to live at the house of Saint-Yon in the city of Rouen.

His body was buried in Rouen, but his remains later had a long and troubled journey, much like his life: during the French Revolution his tomb was violated, though fortunately his relics survived intact; in 1904, when the Brothers were expelled from France, the remains were taken to Belgium; and only in 1937 were they solemnly brought to rest permanently in the church bearing his name next to the institute’s headquarters in Rome, where pilgrims still come to venerate them today. Another part of his relics is kept at the main altar of the Cathedral of Reims, where he had once been a young canon before giving up everything.

On May 15, 1950, Pope Pius XII solemnly proclaimed Saint John Baptist de La Salle “Principal Patron of all educators and teachers”. The Church celebrates him on April 7 each year; De La Salle schools celebrate on May 15.

In Vietnam, the De La Salle Brothers have been present since 1866, helping lay the foundations of modern education with well-known schools such as Taberd School in Saigon, Pellerin School in Huế and Bá Ninh School in Nha Trang, along with many free schools for poor children.

He told teachers:

“Touch the hearts of your pupils and transform them with love... Remember that you are their guardians, the guardian angels God has sent to lead these children into the light of knowledge and salvation!”