Saint John Baptist de La Salle

John Baptist de La Salle was born in Reims on April 30, 1651, the first of ten children, into a noble family of jurists. His father wanted him to be a lawyer; he studied at the Sorbonne and at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and was ordained a priest at twenty-six. At sixteen he was already a canon of Reims Cathedral: ahead of him lay a comfortable, secure career in the Church. He left it for something nobody considered important back then: teaching the children of craftsmen and the poor. He started by helping a few makeshift schoolmasters, people with no training who taught as best they could. Then he took them into his own home — which, for a canon from a noble family, was a scandal — and set about training them. In the end he gave up his canonry and gave away his fortune. From this came the Brothers of the Christian Schools, the first lay congregation in the history of the Church: religious who are not priests and who do nothing but teach. And ideas were born that seem obvious today and were anything but obvious then: teaching the whole class together instead of one pupil at a time, teaching in French and not in Latin, training teachers before sending them to teach. He wrote catechisms, books of good manners, manuals for teachers. He died in Rouen on April 7, 1719. Leo XIII proclaimed him a saint in 1900, and Pius XII named him patron of all educators. If your name is John Baptist, today is your name day.