page_title: Jean-Baptiste de La Salle
section_title: Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Baptiste de La Salle / Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools
caption_attribution_description: English: Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle's church, in Paris (Paris XV, France). Français&#160;: Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle, à Paris (Paris 15è, France).
context_page_description: Jean-Baptiste de La Salle was a French priest, educational reformer, and founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. He is a saint of the Catholic Church and the patron saint for teachers of youth. He is referred to both as La Salle and as De La Salle.
  La Salle dedicated much of his life to the education of poor children in France; in doing so, he started many lasting educational practices. He is considered the founder of the first Catholic schools.
context_section_description: At that time, most children had little hope for social and economic advancement.  Jean Baptiste de La Salle believed that education gave hope and opportunity for people to lead better lives of dignity and freedom. Moved by the plight of the poor who seemed so "far from salvation" either in this world or the next, he determined to put his own talents and advanced education at the service of the children "often left to themselves and badly brought up".
  La Salle knew that the teachers in Reims were struggling, lacking leadership, purpose, and training, and he found himself taking increasingly deliberate steps to help this small group of men with their work. First, in 1680, he invited them to take their meals in his home, as much to teach them table manners as to inspire and instruct them in their work. This crossing of social boundaries was one that his relatives found difficult to bear. In 1681, De La Salle realized that he would have to take a further step – he brought the teachers into his own home to live with him. De La Salle's relatives were deeply disturbed, his social class was scandalized. When, a year later, his family home was lost at auction because of a family lawsuit, De La Salle rented a house into which he and the handful of teachers moved.
  La Salle decided to resign his canonry to devote his full attention to the establishment of schools and the training of teachers. He had inherited a considerable fortune, and this might have been used to further his aims, but on the advice of a Father Barre of Paris, he sold what he had and sent the money to the poor of the province of Champagne, where a famine was causing great hardship.
  La Salle thereby began a new religious institute, the first one with no priests, at all, among its members: the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, also known as the De La Salle Brothers (in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Malta, Australasia, and Asia) or, most commonly in the United States, the Christian Brothers.  (They are sometimes confused with a different congregation of the same name founded by Edmund Ignatius Rice in Ireland, who are known in the U.S. as the Irish Christian Brothers.) The De La Salle Brothers were the first Roman Catholic teaching religious institute that did not include any priests.
  
  One decision led to another until La Salle found himself doing something that he had never anticipated. La Salle wrote:
  I had imagined that the care which I assumed of the schools and the masters would amount only to a marginal involvement committing me to no more than providing for the subsistence of the masters and assuring that they acquitted themselves of their tasks with piety and devotion ... Indeed, if I had ever thought that the care I was taking of the schoolmasters out of pure charity would ever have made it my duty to live with them, I would have dropped the whole project. ... God, who guides all things with wisdom and serenity, whose way it is not to force the inclinations of persons, willed to commit me entirely to the development of the schools. He did this in an imperceptible way and over a long period of time so that one commitment led to another in a way that I did not foresee in the beginning.
  La Salle's enterprise met opposition from the ecclesiastical authorities who resisted the creation of a new form of religious life, a community of consecrated laymen to conduct free schools "together and by association".  The educational establishment resented his innovative methods. Nevertheless, La Salle and his  small group of free teachers set up the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools which is, according to the La Salle Web site, entirely dedicated to the Christian education of the "children of artisans and the poor", in a life close to that of the Catholic religious.
  In 1685, La Salle founded what is generally considered the first normal school — that is, a school whose purpose is to train teachers — in Rheims, France.
  Worn out by austerities and exhausting labors, La Salle died at Saint Yon, near Rouen, early in 1719 on Good Friday, only thr
caption: Statue in the Church of Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, Paris, France
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