St. John Baptist de la Salle

April 7 is the feast of St. John Baptist de la Salle (1651-1719), the patron of teachers and the founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Born at Reims to a noble family, he was a canon of the cathedral at Reims when, in 1679, he began to work with Adrien Nyel to found charity schools for the poor boys of the city. He gave up his canonry and his fortune, and in 1684 he founded the first religious congregation of men dedicated entirely to education — the Brothers of the Christian Schools, or De La Salle Brothers.

The schools he founded were revolutionary for their time: free, in the vernacular (not Latin), grouped by ability rather than taught individually, and taught by lay religious brothers, not by priests. The Conduct of the Christian Schools (1706) is the first manual of pedagogy in the modern sense. He died at Rouen in 1719, at Saint-Yon, the novitiate of the Brothers, and was canonized in 1900 and proclaimed patron of teachers by Pope Pius XII in 1950.

The body of John Baptist de la Salle lies in the Chapel of the Holy Relics at Rome, in the Generalate house of the Brothers on the Aventine. From Reims, where he was born and began his work, to Rome, where his body lies, the April 7 feast is kept by the Lasallian family of brothers, lay colleagues, and students — a network of schools in eighty countries.