Feast Day: April 7th
Born in Reims, France, around 1651, he enters the world the eldest son of wealthy parents. As the firstborn, he is set on the path of becoming a priest, and at the age of 11 is named a canon of the Reims Cathedral. Both his parents die when he was about 20, so he left seminary for a time to turn his attention to managing the family estate while his 6 younger siblings grow up, returning to seminary studies to be ordained a priest at 26. Gets his doctorate in theology, spends his first years as a priest serving as chaplain and confessor of a girls school, eventually getting involved in fundraising to build a new school and personally helping to train the new teachers.
So far, a pretty ordinary track for a young priest in 1650s France. But God had plans to make him a saint (turns out, the Lord has those same plans for all of us!)
Amid that oh so ordinary work trying to educate children, Jean-Baptiste is slowly moved by the plight of so many poor families who cannot afford schooling for their children. He has tried natural responses to the problem – fundraising, training, building, teaching – but God’s plans are so much bigger. He considers starting a religious community devoted to teaching and catechizing and after praying and considering and wrestling with the consequences of doing so he finally just goes all in. He leaves his comfortable position as a canon, moves in with a small group of similar-minded teachers, and forms them into the Brothers of the Christian Schools.
As with any time we take a plunge into God’s plan, the world immediately pushes back. The secular schooling system lambasted his tuition-free schooling model – how impractical, wrong-headed, unworkable; it would throw into havoc the rest of the education system where honest people paid an honest price … Meanwhile the Church could not see a place for an order merely dedicated to teaching and educating; this ramshackle group of half-trained teachers cannot become a religious congregation; there’s not even any priests in the order!… This his family got involved – How dare you use the family fortune to start this personal project (Jean-Baptiste gave his inheritance to the poor). How dare you bring this gaggle of people into the family home! (Which then got sold, so Jean-Baptiste rented a little place for his fledgling order.)
At every turn, resistance reared its head, but like so many other saints, Jean-Baptiste wasn’t on a personal mission, and he wasn’t there to prove something, and he didn’t try to look too far down the path. He was simply following God’s will, and even if you don’t know where you’re going, if everything is against you, but God is for you, you just keep going forward.
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 …[3] 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.
Perhaps a final stamp of the Lord’s approval – besides the eternal fruit born by his efforts – came when La Salle died in 1719, on Good Friday.
– Fr. Dominic when applying for seminary felt entirely uncertain about the path ahead, afraid of the unknowns, overwhelmed by the commitment, the uncertain cost, and the turmoil within … and he received some of the best advice he ever received: just stay on the path that God had you on before the storm struck. He entered seminary, found God was behind Him all that time, and discovered the truth that St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle exemplifies for us, and a famous fish once said: just keep swimming. At least, if Jesus pointed you that direction.