Angelus News | May 31, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 20

delayed for a time.
In his first year as a priest, Father de
La Salle served as the chaplain and
confessor for a newly formed order of
religious sisters. They cared for the
sick and provided for the education of
poor girls. This contact with the sisters
would prove providential.
The sisters were able to open a
school with the generous support of
a wealthy woman in town. There was
one condition to her financial
gift, and it was contingent on de
La Salle’s continued association
with the sisters and the school.
It’s almost certain that during
his seminary studies, de La Salle
would have never imagined that
education would become his
life’s work.
Lesson number two: God has
plans for us that take us to places
beyond what we think is possible.
As St. John Bosco would realize
two centuries later in Turin, de
La Salle came to see that education
was the surest path to give
hope and the promise of a brighter
future for children and youth.
He would literally spend himself
for the rest of his life, including
giving his family inheritance to
further the work of the Gospel in
unforeseen ways.
Lesson three: God uses our natural
talents and inspired vision to
do amazing things.
Religious orders of men and
women had been educating
youth for centuries. But de La
Salle was a true educational
innovator. It wasn’t only the kids
who needed education. He provided
training and support for teachers so
they could be the best qualified educators
as possible — even founding
a school dedicated to training them
(no wonder he is the patron saint of
teachers)
Beyond training and support, de La
Salle believed in instilling a spirit of
Christian fellowship in teachers. He
invited the teachers to eat in his home
and taught them proper etiquette and
table manners. His wealthy family was
not happy that he, even as a priest,
would deign to have these “lower
class” men dine in his home. Pretty
soon, some of them ended up living
in his home.
Lesson number four: Do not be
single-minded or single-hearted.
After the deaths of his parents, de La
Salle acquired a substantial inheritance
that could have provided for
the rapid expansion of and financial
support for his schools and fledgling
new order.
Thanks to advice from a wise priest
from Paris, he divested himself of his
A file photo from the 2014 Founders Day Mass at Cathedral
High School.
fortune and gave the money to the
poor in a French province devastated
by famine. Holy charity and works of
mercy are not meant for the exclusive
benefits of one’s even noble and
important apostolic works.
Rather, the mission of Christ and his
Church must reach beyond our own
worthy personal realm. We are called
to support the Universal Church
while still being faithful to the work
on the local level entrusted to us by
our blessed Lord.
And one more bold innovation:
Eventually, these men, whom he had
invited to live in his home, and was
forming in the Gospel and as first-rate
educators, became a new religious order,
the Institute of the Brothers of the
Christian Schools. Although he was
a priest, this new order was to consist
exclusively of teaching brothers and
still does not include priests.
None of this is what he had planned
or imagined for his life. De La Salle
looked back at his life not as a series
of decisions or coincidences, but as a
path in which God constantly guided
him without revealing the next
step.
“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,” the priest
wrote, “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
wrote in the same letter. “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.”
And that, perhaps, sums up de
La Salle’s wisdom best. If we are
faithful, day by day, to the small
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and seemingly insignificant tasks
that God gives us to do, we will
find meaning and fulfillment.
I can attest from my own experience
that this is true: It wasn’t
until my last years in college that
I began to feel the call from God
to be a priest. My road to the priesthood
began later than de La Salle’s,
but it similarly took twists and turns
that I could never have predicted or
planned for. Even today, the fact that
I am now a vocations director kind of
blows my mind.
Thanks to the generous invitation
from Cathedral High School, I now
have a greater admiration for this
one-of-a-kind saint. St. Jean-Baptiste
de La Salle, pray for us. Help us to be
faithful as you were.
Father Samuel Ward is the director
of vocations for the Archdiocese of Los
Angeles.
May 31, 2019 • ANGELUS • 19