John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education Ronald Eugene Isetti John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education. Edited by Carl Koch, Jeffrey Calligan, FSC, and Jeffrey Gros, FSC. [The Classics Western Spirituality.] (New York and Mahway, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 266.$26.95 paperback.) This slim paperback volume on the writings of John Baptist de la Salle, the founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, is part of a larger series on the "Classics of Western Spirituality." It contains an elegantly-written preface by Thomas H. Groome, a pithy biographical sketch, and an introduction to his spirituality, but it is devoted mostly to de la Salle's "foundational" writings and letters. The most important of them is a collection of meditations he wrote for his Brothers during the time of annual retreat. They express best of all his advanced thoughts on the vocation of lay religious to announce the Gospel to the poor, comparing their role to that of the early apostles and to their descendants the bishops. Other documents such as Rules, memoranda, and personal notes and letters are of considerable historical value and interest, [End Page 420] but do not pertain directly to matters of theology and spirituality. The translations of the documents reprinted in this book are scrupulously faithful to the original texts, which is both their strength and their weakness, if only because de la Salle's own prose style was lawyer-like, sometimes convoluted, and only rarely poetic. His personal letters to his confreres, as the editors rightly note, were "brisk" and even "curt," in contrast to his longer treatises. Readers will have to transport themselves back to the spirituality of seventeenth-century France to fully appreciate both the theology and vocabulary of the selections included in this volume. Although de la Salle made an original contribution to the life and ministry of the Church by founding a religious order composed exclusively of consecrated lay religious, the bulk of his of his writings were directed to grammar school teachers who are warned against "teaching truths with scholarly words"; and urged to serve as "substitutes" for the mothers and fathers of their students. Today in the United States, the Christian Brothers teach mainly in college preparatory high schools and in liberal arts colleges and universities. Indeed, the editors, two of whom are Christian Brothers and one a former Brother, all hold numerous advanced degrees, including doctorates, a development that would have shocked de la Salle, who explicitly forbade his followers to learn Latin and Greek, which in his day meant studying the classics or the liberal arts. Although essential components of de la Salle's theology of teaching may still apply to men and women even at the highest levels of education, they will need to be restated and adapted to an academic environment that stresses critical thinking, freedom of thought, and advanced scholarship. This is the challenge facing the present-day followers of an educational reformer whose revolutionary ideas got him constantly in trouble with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of his time and place. Ronald Eugene Isetti Saint Mary's College of California Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press