I. Charism - La Salle.org

IV. DISCOVERING, LIVING, SHARING THE GIFT OF GOD 109
These gratuitous schools were also competing with paying schools
by taking away potential pupils and by dispensing knowledge
which was reserved to the corporation of sworn master-writers. The
new Community thus found itself confronted, at the turn of the
century, by two institutional obstacles:
– The status of education in the Society of the Ancien Régime, the
function of education as an instrument of social change. For a significant
number of political and religious leaders, instructing people
beyond the catechism and elementary reading was a mistake, because it
was a source of destabilisation of Society. One can even find traces of
this point of view in John Baptist de La Salle himself: “And since the
majority are born poor, we should teach them to despise riches and love
poverty, because Our Lord was born poor, and loved the poor and liked
to be with them and He himself said ‘blessed are the poor for theirs is the
Kingdom of Heaven’” (MTR 202.2).
– The status of the Community in a clerical Church, where money
counted a lot. Who is the leader of this community of lay persons who
aspire to working in the parishes and dioceses… with what control of
the hierarchy and with what resources The young Community, composed
of lay persons, had no recognised status in the ecclesiastical
world of its time: they were neither clerics nor “religious”. They innovated
by their life-style and their manner of carrying out their ministry.
For a period of about ten years (since the arrival in Paris), it is the
parish structures of Saint-Sulpice which have served as the framework
of life of this group and this work and now they are detaching themselves
from it.
6. The new community in conflicts.
In Paris, conflict with ecclesial organisation.
The crisis of 1702 70 had its origins in the excessive behaviour of two
70
Blain. op. cit., Book Two, p. 413 - 441. (CL 7, p. 398 - 417).