I. Charism - La Salle.org

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IV. DISCOVERING, LIVING, SHARING THE GIFT OF GOD
ond part of the proposition, on to the “to keep gratuitous schools”
…which even becomes under the pen of Brother Irénée and in the
Rule of 1726: “the vow of teaching gratuitously”. Bluntly, the
emphasis has passed from a Society which keeps gratuitous schools,
to individuals who “teach gratuitously”. The ‘society’ dimension of
the initial project has become blurred and faded away (and this is
in 1717, two years before the death of the Founder), to be replaced
by a more individual, but also more impersonal, perspective. For
this is the “command structure” which will from now on regulate
the practice of the vow, at the level of the Society, and no longer of
the associates.
However, when they live fully, together and by association, the
responsibility of the association for keeping schools gratuitously, at
all the levels of their lives: personally as school-teachers, locally in a
specific school, with a Community of associates, in the Institute
considered as the “Society of the Christian Schools”, they have this
power. Has this transformation been due to the numerical increase
of the Brothers, to the distances between the Communities, or to a
change in spirituality both among the Brothers and in the surroundings
in which they live More than thirty five years have
passed since the beginnings in Reims and many personages from
those beginnings have disappeared.
To sum up, one can say that during the first thirty years of the life
of the Community, then of the Society and finally of the Institute
of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, the Brothers who made
vows pronounced explicitly the vow of association “to keep, together
and by association, gratuitous schools”. When they tried to make
clear the obligations which flowed from the vows, they soon distinguished
in the vow of association to keep gratuitous schools, a double
commitment: that of association and that of teaching gratuitously.
Progressively they came from that to speaking of a vow to
teach gratuitously which became the subject of personal and com-