I. Charism - La Salle.org

MAKING THE LASALLIAN CHARISM LIVE TODAY 261
The understanding of this commitment, in varied and sometimes contradictory
political, economic and cultural contexts and also the resulting
responses, have not always been simple and unanimous, nor have they
always been very clear. And yet this remains one of the sources of the spirituality
of the Lasallians. This forms part of the heritage because gratuity
for John Baptist de La Salle was not in the first place based on gratuity
in the transmission of knowledge but on the gratuity of the salvation of
God, on the concrete possibility for the children and young people of
reaching the plenitude of their vocation of children of God. The gratuity
of the Lasallian school was not so much concerned with the poor, who in
any case had access to the charity school which was the Christian school,
as with the rich, or at least those who seemed able to pay a teacher. For
Monsieur de La Salle, it was all children, without distinction, who had a
right to salvation. And since for him, salvation arrived through the
Christian school, lived to the full, it was the entire school, with all its educational
opportunities (profane and Christian), which ought to be “gratuitous”.
The Brothers and the Founder were well aware that gratuity in itself was
not enough to ensure that the children would have access to salvation by
means of the school - they also needed to be present! This is the entire
subject for reflection in Chapter 16 “Absences” of the Conduct of Christian
Schools. This also implies that the school needs to be a quality school: useful
and attractive for all, of a good standard, preparing them for life, integrating
them into society. The Sunday academy set up by the Brothers in
Paris towards the end of the 17 th Century, shows that it is this aspect of
the Lasallian school - that is to say, giving young people mastery over their
lives, another way of saying “getting for them the means of salvation within
their reach” - which is the determining factor in the application of gratuity.
The latter is not concerned only with one age category (children
from 7-13), because those who frequent the Sunday academy are apprentices
aged 15-20; nor with the classical type of school institution: the
“academy” was not a school. But in both cases the entire person of the
child or young person is taken into account, keeping in view the practical
details appropriate to each age group since, besides the training which
involved trades, the academy also provided a social, human and Christian