Educating in a spirit of audacity and hope

Marcellin Champagnat

MarcellinSaint Marcellin Champagnat, Founder of the Marist Brothers, was a peasant from the region of southern France, near Lyons.
 
Marcellin was born in 1789, the year of the French Revolution and died from cancer in 1840. His father was a local revolutionary official. His mother and aunt were remarkable spiritual influences on the young man.
 
Saint Marcellin Champagnat was not an educational theoretician, but he had a profound respect for life. He was an outstandingly simple man, wholly given to direct action. His simplicity and outgoing personality quite naturally oriented his sympathies towards young people and their education.
 
The Golden Rule
Saint Marcellin Champagnat's golden rule of education was very simple. Each student must be loved by the teacher. He understood "love" in the spirit of St Paul's famous passage in 1 Corinthians: 13. Marcellin believed that:
 

  • “To educate young people properly, we must love them, we must love them all equally. To love young people is to devote yourself completely to teaching them and to take all the means that a keen imagination can think in order to form them in gospel values.”
  • "We must never forget that young people make plenty of mistakes and, in consequence, they must be treated with kindness, charity, indulgence and the greatest patience."
  • "To love young people is to put up with them without complaint, to put up with their defects, their headstrong nature, even their ingratitude. In caring for them, we must be motivated solely by the call to spread God's love among them."

 

The Spirituality of Marist Education
Above all, Saint Marcellin Champagnat's motivation in founding the Brothers in 1817 was to ensure that the young people of his day, scarred by the excesses of the Revolution and the collapse of the Napoleonic era, came to know about the love that Jesus and Mary - known among the local peasants as the Good Mother - was for all of them without exception. In this passage, he formalises the spiritual role all teachers in Catholic schools accept when they become part of the community.
 
"Always tell your students that Jesus and Mary love them dearly - those of them who are good because they are like Jesus , who is goodness itself and those of them who are not yet so, because they will become so, since the Good Mother loves them too. After all, she is the Mother of every student in our schools."