How St. John Baptist de La Salle Brought Education to Millions of Poor Kids Like Me

by Paul Mariani

I am sitting in a small classroom in one of those World War II Quonset huts that line the hill along the rim of Manhattan College in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. It is the spring of 1962—the semester I will graduate—and this is Brother Luke Salm’s religion class. We are blue-booking one of his quizzes, and he is off to one side, reading what looks like endless reams of galleys while the students in the class chew their pencil erasers or scratch their heads before plunging back into the abstruse questions on church doctrine glaring up at them from the page.

For a moment my attention is focused on Brother Luke’s absorption in those galleys of small print, and I am thinking: Yes, this is what I want to do someday. Forget myself and the humdrum world around me and, like some student of the Torah, study the world of words and someday—God willing—my own galleys. Ah, to become lost like him in the cosmic dance of literature, art, music, philosophy and religion, to watch as words form the mica chips of the infinite Word.

Then it is back again to the quiz in front of me whose questions long ago evaporated into the ether of history. In the late afternoon, I will walk through the tree-lined quad, past the chapel and the brick arcade, and head for my friend John Monahan’s ’57 hearse-gray Ford to make the trip back over the Throgs Neck Bridge and Northern Boulevard to Mineola, grab a bite to eat, then head down to the Garden City A&P, where I will stack shelves from 6 to 11, then head home to get my homework done before grabbing five hours of sleep. And then it will be up again and back to Manhattan College.

What a blessing those Christian Brothers in their black soutanes and my other teachers were as they taught so many young men like myself. Mostly we hailed from Irish-American working-class or lower-income middle-class families. There were Italian-Americans, too, and Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans. We studied engineering, pre-med or pre-law, or took classes in the Great Books, beginning with the Egyptians and Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages, then on to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and through the Romantics and Victorians and the Modernists. How often the brothers were there for me, though I feared some of them a bit, especially after I joined a frat that made “Animal House” look tame. Most of them were gentle or funny and gave me sound advice by their example. There was Brother Anthony, for one, who volunteered to teach a group of us basic Greek to supplement our Latin. Once he heard me swearing as I ascended the steps of the library and suggested I refrain from what he called that “sub-Chaucerian” lingo.

In time, I graduated and got married and had three sons and earned a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature downtown at Hunter College, all of it possible because of what I learned at Manhattan. Years later, Brother Luke would invite me back to Manhattan to address the student body, now made up of women as well as men, and receive an honorary degree—the same brother who wrote a life of St. John Baptist de La Salle, the founder of those same Christian Brothers, called The Work Is Yours. Reading it now, years after Brother Luke went to his reward, I better understand what de La Salle achieved in educating so many of the marginalized, myself among them.

I am the first in my family fortunate enough to go to college. Because of the Great Depression, neither of my parents went beyond the second year of high school. My father’s parents came from northern Italy and settled in the shadow of the 59th Street Bridge, had 11 children, six of whom survived. School was something you endured until you were 16; then you went to work. For my father, the youngest of the lot, that meant driving a grocery truck or working at gas stations. Then came the war, when he learned to fire an M-1 and drive half-ton trucks and Shermans.

After the war, my family moved to Long Island—Levittown, then Mineola—where I worked at my father’s Sinclair gas station. When I turned 16, my father thought it was time for me, too, to drop out of school and work full time. “Over my dead body,” my mother told him, and she meant it. In high school, I took classes in pre-engineering because my father insisted it would lead to a good job, though my heart was not in it. Manhattan College had a strong reputation as an engineering school, so I applied there.
But when I arrived for my interview, one of the brothers told us about a four-year curriculum in the humanities based on the Great Books, and my heart melted. It seemed almost too good to be true: a chance to study Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Milton and Dostoyevsky and on and on. I had $100 in the bank, and there were still six younger siblings at home to feed and clothe. But here was my chance, and with the help of God, I had to believe it would all work out.

Which is what de La Salle himself, it turns out, had believed. And so, despite sickness and exhaustion and the difficulties of getting to and from college, it did in fact work out. And not just for me but for so many young men.

Who was this brilliant, saintly priest who founded the Christian Brothers? Perhaps now, on the 300th anniversary of his death, it is time for those of us who have benefited so richly from our educations to remember who he was….

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