[1] La Salle was tonsured at age eleven on 11 March 1662,[2][3] in an official ceremony that marked a boy's intention, and his parents offer of their young sons, to the service of God.

When De La Salle had completed his classical, literary, and philosophical courses, he was sent to Paris to enter the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice on 18 October 1670.

What began as an effort to help Adrian Nyel establish a school for the poor in La Salle's home town gradually became his life's work.

Moved by the plight of the poor who seemed so "far from salvation" either in this world or the next, he determined to put his own talents and advanced education at the service of the children "often left to themselves and badly brought up".

[5] La Salle knew that the teachers in Reims were struggling, lacking leadership, purpose, and training, and he found himself taking increasingly deliberate steps to help this small group of men with their work.

[8] La Salle decided to resign his canonry to devote his full attention to the establishment of schools and training of teachers.

He had inherited a considerable fortune, which he could have been used to further his aims, but on the advice of a Father Barre of Paris, he sold what he had and sent the money to the poor of the province of Champagne, where a famine was causing great hardship.

The institute is sometimes confused with a different congregation of the same name, founded by Edmund Ignatius Rice in Ireland and known in the USA as the Irish Christian Brothers.

La Salle wrote:I had imagined that the care which I assumed of the schools and the masters would amount only to a marginal involvement committing me to no more than providing for the subsistence of the masters and assuring that they acquitted themselves of their tasks with piety and devotion ...[3] Indeed, if I had ever thought that the care I was taking of the schoolmasters out of pure charity would ever have made it my duty to live with them, I would have dropped the whole project.

[10]La Salle's enterprise met with opposition from ecclesiastical authorities who resisted the creation of a new form of religious life, a community of consecrated laymen to conduct free schools "together and by association".

Since the 1980s increasing numbers of cases of sexual and physical abuse of children, covered up by authorities, in institutions of the Catholic Church[16] and others[17] have been reported.