Patron saint of teachers

Every teacher knows the feeling of standing in front of a room of faces at the start of the year and wondering how to reach them all. The Church has a long line of saints who stood in that same spot, and one of them was named by a pope as the patron of every educator in the world.

St. John Baptist de La Salle, the patron saint of teachers

St. John Baptist de La Salle was born in Reims in 1651, the eldest son of a wealthy, well-connected family. He was made a canon of the cathedral as a teenager and ordained a priest in 1678. Nothing about his start pointed to a schoolroom. Then, in 1679, he agreed to help a layman open schools for poor boys in Reims, and in the Catholic Encyclopedia's phrase, he was led into the work "almost without a premeditated design."

The schools needed teachers, and the teachers were poorly trained and poorly paid. La Salle invited them to eat at his house, then took them in to live with him, to the scandal of his family. He gave up his canonry, sold his fortune during a famine and gave the money to the hungry, so that he would be as poor as the men he led. From those schoolmasters came the Brothers of the Christian Schools, laymen vowed to teach the children of the poor free of charge. He opened schools across France, trained lay teachers for country parishes, and wrote The Conduct of the Christian Schools, which taught a whole class together by level instead of calling pupils up one at a time. He died on Good Friday, April 7, 1719, and Pope Leo XIII canonized him in 1900.

Why he is the patron of all educators

On May 15, 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed him "Heavenly patron of all educators" in the apostolic letter Quod ait. Pope Leo XIV recalled the 75th anniversary of that proclamation when he received the Brothers in 2025. The reason is plain: La Salle spent forty years training teachers, organizing schools and writing for them. He loved to tell his Brothers, "Your altar is the cathedra," meaning the teacher's chair. Catholic schools and teachers around the world ask his prayers, especially at the start of the school year. His feast is April 7; see the feast day calendar.

A prayer for teachers

We know of no longer traditional prayer to St. John Baptist de La Salle with a citable origin, so we don't print one. Lasallian schools close many prayers with a simple invocation and the Brothers' motto:

St. John Baptist de La Salle, pray for us. Live Jesus in our hearts. Forever.

Teachers also love a meditation of St. John Henry Newman, from his Meditations and Devotions, that fits anyone who spends a life on other people's children:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

For students facing tests, see our prayers before an exam.

Other patron saints of teachers and schools

St. Gregory the Great

St. Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604 and a Doctor of the Church, is a patron of teachers and students because his books taught the medieval Church: his Pastoral Rule trained generations of bishops, and his Dialogues and commentaries on Scripture were copied and studied all through the Middle Ages. He is also the patron of musicians and singers, from the chant that bears his name.

St. Catherine of Alexandria

St. Catherine is the patron of students, philosophers and librarians. Her legend makes her a brilliantly educated young woman of 4th-century Alexandria who confronted the emperor and defeated his philosophers in debate before her martyrdom. Teachers and students have long asked her prayers before study and examinations. Her patronage of teachers is popular custom, not a formal title, but it is an old and natural one.

St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Henry Newman

St. Thomas Aquinas spent nearly his whole life in schools, as a pupil, a student and a master in Paris and Cologne. Pope Leo XIII named him patron of Catholic universities, academies, colleges and schools in 1880. On November 1, 2025, Pope Leo XIV declared Newman a Doctor of the Church and named him co-patron, with Aquinas, of the Church's educational mission.

Patrons of Catholic schools and educators

• St. Ursula is a patron of teachers, students and Catholic education, especially of girls, through the Ursulines, the teaching order St. Angela Merici founded under her name in 1535.
• St. Elizabeth Ann Seton opened St. Joseph's Free School for the poor girls of Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1810. Popular devotion calls her the patron of Catholic schools, and her biographer Sr. Betty Ann McNeil calls her school "the cradle of Catholic education in the United States."
• St. John Neumann, bishop of Philadelphia, organized the first diocesan Catholic school system in the country.
• St. Marguerite Bourgeoys opened the first school in Montreal in 1658, in a stone stable.
• St. Francis de Sales is a patron of educators through the Salesians of St. John Bosco, who took his name for their work with poor boys.

Let us pray for every teacher, catechist and school, and for the children in their care. St. John Baptist de La Salle, St. Gregory, St. Catherine and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

See also the patron saints of athletes, lost causes, and the full list of patron saints.