Salomon Leclerc

Guillaume-Nicolas-Louis Leclercq, known in religion as Brother Solomon (Frère Salomon), was born on 14 November 1745 in Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France. After a period of work in commerce, he entered the novitiate of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1767. That congregation, founded by Saint John Baptist de La Salle, was devoted to the Christian education of the young, especially the poor. He took vows as a lay religious brother, not as an ordained priest, and spent his life in teaching and in the internal administration of the Institute.

Brother Solomon taught in several of the Brothers' schools and later served as secretary to the Superior General, a post that placed him at the centre of the congregation's affairs in Paris. He was regarded as a regular, prayerful, and administratively capable religious. In the late eighteenth century the Institute faced growing hostility from revolutionary legislation that suppressed religious orders and demanded that clergy and many religious swear the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Brother Solomon refused the oath, remaining in communion with Rome.

On 15 August 1792 he was arrested in Paris and imprisoned in the former Carmelite convent on the rue de Vaugirard, then used as a holding place for refractory priests and religious. On 2 September 1792, during the September Massacres, a crowd invaded the Carmes. Prisoners were hastily judged in the garden and killed. Brother Solomon was among those slain that day. He is numbered with the Martyrs of September 1792, who died for refusing to abandon the Catholic Church's discipline and communion as then understood.

Pope Pius XI beatified 191 of these victims, including Brother Solomon, on 17 October 1926. After the recognition of a miracle attributed to his intercession, Pope Francis canonized him on 16 October 2016 in Saint Peter's Square. He was the first member of the De La Salle Brothers to be declared a saint. His feast is observed on 2 September. Remains associated with the massacre are preserved in the crypt of the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes in Paris.