Saint John Bosco (1815-1888)

Becchi, 1815: born into peasant poverty

John Bosco was born on 16 August 1815 at Becchi, a hamlet in the commune of Castelnuovo d'Asti — later renamed Castelnuovo Don Bosco in his honour —, in the hills of Piedmontese Monferrato.^[7][8] He was the youngest son of Francesco Bosco, a humble sharecropper, and Margherita Occhiena (1788-1856), a peasant woman of deep faith who became famous in Salesian history as Mamma Margherita.^[9]

Misfortune struck early: in 1817, when John was not yet two years old, his father died of pneumonia. The widow had to raise three boys on her own — Antonio, the eldest from a first marriage, Giuseppe and Giovanni — amid the great famine then ravaging Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.^[10] From this harsh childhood, John kept a sense of work, the hardness of bread earned by sweat, and above all the maternal upbringing that would remain the matrix of his entire pedagogy.

The dream at the age of nine (about 1825)

At about nine years old, the child had a dream that would mark him for life and which he himself recounted, many years later, in his Memoirs of the Oratory. He saw himself amid a crowd of boys swearing and fighting; he wanted to silence them with his fists, when a majestic figure stopped him and revealed his mission:

"It is not with blows, but with gentleness and charity that you must win these friends." — The figure in the dream at the age of nine, as recounted by Don Bosco in his Memoirs of the Oratory^[11]

Before his eyes, the crowd of quarrelling youngsters then changed into wild beasts, then into docile lambs, while a luminous Lady told him he would understand the meaning of it all later.^[12][13] Don Bosco would see in this dream the prophetic announcement of his entire work: to win youth not by constraint, but by kindness.

God's juggler

Young John at once put this vocation into practice. Gifted with an extraordinary memory and dexterity, he learned the tricks of the travelling acrobats he met at fairs: juggling, acrobatics, magic tricks, tightrope walking. On Sundays, he gathered the neighbourhood children, entertained them with his feats — then demanded, as the price of the show, that they recite the rosary with him and listen to his summary of the sermon heard at Mass.^[14][15] The whole pedagogy of the Oratory was already present in this game: winning hearts through joy before speaking of God.

Chieri, the seminary and ordination (1841)

The road to the priesthood was strewn with obstacles. The opposition of his half-brother Antonio, who despised studies, forced him for a time to leave home and hire himself out as a farmhand. But his vocation held firm. Supported by the parish priest Don Calosso, then by the decisive meeting with the future saint Joseph Cafasso, he entered the college of Chieri, where he plied a thousand small trades — tailor, cobbler, café waiter, carpenter — to pay for his studies.^[16][17]

Admitted to the seminary of Chieri in 1835, he was finally ordained priest on 5 June 1841, on the eve of Trinity Sunday, by the Archbishop of Turin, Luigi Fransoni.^[18][19] The young priest at once gave himself a motto drawn from Genesis, which he had engraved on his bedroom door and which sums up his whole life:

"Da mihi animas, cetera tolle" — "Give me souls, and take away all the rest." — Don Bosco's motto, after Genesis 14:21^[20]

The Convitto and the prisons of Turin

On Don Cafasso's advice, Don Bosco entered the Convitto ecclesiastico of Turin, an institute of pastoral formation directed by Cafasso himself, to perfect his training as a confessor.^[21] There he discovered the scourge of the great industrial city: uprooted teenagers, come from the countryside in search of work, left to the streets, to exploitation and often to prison.

Visiting Turin's prisons shook him. He saw boys of twelve or fifteen crowded together with hardened criminals, with no one to love or teach them. From this he drew the conviction that would become the mainspring of his work: better to prevent than to repress, to reach the child before misery makes a delinquent of him.^[22]

8 December 1841: Bartolomeo Garelli and the first Mass served

The work was born of an encounter. On 8 December 1841, feast of the Immaculate Conception, as Don Bosco was preparing to celebrate Mass in the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, the sacristan was driving away with a stick a ragged young labourer who refused to serve at the altar. Don Bosco called the boy back, comforted him, asked his name — Bartolomeo Garelli — and proposed that he come back the following Sunday to learn the catechism.^[23][24]

From this friendship the Oratory was born. Bartolomeo brought other boys; within a few months there were dozens of them, then hundreds. Don Bosco placed his work under the patronage of Saint Francis de Sales, the model of apostolic gentleness, whom he would make the patron saint of his entire religious family.^[25]

The wandering years and the settlement at Valdocco (1846)

The itinerant Oratory caused alarm: a noisy troop of lads moving from district to district looked like a hotbed of disorder, even of political subversion in pre-unification Turin. Don Bosco was driven from place to place, even suspected of madness. But he held firm, and in April 1846 he finally obtained a fixed base: a wretched shed rented from a man named Pinardi, in the working-class suburb of Valdocco, which would become the cradle of the entire Salesian work.^[26][27]

To keep this house open to the hundreds of boys crowding into it, Don Bosco called his own mother to his aid. Mamma Margherita left her countryside, came to settle at Valdocco and became, until her death in 1856, the "mother" of the Oratory: she sewed, nursed, cooked and watched over these turbulent young people, embodying maternal tenderness at the heart of her son's educational system.^[28]

Reason, religion, loving-kindness

Don Bosco's most lasting contribution to the history of education is his method, which he called the Preventive System (Sistema preventivo), as opposed to the then-dominant repressive system, founded on surveillance, threats and punishment. Where the repressive system waits for the fault in order to punish it, the preventive system surrounds the child with so much kindness that he no longer has the occasion to do wrong.^[29][30]

Don Bosco summed up his pedagogy in three words that became the charter of all Salesian education:

"This system rests entirely upon reason, religion and loving-kindness." — Don Bosco, pamphlet The Preventive System in the Education of Youth (1877)^[31]

• Reason (ragione): explaining rather than imposing, making the child understand the meaning of rules and duties.
• Religion (religione): placing God, the sacraments and Marian devotion at the centre of life, as the foundation of all uprightness.
• Loving-kindness (amorevolezza): a real affection, shown and felt by the child — for "it is not enough to love young people, they must feel that they are loved".^[32]

The Letter from Rome (1884): "education is a matter of the heart"

In May 1884, now old and ill, Don Bosco addressed from Rome to his Salesians in Turin a long letter that remains the pedagogical testament of the Oratory. In it he lamented that the familiarity and trust of former days had given way to cold discipline, and recalled the secret of all education:

"Education is a matter of the heart. […] Familiarity breeds affection, and affection engenders trust. That is what opens hearts." — Don Bosco, Letter from Rome, 10 May 1884^[33]

This intuition — that nothing is passed on without love received and perceived — makes Don Bosco a forerunner of the whole pedagogy of relationship. Yet his gentleness was not weakness: he demanded work, piety and honesty, but was so loath to punish that he wrote, in 1887: "I do not remember ever having inflicted a formal punishment."^[34]

The Society of Saint Francis de Sales (1859)

To make the Oratory outlive his own person, Don Bosco gathered around him his best pupils, now priests or clerics. On 18 December 1859, he officially founded the Society of Saint Francis de Sales, the future Salesians, with eighteen first members.^[35][36] The constitutions were approved by Pius IX in several stages, the definitive approval coming in 1874.^[37]

Growth was lightning-fast. In the founder's own lifetime, the Salesians spread through Italy, France, Spain, then Latin America. At Don Bosco's death in 1888, the congregation already counted some 250 houses on several continents, welcoming more than 130,000 young people and having trained thousands of priests.^[38]

The Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (1872)

Wishing to extend his work to poor girls, Don Bosco founded in 1872, at Mornese, the institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, with the decisive collaboration of Saint Maria Domenica Mazzarello (1837-1881), who became its first superior.^[39][40] Conceived as "a living monument of gratitude towards the Virgin Help of Christians", this women's congregation would likewise expand worldwide.

The Salesian Cooperators (1876)

Don Bosco understood at last that the laity are an apostolic force. In 1876, he instituted the Association of Salesian Cooperators, a network of lay benefactors and apostles sharing the spirit and mission of the Oratory in the world.^[41] Religious, Sisters and laity thus form the great Salesian Family.

The church builder: Mary Help of Christians and the Sacred Heart

Don Bosco was also a builder who defied all financial prudence, convinced that Providence would provide. His masterwork is the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians (Maria Ausiliatrice) at Valdocco, raised with almost no resources and consecrated on 9 June 1868, which became the mother-sanctuary of Salesian devotion.^[42][43] Salesian chronicles report that the many healings obtained during its construction helped to finance the building.

At the request of Leo XIII, the old priest accepted, despite exhaustion, to raise in Rome the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacro Cuore), near Termini station. It was while celebrating Mass there, in May 1887, that he broke into tears several times, seeing again, as he would say, the dream of his nine years finally fulfilled.^[44][45]

The popular writer and printer

A pedagogue even in spreading the faith, Don Bosco was a prolific writer and publisher. He wrote manuals of piety for young people — including The Well-Prepared Young Man (Il giovane provveduto, 1847), a Catholic best-seller reprinted hundreds of times —, lives of saints, accounts of sacred history and Church history, and launched the popular collection of the Letture Cattoliche to counter the anticlerical press.^[46] He set up his own printing workshops at Valdocco, making publishing an instrument of apostolate — which would later earn him the patronage of publishers and printers.

The missionary dreams: Patagonia (1872)

Don Bosco's life is studded with dreams to which he attributed a prophetic scope and which, recounted to his boys, formed part of his pedagogy. The most famous is the missionary dream of 1872, in which he saw savage peoples of an unknown region. He only understood its meaning in 1874, when pressing requests reached him from Argentina: those peoples were the inhabitants of Patagonia, then almost unexplored.^[47]

"Give me souls, take away the rest." — The missionary motto Don Bosco passed on to his first envoys^[48]

From 1875 onwards, he sent his first missionaries to Buenos Aires under the leadership of the future Cardinal Giovanni Cagliero; within a few years, the Salesians penetrated the hinterland as far as the Strait of Magellan, fulfilling their founder's vision to the letter.^[49]

Grigio, miracles and trust in Providence

The strangest file in Don Bosco's life is that of the dog Grigio ("the Grey"), who accompanied the saint for more than thirty years. Appearing one evening in 1852, this animal always sprang up at the moment the priest was in danger: it saved him from an attacker who had fired two pistol shots at him on the Cours Reine-Marguerite, from two thugs who had gagged him in a dark Turin alley, then from a band of ruffians lying in ambush in the bushes — and one evening, barring with its body the doorway of the house despite Mamma Margherita's pleas, it even prevented Don Bosco from going out towards an ambush being prepared against him.^[50] The last apparition took place in 1883: although the dog had "not grown a single white hair in thirty-two years", it put the lost Don Bosco back on his road, accompanied him to the door of the patronage, then vanished for ever.^[51] Questioned about the strange protector whom all his circle had seen, touched and stroked, the saint answered evasively:

"To say it was an angel would make people laugh. But neither can one say it was a dog like any other." — Don Bosco on the subject of Grigio, words reported by Anne Bernet^[52]

Another episode, very close to the saint's death: in December 1887, less than two months before dying, Don Bosco received at Valdocco a group of South American visitors, among them a young Chilean journalist suffering from a deforming arthritis of the right hand and arm which prevented him from holding his pen and practising his profession. Don Bosco took the sick hand in his own, fell into prayer, then declared to the visitor:

"You are healed, but you will go on feeling a slight pain, so that you never forget the grace the Blessed Virgin has granted you." — Don Bosco to the Chilean journalist, December 1887^[53]

Salesian biographies — in particular the monumental Biographical Memoirs — abound in prodigious accounts of the same kind: multiplication of hosts and chestnuts, sudden healings, verified predictions.^[54][55] Without confusing hagiographical tradition with strictly established fact, the Church recognised, at the end of the canonical inquiry, the reality of miracles obtained through his intercession, the condition for his beatification and canonization.

Mary Help of Christians, the Eucharist and the Pope

Don Bosco's whole interior life rests on three devotions which he bequeathed as a testament. To the Salesians gathered around his deathbed, he commended that they never forget three pillars:

"Never forget these three things: devotion to the Most Blessed Sacrament, devotion to Mary Help of Christians, and devotion to the Pope." — Don Bosco's dying recommendation to his spiritual sons^[56]

Frequent Eucharist and confession are at the heart of his pedagogy: he made them the two "wings" lifting the young soul towards God. The Virgin Help of Christians, he regarded as the true foundress of his work — "it is she who did everything", he kept repeating. And attachment to the Successor of Peter, in the midst of the crisis of temporal power and Italian unification, was for him a fidelity of every instant.^[57][58]

The joyful holiness of youth

Don Bosco's spiritual originality was to show that holiness is possible and joyful for young people. His educational masterpiece in this domain is the life of his pupil Dominic Savio, who died at fifteen in the odour of sanctity and was later canonized: living proof that the pedagogy of Valdocco truly led to Christian perfection. Don Bosco loved to repeat to his boys a phrase that sums up his supernatural optimism:

"It is enough for you to be young for me to love you." — Words attributed to Don Bosco to his boys at Valdocco^[59]

The "Father and Teacher of Youth" (1888)

Worn out by forty years of labour, Don Bosco died in Turin, on 31 January 1888, at dawn, surrounded by his spiritual sons.^[60][61] His last words, passed on to his boys, express all his tenderness: "Tell my boys that I am waiting for them all in Paradise."^[62] His funeral became a popular triumph: an immense crowd accompanied the coffin through Turin, as one already accompanies a saint.

Beatification and canonization (1929-1934)

The beatification process, opened shortly after his death, reached its goal on 2 June 1929, when Pius XI — who had personally known Don Bosco — proclaimed him blessed. The same pope canonized him on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1934, bestowing on him the now-famous title of "Father and Teacher of Youth".^[63][64] In 1988, for the centenary of his death, John Paul II would complete this title by declaring him "Father, Teacher and Friend of Young People".^[65]

The legacy: the third largest religious family in the world

The work never stopped growing after the founder's death. In the 20th century, the Salesians of Don Bosco became one of the largest male congregations in the Catholic Church, present in more than one hundred and thirty countries through schools, vocational centres, oratories and missions.^[66] Patron of young people, apprentices, publishers and — a nod to the juggler he once was — conjurers, Don Bosco remains the model of an educational charity that changes hearts through kindness.

"For you I live, for you I study, for you I work, for you I am even ready to give my life." — Don Bosco to his boys, a phrase become the emblem of Salesian spirituality^[67]

• Saint Joseph Cafasso (1811-1860) — the Turin priest who was Don Bosco's spiritual director and master at the Convitto ecclesiastico.
• Saint Dominic Savio (1842-1857) — the young pupil of Valdocco, a model of adolescent holiness, canonized in 1954.
• Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622) — the doctor of gentleness, chosen by Don Bosco as patron for his entire religious family.
• Saint John Mary Vianney (1786-1859) — the Curé of Ars, another great priest of souls in the 19th century, a contemporary of Don Bosco.
• Pius IX (1792-1878) — the pope who approved the Salesian Society and supported Don Bosco's work.
• Leo XIII (1810-1903) — the pope who entrusted Don Bosco with building the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Rome.
• The shrine of Turin and the Holy Shroud — Don Bosco's city, the spiritual capital of Catholic Piedmont.