John Bosco

Don Bosco

After ordination, Bosco went to Turin, where Cafasso headed the Institute of Saint Francis of Assisi, which provided higher education for the diocesan priests. Turin then had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. The city reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization. Numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city and had come from the countryside in search of a better life. During his studies, Bosco accompanied Cafasso in visiting the prisons and became concerned regarding the recidivism of the young offenders. He began to work with orphaned and abandoned boys, teaching them catechism and helping them find work. Upon completion of his studies, Cafasso secured for Bosco an appointment as almoner of the Rifugio ("Refuge"), a girls' boarding school founded in Turin by the Marchioness Giulia di Barolo, so that he could remain in Turin.[30] His other ministries included visiting prisoners, teaching catechism, and helping out at many country parishes.

Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry to be inefficient. He decided that it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops and marketplaces. They were pavers, stonecutters, masons, and plasterers who had come from far away, as he recalled in his brief Memoires.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco, it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice, he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time, they stole the blankets; the second, time, they emptied the hayloft. He did not give up, and in May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valencia in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860, and 600 in 1861, reaching a maximum of 800 sometime later.[31]

Bosco and his oratory moved around town for several years; he was turned out of several places in succession. After only two months based in the church of St. Martin, the entire neighbourhood expressed its annoyance with the noise coming from the boys at play. A formal complaint was lodged against them with the municipality. Rumours also circulated that the meetings conducted by the priest with his boys were dangerous; their recreation could be turned into a revolution against the government. The group was evicted.[32]

In the archives of the Salesian Congregation is a contract of apprenticeship, dated November 1851; another one on stamped paper costing 40 cents, dated 8 February 1852; and others have later dates. They are among the first contracts of apprenticeship to be found in Turin. All of them are signed by the employer, the apprentice, and Don Bosco. In those contracts, Don Bosco touched on many sensitive issues. Some employers customarily made servants and scullery boys of the apprentices. Don Bosco obliged them to agree to employ the boys only in their acknowledged trade. Employers used to beat the boys. Don Bosco required them to agree that corrections be made only verbally. He cared for their health and demanded that they be given rest on feast days and an annual holiday. Despite all the efforts and contracts, however, the situation of the apprentices of the time remained difficult.[31]

One influential friend was Piedmontese Justice Minister Urbano Rattazzi. He was anticlerical in his politics but saw some value in Bosco's work.[33][34] While Rattazzi was pushing a bill through the Sardanian legislature to suppress religious orders, he advised Bosco on how to get around the law. He found a religious order to keep the oratory going after its founder's death.[33] Bosco had been thinking about that problem too and had been slowly organizing his helpers into a loose "Congregation of St. Francis de Sales". He was also training select older boys for the priesthood. Another supporter of the idea to establish a religious order to carry out Bosco's vision was the reigning pope, Pope Pius IX.[35]

Bosco disliked the ideals that had been exported by Revolutionary France and called Rousseau and Voltaire "two vicious leaders of incredulity".[36] He favoured an ultramontane view of politics that acknowledged the supreme authority of the pope. In 1854, when the Kingdom of Sardinia was about to pass a law suppressing monastic orders and confiscating ecclesiastical properties, Bosco reported a series of dreams about "great funerals at court" that referred to politicians or members of the Savoy court.[37]

In November 1854, he sent a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II and admonished him to oppose the confiscation of church property and suppression of the orders, but the King failed to respond.[38] His actions, which had been described by the Italian historian Roberto Petoia as having "manifest blackmailing intentions",[39] ended only after the intervention of Prime Minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. The king's family suffered several deaths in a short period. From January to May 1855, the king's mother (age 54), wife (32), newborn son (Vittorio Emanuele, Count of Genoa; nearly four months old), and his only brother (32) all died.[37][38]

Opposition to Bosco and his work came from various quarters. Traditionalist clergy accused him of stealing the young and old people away from their own parishes. Nationalist politicians, including some clergy, saw his several hundred young men as a recruiting ground for revolution. The Marquis de Cavour, the chief of police in Turin, regarded the open-air catechisms as overtly political and a threat to the state and was highly suspicious of Bosco's support for the powers of the papacy. Bosco was interrogated on several occasions, but no charges were made. Closure may have been prevented by orders from the king that Bosco was not to be disturbed.[40]

Several attempts were also made on Bosco's life, including a near-stabbing, bludgeoning, and a shooting. Early biographers put that down to the growing influence of the Waldensians in opposition to Catholic clergy.[41]

Basilica Don Bosco in Castelnuovo Don Bosco, Asti

St. John Bosco Parish Church, Makati, Philippines

Statue of Saint John Bosco, Ronda, Spain

Statue of Saint John Bosco, Makati, Philippines

Statue of Saint John Bosco at the Diocesan Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, Canlubang, Calamba City, Philippines

Some of the boys helped by Don Bosco decided to do what he was doing: working in the service of abandoned boys. That was the origin of the Salesian Congregation. Among the first members were Michael Rua, John Cagliero (who later became a Cardinal), and John Baptist Francesca.[31]

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians, and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales". That was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work. When the group had its next meeting, it voted on the admission of Joseph Rossi as a lay member, the first Salesian brother. The Salesian Congregation was divided into priests, seminarians, and "coadjutors" (the lay brothers).

Next, he worked with Mary Mazzarello, and a group of girls in the hill town of Mornese. In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians". In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators", who mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians but would not join a religious order.

The first Salesians departed for Argentina in 1875. After his ordination, Bosco himself would have become a missionary if his director, Joseph Cafasso, had not opposed the idea. Bosco nevertheless eagerly read the Italian edition of the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith and used this magazine to illustrate his Cattolico Provveduto (1853) and his Month of May booklets (1858).

When Bosco founded the Salesian Society, the thought of the missions still obsessed him, but he then completely lacked the financial means. Bosco claimed that in another dream, he was on a vast plain inhabited by primitive peoples, who spent their time hunting or fighting among themselves or against soldiers in European uniforms. Along came a band of missionaries, but they were all massacred. A second group appeared, which Bosco at once recognized as Salesians. Astonished, he witnessed an unexpected change when the fierce savages laid down their arms and listened to the missionaries. It seems the dream made a great impression on Bosco because he tried hard to identify the men and the country of the dream, and for three years, he collected information about different countries. A request from Argentina turned him towards the Indians of Patagonia, and a study of its people convinced him that the country and its inhabitants were the ones that he had seen in his dream. In late 1874, Bosco received letters from the Argentine consult at Savona requesting that he accept an Italian parish in Buenos Aires and a school for boys at San Nicolas de Los Arroyos.

Bosco regarded it as a sign of Providence and started to prepare a mission. Adopting a way of evangelization that would not expose his missionaries to wild, "uncivilized" tribes, he proposed setting up bases in safe locations at which missionary efforts were to be launched. Negotiations started after Archbishop Aneiros of Buenos Aires had indicated that he would be glad to receive the Salesians. In a ceremony held on 29 January 1875, Bosco was able to convey the great news to the oratory. On 5 February, he announced the fact in a circular letter to all Salesians asking volunteers to apply in writing. He proposed for the first missionary departure to start in October. There were many volunteers.

In the years that Bosco had spent running his oratory and giving spiritual and practical instruction to the boys he had housed there, he relied on a different approach on education and general instruction, which he believed to be superior to traditional educational methods, which he labeled as a Repressive System of Education. On 12 March 1877, Bosco gave an opening address on the systems of education during the day for the opening of the St. Peter's Youth Center in the new quarters of the Patronage de Saint Pierre in Nice in which he first mentioned the term 'Preventive System'.[42] Upon his return to Turin, Bosco wrote down the address as a polished essay under the title The Preventive System in the Education of the Youth, which was published in 1877 in which he included in the initial draft of the Rule for the Salesian Order.[43] It espoused the values of reason, Religion, and loving kindness with a goal of producing "good Christians and honest citizens".[13] That was the only attempt that Bosco made at a systematic exposition of his educational system. Though the idea itself was not innovative by any means, Bosco having drawn the inspiration for his system through the contemporary criticisms of the punitive and outdated educational systems prevalent in Europe during his time, and he was one of the first to combat it and to put his criticisms into practice.[44]

Though Bosco's written works were little known outside of his own order and the subscribers of his Salesian Bulletin, which he founded in August 1877, he wrote frequently and voluminously. Though Don Bosco was described as more of a man of action than a scholar,[45] he was an exceptional historian. He penned the 1881 A Compendium of Italian History from the Fall of the Roman Empire, which was translated and continued to the present by John Daniel Morell and was noted by scholars for its cultural importance on the knowledge base of ancient to modern civilization.[46] He was also a skilled biographer. His two most well-known biographies were on his mentor, Joseph Cafasso[47] and one of his students, Dominic Savio, which would later be instrumental in his canonization.[48]