John Bosco

Don Bosco

John Bosco was first called to be chaplain of the Rifugio ("Refuge"), a girls' boarding school founded in Turin by the Marchioness Giulia di Barolo. His other ministries included visiting prisoners, teaching catechism, and helping out at many country parishes.

At that time, the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons, Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them from ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided 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, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, 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 they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. 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, 800 is the maximum sometime later.[26]

Bosco and his oratory moved around town for a number of years; he was turned out of several places in succession. After only two months based in the church of St. Martin, the entire neighborhood expressed its annoyance with the noise coming from the boys at play. A formal complaint was lodged against them with the municipality. Rumors 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.[27]

In the archives of the Salesian Congregation is a contract of apprenticeship, dated November 1851; another one on stamped paper costing 40 cents, dated February 8, 1852; and others with later dates. These 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 are given rest on feast days and that they are given an annual holiday. But in spite of all the efforts and contracts, the situation of the apprentices of the time remained difficult.[26]

One influential friend was the Piedmontese Justice Minister Urbano Rattazzi. He was anticlerical in his politics, but he saw some value in Bosco’s work.[28][29] While Rattazzi was pushing a bill through the Sardinian 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.[28] 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.[30]

Bosco disliked the ideals that had been exported by revolutionary France, calling Rousseau and Voltaire "two vicious leaders of incredulity."[31] 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", referring to politicians or members of the Savoy court.[32]

In November 1854, he sent a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II, admonishing him to oppose the confiscation of church property and suppression of the orders, but the King failed to respond.[33] His actions, which had been described by Italian historian Erberto Petoia as having "manifest blackmailing intentions",[34] ended only after the intervention of Prime Minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. The king's family suffered a number of 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.[32][33]

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, 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 made. Closure may have been prevented by orders from the king that Bosco was not to be disturbed.[35]

Several attempts were also made on Bosco's life, including a near-stabbing, bludgeoning and a shooting. Early biographers put this down to the growing influence of the Waldensians in opposition to Catholic clergy.[27]

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 City, 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, that is, to work in the service of abandoned boys. And this was the origin of the Salesian Congregation. Among the first members were Michael Rua, John Cagliero (who later became a Cardinal), and John Baptist Francesia.[26]

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." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work. When the group had their next meeting, they 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 estarino, 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." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.[36]

The first Salesians departed for Argentina in 1875. After his ordination, Bosco himself would have become a missionary had not his director, Joseph Cafasso, opposed the idea. He 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, though he completely lacked the financial means at that time. Bosco claimed he had another dream where 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 collected information about different countries. A request from Argentina, turned him towards the Indians of Patagonia, and a study of the people there convinced him that the country and its inhabitants were the ones he had seen in his dream. Towards the end of 1874, John 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 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 that the first missionary departure start in October. There were many volunteers.

In the years Don 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 labelled as a Repressive System of Education. On March 12, 1877, Bosco gave an opening address on the subject-matter of 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 mentions the term 'Preventive System'.[37] Upon his return to Turin, don 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, which he included in the initial draft of the Rule for the Salesian Order.[38] It espoused the values of reason, Religion, and loving kindness with a goal of producing 'good Christians and honest citizens'.[11] This was the only attempt Don Bosco had 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, he was one of the first to combat and put these criticisms into practice.[39]

Though Don Bosco's written works were little known outside of his own Order and the subscribers of his Salesian Bulletin, which he founded on August 1877, he wrote frequently and voluminously. Though Don Bosco was described as more of a man of action than a scholar,[40] 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 time by John Daniel Morell, and was noted by scholars for its cultural importance on the knowledge base of ancient to modern civilization.[41] He was also a skilled biographer. His two most well-known biographies were on his mentor Joseph Cafasso[42] and one of his student, Dominic Savio, which would later be instrumental in his canonization.[43]

Bosco was the subject of the 1935 biopic Don Bosco directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. He was played by the actor Gian Paolo Rosmino.

Bosco was also the subject of a 2004 Italian movie, Saint John Bosco: Mission to Love.

The Italian church St. Giovanni Bosco is named after Bosco. The church is located in Montreal, Canada, in the borough of Ville-Emard. St. Giovanni Bosco is the patron saint of the capital of Brazil, Brasília, which he supposedly foresaw in a prophecy concerning an extraordinary new civilization which would flourish in Central Brazil.

A borough in Quilmes, Argentina, is also named after him.