EDUCATING WITH THE HEART OF DON BOSCO

Final address from the Rector Major

Salesian Family Spirituality Days 2008

Dear brothers and sisters, members of the Salesian Family,friends

Over these days we have tried to understand the spiritual and apostolic programme which I gave the Salesian Family for 2008; “educating with the heart of Don Bosco to develop to their full potential the lives of young people, especially the poorest and most disadvantged, promoting their rights”. Now let's try to bring these days of reflection, prayer and being together, to a conclusion with these final words of mine.

If I had said in the commentary on the Strenna that this theme is the most important of those I have offered over the six year period, and that the great challenges I had identified, like family and life, find their solution in education, today various new factors confirm my belief that we are the bearers of an educational charism more necessary and up-to-date than ever: Don Bosco's Preventive System. This is our treasure; it is what we are called to give the young and society today, our prophetic contribution.

The Education Emergency

To illustrate what I just said above, let me tell you that a few days ago, in the meeting between the Holy Father and the Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, Benedict XVI, expressing his concern over the deteriorating situation of certain elements in our city, spoke of an “education emergency”.

But what does this mean? To confirm my thinking, I would like to quote verbatim from two sections of a conference given by Cardinal Cafarra on 6 November 2007, in other words recently, to the Teatro Jolly at Castel San Pietro Terme (BO). It was entitled “Education Emergency. Commitment, beauty and the attempt to educate”. Here are his words:

“Finally it is possible to say what the education emergency we find ourselves in consists of. It comes from two factors. On the one hand a generation of children asks – and it could not do otherwise – if they can enter a true, good, beautiful universe; and on the other hand a generation of parents has become strangers to a meaningful universe: it has no idea what else to say. The education emergency is the interruption to the story that one generation tells the other: it is the loss of memory on the part of a generation of parents and the inability of a generation of children to even articulate the question that arises in their hearts. The parents offer no tradition, because they have lost the memory of it, and they become witnesses to nothing and just hand on rules. The children find themselves wandering in a desert without paths, no longer knowing where they came from or where they are going.”

And after having tried to answer the question “How do we get out of this education emergency?” he concluded:

“I had already substantially developed this line of reflection when, a few weeks ago, came a book by U. Galimberti: L’ospite inquietante . Il nichilismo e i giovani (The disturbing guest: nihilism and the young) [Feltrinelli, Milano 2007]. We agree with many of things he says; but not with other things and most decidedly so. What is one of the basic tenets of this book? That uprooted from the great tradition which gave them life, the young find that the most disturbing guest of all comes to live with them: nihilism. Let us not delude ourselves: this is the situation for many young people today.”

I must say that I found and read this book of Umberto Galimberti's and had the exact same reaction as did Cardinal Cafarra. On the one hand the book confirms an interpretation and evaluation that I make of the youth situation today, at least in some European countries, but not only there, and on the other hand I found myself in disagreement especially when he speaks as a social psychologist. I find myself reading the same thing from the point of view of the pedagogist with the treasure of all of Don Bosco's experience behind that, the Preventive System and his inculturation in the world.

Last weekend I went to Soverato for the Centenary celebration of the Salesian presence on the Ionic coast. One of the questions put to me by a journalist there was: as you go around the world, what are the most beautiful experiences you have had with young people, and which ones have been the saddest?

I don't intend repeating all of my answer here, but I can say that while there have been many unforgettable experiences of educational success there have been a few, but dramatic examples of negative ones, all marked by a lack of respect for human rights. It is enough to think of child soldiers in Liberia or children exploited for sex tourism in Sri Lanka.

So in this address I want to draw your attention to the two most important elements in applying the Preventive System today: its connection with human rights and the need to offer an educational response able to give rise to and generate culture. This will have you see better what it means today to speak of an “education emergency”: putting society into an educational mode if we want it to have hope and a future.

The Preventive System and Human Rights

“It is not difficult to see, theorising about the ‘educational project’ and in pedagogical practice, the effective promotion of rights proclaimed by the oft-quoted international declarations: the right to life; the right to education and instruction; the right to repose, enjoyment and play; the right to work. In substance, before the public and solemn formulation of the rights of man and the child, Don Bosco had foreseen and shaped the essential map and lines of the application of these”¹.

Cardinal Tonini said to young people who gathered at Colle Don Bosco for ‘Confronto 2001’: “We are human beings first, and then citizens”. Life brings us together and the fact of being born in America, Europe, Asia or Africa is a secondary feature. This life that brings us together and makes us the same has to be experienced with the same dignity in any corner of the world. The right to a “dignified life for all” has to be the key idea bringing us to being involved in the education of the new generations.

The defence of life is the pillar supporting daily effort and various common research in different social, political and cultural situations. The struggle for the defence of life should be a bridge uniting the reduced limits of survival of the great impoverished masses with the broad horizons of the full, more human and better quality of life enjoyed by the few. These ideals should be found in educational commitment, if we don't want to forget that we are humang beings and that the human species should be the first to be protected.

In 1948 the proclamation of “Human Rights” took place at the United Nations. Some groups of people have still not even heard tell of them. Many others do not know about them, simply because their governments are the first to ignore them and trample upon them. How can we speak of the right to life if the most developed societies are the first to sacrifice innocent life with aberrant legislation on abortion? How can we speak of education to respect for human rights, when there are enormous numbers of children and adolescents who don't even enjoy the right to education?

In November 1989, in New York, the “Rights of Minors” were proclaimed. I quote the second article, simply to note how far reality is from good intentions. It is the right to not be discriminated against: “The totality of rights should be applied to the totality of children, without exception, and it is the State's obligation to adopt the measures needed to protect them from any discrimination”.² So what do we say about the ethnic minorities in the Amazonian forests; the millions of “street children” in Latin America; children dying of hunger in Africa or Asia; sale or sexual exploitation of children? And where there are little children, their child's right to play restricted by disgraceful work in the mines at age five, or breathing in toxic fumes in shoe factories or repeating mindless movements for long working days in the factories or assembly plants of great multinationals?

We hear constantly that humanity has sufficient resources for all the earth's inhabitants to live with dignity. And statistics constantly confirm, year after year, that the North-South divide is on the increase, and that while some are swimming in abundance and making great fortunes, a huge mass of needy people makes do with the scarcest of resources and hardly manages to survive at the edges of any kind of human dignity.

It is well-known that financial interests establish the priorities of materialist society and that advertising, the incitement to consumerism, is the magic noticeboard employed by the insatiable greed of the multinationals. Only aggressive and competitive societies survive, and this style has even become a part of educational bodies and associations. So what do we do?

Education should be more a case of an open window on world realities and an engine for sensitising and transforming humanity. For this reason, without manipulation or ideologising, classrooms should hear the voice of those who have no voice, hear of the hunger, thirst, see the bare existence of so many forgotten people; realistically and coherently the efforts of so many committed people should be made known - people working for great causes such as the dignity of women, for peace, respect for creation… Luckily in various situations (NGOs, Volunteer movements…) there is some convergence towards defence of life, of the human being and his or her rights, whole peoples and their rights, the planet and its rights.

At the base of all our reflections there is a doubt as to whether we are achieving or not the quality education that the new culture demands, one already part of our world, creating a culturally new man and woman. Our priorities should go towards forming people who are truly free, critical, socially committed, able to serve their brothers and sisters, cwho find their motivation from the Gospel, in their faith in the New Man: the Risen Christ. Will education perpetuate the old system of competition, or will it open up new roads to participation, shared responsibility, solidarity and social justice?

It wouldn't be bad to settle on some criteria to keep in mind for education if we want it to be an effective mechanism for improving society. The first would be: a critical mentality as a tool for analysing what is around us and for determining all that does not seem to us to be just and that we want to change. The second would be altrusim, which must get us out of ourselves in order to establish the best relationship with others. The third: respect for the Declaration of Human Rights, which can be a reference point when analysing our daily experience or that which we receive through mass media. The fourth must be the factor of involvement and commitment, in a way that is most compatible with our current concrete circumstances, so that the above criteria will not remain simply statements of good will.

Promoting human rights, especially those of minors, is a Salesian way of promoting a culture of life and of changing structures. Don Bosco's Preventive System has great social projection: it aims at collaborating with many agencies to transform society, working at a change of criteria and view of life, developing the culture of the other, aiming at a modest lifestyle, a constant attitude of free sharing and commitment to justice and the dignity of each human being. Education to human rights, especially of the very young, is the privileged way in different contexts for carrying out this commitment to prevention, complete human development, building a more balanced, more just and healthy world. The language of human rights also allows for dialogue and for us to insert our pedagogy into various cultures around the world.

Education and Culture

“The primary and essential task of culture in general and of each culture in particular is education. This consists in the fact that the human being becomes ever more human, that he or she can ‘be’ more and not just ‘have more’, and that as a consequence, through all that he or she has , 'possesses', he or she can know more fully how to ‘be human’.³

Education is a specific path to humanisation, that is, development of the person. It seeks to build human beings from within, freeing them from circumstances that could prevent them from fully living out what they are called to be and enabling them to expand their creative capacities.

The development of the human being as a person necessarily goes by way of culture, understood especially as a way of relating the person to the world, with others, with him or herself, with God, but understood also as an encounter with an objective heritage of understandings, goods and values, and finally as a personal process of assimilatiion, re-elaboration, enrichment.

However culture is no static, universal heritage easily accepted by everyone. Today we have a task ahead of us with our ever more complex, post-ideological, uncertain societies, but especially multicultural ones, with all the baggage of ambiguity evoked by this last reference in terms of openness or closedness to difference. Then we have to keep in mind the scenario of globalisation which grinds all identities and local planning together. The future challenge to education, then, will be precisely that of a world view and of intercultural thinking, where the recognition of differences and undoing of stereotypes will be an educational necessity and resource.

Education is a cultural mediation able to contrast the aspirations and situations experienced by the young today with the experiences of humankind expressed in their cultural heritage and in the variegated world views of today. Salesian education is based on a scale of values coming from a particular concept of the human being: the maturing of awareness through the search for truth and an inner adherence to it; the development of responsible and creative freedom through awareness and choice of what is good; a capacity for relationships, solidarity, rapport with other human beings, based on recognition of the dignity of the human person; preparation for historical responsibilities, based on a sense of justice and peace.

Salesian works are environments of education and culture, in which knowledge is offered that makes young people aware of the problems of today's world, makes them sensitive to values and constructively critical; in which the young acquire attitudes which allow them to act as free human beings and with abilities that make them competent and effective in their action.

We know well the situation of non-belief in which the greater number of European youth today grows up. This non-belief has an extraordinary cultural impact. It is enough to look at today's literature and cinema. It is very difficult to find, over recent decades, anywhere in the most representative or successful works, where the chief characters get their inspiration for life or the dignity of their existence from Christianity. Religious experience is presented as something bad or in terms of ridicule, or as something which is infantile or just a guilt feeling. Despite this, for us Christ is the best news and most precious gift we can give the world; in Him the human being achieves his or her greatest dignity, being recognised as a child of God, and the frontiers of existence expand into eternity. Therefore the final aim of education is evangelisation as a synthesis of faith and culture, faith and life. Salesian education settingss seek to set in motion a vital dialogue and an integration between knowing, education and the Gospel. In the disparity there is amongst concepts and perspectives, education makes the reference to Christ a criterion of evaluation to discern the values which build up mankind and the counter values which degrade it. In fact, it is particularly the irrelvance of faith in culture and life that makes young people indifferent or strangers to the world of religion, makes the God question meaningless, empties religious language of meaning and tends to make our every effort to educate wholistically and to evangelise in vain.

For many centuries the Christian Faith inspired thinkers, writers, artists, musicians in Europe. It is only with temerity (or rather with cynicism, given that it is not ignorance we are talking about) that there is an attempt today to deny the Christian roots of European culture. Unfortunately we have sensed now over such a long period the lack of an effective and witnessing presence of Catholics in the various areas of creating and spreading culture. Politicans, writers, professors, doctors, poets, lawyers, journalists, and other Catholic professionals are lacking. If today's non-belief has such a powerful cultural impact on the western world, it is evident that the Catholic must make of culture the field to be present in, through commitment and witness. We need militant people, a Catholic ferment in the world of art, thinking, social communication, capable of giving new prestige to the Christian event. “The Church", John Paul II said, "asks the lay faithful to be present in teaching courage and intellectual creativity in privileged places of culture, which are the world of the school and university, scientific and technical research settings, places for artistic creation and humanist reflection”.⁴

The educator “according to the heart of Don Bosco” is aware that the educational process is the privileged place for the total promotion of the person and where faith is offered to the young. Teaching throws light on human knowing through data of faith, without distracting from the objective proper to it and rethinks, in the light of educatiion to faith, both the overall sense of culture, and the teaching of single disciplines, as well as personal relationships within groups.

Therefore in the educational process we seek to develop the culture of each one as a capacity for communion and listening to other human beings and events, as the duty of service and responsibility for others and not as a means of self affirmation and aggrandizement. The Salesian educator helps to discover the profound coherence there is between faith and the value that culture pursues: it highlights the function of the Gospel in culture: it elevates culture's authentic expressions, regenerates and transforms its less human elements; it enables attitudes that predispose the young to a vital understanding and favourable response to the Gospel.

Conclusion

Allow me to finish with a poem by Gabriella Mistral. It is brief but replete with prophetic meaning, and tells us why today more than ever before we should speak of an “education emergency” and how today more than ever before the way out can be found in the heart of Don Bosco:

His Name is “Today”

We are guilty of many errors, of many faults,

But our worst crime is abandoning the children,

Neglecting the fountain of life.

Many of the things we need can wait.

The child cannot.

Right now is the time his bones are being formed,

His blood is being made and his senses are being developed.

To him we cannot answer “Tomorrow”.

His name is “Today”.

Gabriella Mistral

Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile

And now I call upon the Lord to give you the grace of an educator's heart like that of Don Bosco's. I wish you all a fruitful work of education and ministry.

Rome, 20 January 2008

Fr Pascual Chávez Villanueva

Rector Major