STRENNA 2009

by Pascual Chávez Villanueva

A VAST MOVEMENT FOR THE YOUNG

A HUNDRED WAYS OF COMMUNICATING

The new situation of the culture of communication offers previously unknown possibilities for education and evangelization. Today social communication is the obligatory pathway for the spreading of culture and life models. It is a significant part of the experience of youth. (CMS 19)

_Agreat creator of educational/evangelising situations, Don Bosco knew how to take advantage of the quality and the strength of the languages of communication in order to make an impact in an original and effective way on the young. He knew how to touch the heart-strings. He was not only an evangeliser/educator but a born communicator too. The clear objective of the style of communication invented by Don Bosco was that which one of my predecessors, Fr Egidio Viganò, described in lapidary form: educating by evangelising and evangelising by educating, the inseparable link in the Salesian mission. He succeeded in getting the best out of the youngsters by making them take the leading role in their own education, and the best out of the educators/ evangelisers by making them witnesses to the gospel and the animators of the wealth of youthful expression. In the Oratory a broad spectrum of forms of communication touched the lives of the many “poor and abandoned” boys who arrived in Turin from the valleys. The house, the school, catechism, mass, work, the band, the stage, outings, games, work-shops, the Good Nights, descriptions of dreams, sermons, a little word in the ear, slips of paper with personal messages, etc. all communicated a culture, a way of relating to God, to the world sand to others. All of this opened up life to hope, to trust to meaning, just when perhaps for some that had already been lost. The Oratory, in other words, represented a sound and well founded cultural alternative.

 But Don Bosco went further. His gifts as a communicator can been seen from an impassioned letter from which I quote a short extract: “The spreading of good books is one of the principal aims of our Congregation. [...] Therefore among these books we intend to spread I propose that we concentrate on those which have the reputation of being good, moral and religious, and those are to be preferred which we have produced on our own presses […] With the Salesian Bulletin, among my other aims, I also had this: to keep alive in the young people who had returned to their families a love for the spirit of Saint. Francis of Sales and for his pieces of advice so as to make themselves the saviours of other young people.”¹ Don Bosco was therefore an educator/ evangeliser/communicator. As I wrote in the letter dedicated to Social Communication (SC)². For Salesians SC is based on the very mission of the Church³ and is an expression of the passion for God, of the passion for the salvation of the young, of “da mihi animas, cetera tolle”. Therefore SC is not something outside, and even less, something extraneous to the mission, but rather flows from it. Therefore, the Salesian, as a son of Don Bosco, is an evangeliser-educator-communicator by nature.

Today we are witnessing how the young have created their own space, the so-called digital world, a virtual habitat where they feel they are in charge. At first this was viewed with a certain unease. But it is only right to recognise that – having left behind the age of stone and chisel, of paper and ink, of walls and class-rooms and of passive listening, the young are adopting new languages, new methods and new forms of education and evangelisation. They want to be the script-writers and the actors in their own space, with their language and their contents. They discover and recreate themselves and demand the freedom to navigate and to dialogue in cyberspace. Well then, if that is where they are, that is where we should be too: educating, making our voice heard, giving witness. Outside these spaces and these languages we are neither seen nor heard, nor understood by the young. We would not be able to educate nor make an evangelising impact on culture.

 This new situation should not frighten us, but neither can we ignore it; we would run the risk of abandoning the young who are already at home there and forming by far the vast majority. That is where they were born, where they live and work and where they enjoy themselves, form relationships, experience joys and sorrows, and, I would even say, many are dying there: it is enough to look into the social networks: Second Life, or MySpace, or Facebook, or any blog, or Youtube, or…

If the preventive system demands the presence of the Salesian “in the playground,” among the youngsters, then we need to be thinking about, bringing up to date, and putting into practice the presence of the Salesian educator/evangeliser in the new playgrounds of communication, where so many forms of the media are to be found, where the walls are not made of bricks or cement, the connections are not only made of metal or fibre but also by electronic waves, picked up and transmitted by satellites through space. I close quoting Pope Benedict XVI: “I would like to conclude this message by addressing myself, in particular, to young Catholic believers: to encourage them to bring the witness of their faith to the digital world. Dear Brothers and Sisters, I ask you to introduce into the culture of this new environment of communications and information technology the values on which you have built your lives!”

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