DON BOSCO EDUCATOR

PASCUAL CHÁVEZ VILLANUEVA

DON BOSCO speaks

12.

The Preventive System must really be ours

On 27 April 1876 I was in Rome. I wrote a long letter that day to Don Cagliero who had left five months previously as leader of the first missionary expedition to Argentina. I informed him of some initiatives and, among other things, I said: “We have in hand a series of projects that seem like fairy tales or plans thought up by madmen. But as soon as we begin, God will bless our plans and everything will go ahead full sail. They give us reason to pray, to thank God, to hope and to pay careful attention.”

It was certainly no bed of roses. Debts were increasing out of all proportion. Delicate judicial disputes were sprouting and were still unresolved. There was the longstanding problem of the strained relations with the Archbishop of Turin and the inevitable problems of a new Congregation settling down while, at the same time, planning expansion on several fronts. It was during those years that I had sought help from the government, pointing out the enormous expenses involved in the first missionary expeditions. I thought I was doing the right thing because, among the many tasks entrusted to the Salesian, was the care of the numerous expatriate Italian families in Argentina. There was a Turin newspaper, the Gazzetta del Popolo, which did not spare me. I was subjected to irony, criticism and many objections. One of its writers finished an article saying: “Is the huge number of young people being brainwashed at Valdocco not enough? If there are any more Don Boscos, we will all finish up as imbeciles.” I was not discouraged by this sort of cheap criticism. I used to tell my Salesians, “The Lord is expecting great things of you. You yourselves will be surprised and amazed. The one thing God asks of us is that we never become unworthy of his great goodness and mercy.”

The fourth Salesian vow

I always insisted that we must be faithful to our style of education. Years and years of experience have proved its worth. While the Salesian Congregation was spreading to many countries, I became more and more convinced that the Preventive System must become our inalienable inheritance, and the centre around which our whole Salesian education work converges. It is what gives our Salesian work its specific identity. As founder, I felt responsible for this unity of intent and action. At the beginning, for reasons that are fairly obvious, the style of education was closely identified with my person. The Preventive System was not the result of academic studies. It was the fruit of an experience of spirituality and education. I did not give my Salesians a scientific text, carefully edited at my desk. What I handed on to them was my passion for the young. I gave them the witness of my whole life experience. The Preventive System contained the values I had always believed in, values which had guided me even in moments of difficulty, uncertainty and trial.

I was not always fully understood, not even by my Salesians. Yet, I can say, I knew them well. I knew that they were well prepared, attentive and generous. I could see that they were capable of heroic sacrifice. Some of them disappointed me, however. I remember one typical situation. It was in 1885. I was almost blind and my legs were swollen to a frightening extent. I was drawing inexorably towards the end of my life. The 593 Salesians were scattered over Italy, France and Spain and another 200 daring young men were preparing to join them! We had been in South America for ten years, first in Argentina, then in Uruguay and finally in Brazil. The frontiers were widening. The field of work was enormous. The challenges faced and the sacrifices undergone were unimaginable. However, it was not long before alarming letters reached Turin. Out of respect, perhaps, they were not addressed to me, but to some of the Major Superiors. The news crept through the corridors of Valdocco – a word or two here, a conversation interrupted as soon as I arrived, a letter that disappeared mysteriously under my eyes ... and finally things reached my ears. I came to know, to my great sadness and disappointment, that in some houses in Argentina, especially the house at Almagro, they were no longer following the Preventive System. They had a rough approach, sometimes hitting the youngsters and resorting to physical punishment. I had to take a stand. I was tired and my body was in bits, in the relentless heat of a torrid summer, but between 14 and 16 August, I wrote three letters. The first was to Bishop Cagliero who had been made bishop just a few months earlier, the second to Fr Costamagna who was Rector at Almagro, and the third to a young priest. I was careful not to take a harsh approach. Writing to “my dear and always beloved Fr Costamgna,” I reminded him that “the Preventive System is really ours.” With this sentence, I wanted to reaffirm our absolute fidelity to our educative method. This was not just a fancy idea of mine, or a fixed notion. It was a question of defending and preserving an indispensable element of our educational method. I recommended the others also to practise “charity, patience and kindness” and I begged them: “Let every Salesian become the friend of all, quick to forgive and ready to forget, once you have forgiven.”

These were little reminders given in that family spirit which enables people to accept even what may seem at first difficult tasks or corrections which might lead to discouragement. Later on, I received other letters that consoled me. I found out that many of our confreres in Argentina had made copies of my first letters, and remained faithful to the directives contained in them. Indeed, some spontaneously made a kind of vow that they would live the Preventive System (as if it were a fourth Salesian vow) and they renewed it every month.

Even though I was thousands of kilometres away, I was still their father and their superior. I knew that our young Congregation was in need of unity and stability, and that its future depended on fidelity to the spirit of its origins, in other words, on the educational method and style which characterized life at Valdocco.

With the same heart

I have always acted like that. In 1872, when the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians was being founded, I was unable to give them personally the help which I knew was necessary, especially at the beginning, so I sent Don Cagliero to Mornese. He was a Salesian in whom I had complete confidence, and I gave him this instruction: “You know the spirit of the Oratory, our Preventive System. It is the key to making yourself loved, listened to and obeyed by the young. Love them all. Do not make any of them feel bad. Assist them day and night with fatherly vigilance, patient charity and constant kindness.” I did not want to kill any personal initiative, or to impose a monotonous repetition of attitudes and actions. What I wanted to insist on was our charism and our style of education. I insisted on fidelity to the Preventive System in accompanying the young people as they grew up, loving them and making yourself loved in return.

Don Francesco Bodrato, the old teacher at Mornese, understood completely. I had had some interesting conversations with him as early as 1864. He later became a Salesian and in 1876 I made him leader of the second missionary expedition. He sent me a very affectionate letter in which he wrote, without fear of contradiction, “We live like Don Bosco”. These words did not make me feel proud, but they filled my heart with joy and hope. And they showed me, yet again, that the work of education in the preventive style of evangelical charity was bearing much fruit in far distant lands.

Writing to Bishop Cagliero in February 1885, I summed up our whole educative work in one monumental expression that was born out of a long and positive experience: “Make yourself loved, not feared.” The mysterious words that I had heard in a dream sixty years earlier came back to me. I have never forgotten them. “You must win over these friends, not with blows but with kindness and love.” Now I was beginning to understand “everything”, as I was told in the dream.

I now saw this method of love and kindness accepted and lived by my spiritual sons in every part of the world. I knew that everywhere under the sky the young people would find in every Salesian another Don Bosco – with the same heart, the same love, the same passion...