24
August
2013 -- Don Bosco has treated us to the story
of
Severino and his wanderings, not only geographical, but also
religious
and moral, and we have gained some interesting insights into
Waldensians and others of that ilk, plus an entertaining
interlude on
the Great Saint Bernard Pass. He then gave us the story of
Peter, a
'home body' who would have liked to have spent his days around
Valdocco
and the Oratory, but there was a war to be fought on the
Crimean
Peninsula. Now
he
gives us the story of Valentino, and this is a true
rollercoaster ride, in religious and moral terms, with more
than one of
its characters teetering between heaven and hell.
Valentino ends up being one of Don Bosco's shadier characters,
not just
in terms of what he got up to, but also in terms of who he
was, where
he came from, where he went to school... though to be
fair,
himself writes towards the end, saying "I have never been, nor
am I
even now a wicked person. I am an unhappy young man, an
unfortunate
one, but not a perverse one."
Could he have been an Oratory boy, in fact, whom Don Bosco
wanted to
protect in some way, by making him hard to trace? We are
certainly not
dealing with a figment of Don Bosco's imagination here - his
opening
sentence to this shortest of 6 young 'Lives' makes that clear
enough:
"Because I am writing about something that really happened and
that
refers partly to people still living, I judge it better not to
mention
names of people and places referred to in this story". That
said, he
feels free to mention any number of Christian names, like
Valentino,
Osnero, Mari... One wonders if Valentino was possibly one of
the lads he met during his prison ministry.
You will enjoy this story. A reader of austraLasia wrote
recently,
commenting on his satisfaction at having become aware that
there were
some more 'normal' characters amongst Don Bosco's boys; more
normal
than Dominic, Francis and Co., he
meant. If Don
Bosco wrote about Valentino for the Oratory boys (he may have
aimed it
more at parents and other adults) it was possibly because
there were
boys there who had something to learn from Valentino.
Ostensibly the story of Valentino is about "a vocation
obstructed" - by
his father in the first instance, by the first school he went
to, by a
'family friend' who is a demon in disguise, and maybe by his
own fault too. Poor dad ends up very
badly, as indicated by the final lines dedicated to him in the
story: "he became delirious again and with a violent shudder,
died.",
whereas the 'demon' is given kinder treatment: "Mari left this
mortal
coil to enter into eternity where we hope he found mercy in
the Lord’s
sight".
So all in all Don Bosco wrote six stories of boys, all of whom
we
believe he had direct contact with during his priestly
ministry (chances are that
Valentino fits this category somehow, though we don't have the
evidence). We need all six to get the 'big picture'. So,
should you be
interested in having them all in a single collection, such a
collection
is now available
in
a pdf download under the title 'Seen in Action'. Feel
free to
take a copy.
