At the beginning of his letter convoking the 26th General Chapter, the Rector Major wrote: “For some time now the conviction has been growing on me that today the Congregation needs to reawaken in the heart of every confrere the passionate zeal of ‘Da mihi animas’.” (AGC 394, p. 6) This will be the focus of our reflection.

1. “DA MIHI ANIMAS”: SALESIAN SPIRITUALITY AND ASCETICISM

In the same letter, a little further on, Fr. Pascual reminded us of an important text of our Salesian tradition:

“Don Bosco’s motto is a summary of Salesian spirituality and asceticism, as expressed in the ‘dream of the ten diamonds’. Here two complementary perspectives are intertwined: that of the outward appearance of the Salesian, manifesting his daring, his courage, his faith and hope, his complete dedication to the mission, and that of the hidden heart of a consecrated person with an inner reality made up of deep convictions that lead him to follow Christ in his obedient, poor and chaste style of life” (p. 7); “the reason for his tireless work for ‘the glory of God and the salvation of souls’.” (p. 6)

Although we can distinguish between the two parts of Don Bosco’s motto, taken from Sacred Scripture (Gn. 14,21) – we have no intention here of entering into an exegetical discussion – we should not separate them: spirituality and asceticism cannot be understood apart from each other. In this connection, we have only to recall the image presented by the document on fraternal life: “A community that is not mystical (communion) has no soul, but a community that is not ascetic (common life) has no body” (n. 23). We shall return later to this relationship between spirituality and asceticism as a total union of the two in what is their authentic point of departure, viz. love.

From the formal point of view, Don Bosco’s motto is first of all a prayer. “Precisely because it is a prayer, it enables us to understand that the mission does not consist only in pastoral initiatives and activities. The mission is a gift of God rather than an apostolic task; its fulfilment is a prayer in action” (AGC, p. 6). We have to remember the words of Jesus in his discourse on the Bread of life: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me (…) For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father” (Jn 6, 44.65). From this point of view, then, the motto is a prayer of petition: we are asking God to give us the young people to be saved. Are we aware of what we are daring to ask the Lord, of the enormous responsibility our motto entails? Do we realize that we are asking him nothing less than to entrust to us the young, “that part of human society which is so exposed and yet so rich in promise” (C 1)… Are we equal to the task?

2. “… THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE SALVATION OF SOULS…”

What are we really asking God when we pray: give me souls? Doesn’t our request lead to a dichotomy, a spiritualistic mentality which cuts us off from the integral and historical situation of our young people?

This objection could have a leg to stand on, but in our times, and especially in the light of the work accomplished by the Congregation in different parts of the world, it has become a purely theoretical question, having been discarded in actual practice. Asking the Lord for “souls” has always been understood in the Congregation as a figure of speech for the integral person: in fact, each and every young person, in his bodily as well as spiritual reality, is a potential “target” of our mission. That is why our work is essentially educative and pastoral: it is the way in which our mission becomes concrete, “a sharing in [the mission] of the Church, which brings about the saving design of God, the coming of his Kingdom, by bringing to men the message of the Gospel which is closely tied in with the development of the temporal order” (C 31).

I think that our problem is a different one. To put it in a nutshell: if the word “souls” is a figure of speech, then we remain without a satisfactory answer as to what it specifically means.

And we shall never have an answer as long as we forget that salvation was the final and definitive goal of the integral promotion Don Bosco sought for his boys at every moment. If this is not our goal too in our educative and pastoral work, we shall be nothing more than an efficient organization for the development of the young; but, this means that we shall no more be a charismatic movement with the sole mission of being “signs and bearers of the love of God for young people, especially those who are poor” (C 2).

This is how I would put it in the form of a diagram:

Obviously, the central box represents the present-day situation of young people; the boxes at either end correspond to the “traditional” Christian outlook on the situation of man before God: everything is “played out” in terms of his eternal salvation and damnation. The intermediate boxes (with the texts in italics) depict a more “factual” picture of the situation; should this picture become exclusive, there is a risk of forgetting the novissimi or “the last things”. The diagram in its entirety describes an integral outlook which alone animates and does full justice to our Salesian work.

Only when we “work for the salvation of the young” (cf. C 12) does our labour become an experience of God. “The glory of God and the salvation of souls were Don Bosco’s deepest interests. Working for God’s glory and the salvation of souls amounts to conforming one’s will to that of God, who communicates himself as Love, thus showing his glory and immense love for men, all of whom he wants to be saved. There is a unique point in the ‘story of a soul’ (1854), where Don Bosco reveals the secret of the purpose of all his activity: ‘When I dedicated myself to this part of the sacred ministry, I intended to consecrate all my labours to the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls; to work to produce good citizens for this earth so that one day they might be worthy inhabitants of heaven. May God help me to be able to continue until my last breath. Amen” (AGC 394, 37-38).

It is well to clarify once again that “salvation” – to use an analogy - does not mean “just making it to heaven”. For Don Bosco, the ideal of Salesian education is holiness, the “high standard” the Holy Father, John Paul II, presents to us in Novo Millennio Ineunte (nn. 30-31) as the goal and the programme of every undertaking in the entire Church.

To his boys, the majority of whom did not come from “privileged” (socio-economic or religious) environments, Don Bosco recommended a practical programme of spirituality for everyone to follow in his daily life. He was convinced that all are called to holiness, including the young who are capable of making a spiritual journey analogous to that of saintly adults. This journey, under the direction of a spiritual guide, leads to the joyous gift of oneself in everyday life; it draws its strength from the moments of prayer, the sacraments and Marian devotion, and expresses itself in a love and concern for others marked by cheerfulness: “We make holiness consist in always being cheerful”.

To this end, he sought to render the traditional teaching of the Church more accessible by adapting it in a practical and convenient way to the young. Dominic Savio, Michael Magone and Francis Besucco were examples of the youth spirituality of Don Bosco. Even if not all of them reached the holiness of the altars, they were certainly models of a Christian life lived to the full. By narrating the story of their life, and above all, their exemplary death, Don Bosco showed that he considered them to have entered the Kingdom of God, Paradise.

It is precisely the youngster whom we would least associate with the ideal of holiness - Michael Magone - who emerges as the model of a holy and virtuous life. Don Bosco writes of him: “We would have certainly wished for this model of virtue to have remained in the world until a ripe old age – either in the priesthood to which he felt a strong inclination, or in the lay state – because he would have done an immense good to his country and to religion.” Here, in all its clarity, was the human and Christian ideal for a young man, according to Don Bosco.

3. PASSION FOR MAN, FOR CHRIST, FOR GOD…

It is very interesting and significant to find the word “passion” in the Rector Major’s presentation of Don Bosco’s motto. No doubt, it is a word that has gradually entered into the language of our time. I wouldn’t be able to say if it has entered into our mentality as well. Barely a few years ago, it had only a positive meaning when it referred to the “passion of Christ”, and in this case, solely because it meant the suffering and death of Christ (cf. for example, Mel Gibson’s film). If one were to ask: when did Christ’s passion begin? the unanimous and immediate answer would have been: “the day before he died”.

In this connection, a Russian author, D. Merezhkovsky, writes that “it is very strange that the Church, which considers the ‘passions’ as something bad and their absence as a sign of holiness, has had the courage to call her greatest mystery a ‘passion’.”¹

Let us analyze the word “passion” in three progressive steps: anthropological, Christological and theo-logical.

a) In the anthropological sense, passion (and the passions) were considered something negative because they were associated with sin or in any case with the imperfection of concupiscence; oftentimes, the model man consisted in being absolutely without any passions or at least in being able to control and keep them in balance as he strove for the “golden mean” (aurea mediocritas). The fact however is that the word that was literally used to express this ideal – apathy - was far from acceptable. S. Kierkegaard comments on this mentality with some memorable, thought-provoking words: “It is a greater loss for one to lose his passion than to lose himself in his passion.”

I would like to refer to the subject of human love, and more concretely, to eros. Josef Pieper states in his excellent book, On Love, that eros has been the object of a campaign of defamation and calumny ever since it was considered a synonym of sexuality and sometimes even a morbose expression of the same. Probably this is not the case nowadays - not because eros has been rehabilitated but because it has benefited from the present-day positive appraisal of sexuality. (Keep in mind, however, that eros and sexuality are two completely different things.) My impression is that Benedict XVI’s extraordinary Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, and his even bolder Message for Lent 2007 have not yet sufficiently penetrated Christian thinking.

For us who are pastors and educators, it is indispensable that we be able to form passionate people, people who know how to love and be loved. We ought to recall that one of the priorities of our human and Christian education, discerned by the 23^rd General Chapter in 1990, was precisely: education to love and in love. The need continues to be felt, today more than ever before.

b) From the Christian standpoint, to speak today of the “passion” of Jesus Christ in theological and spiritual language² is to refer to his Love as the ultimate motive of the gift of his life for us: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15,13).

It is along these lines that we can say - without falling into a tautology - that Jesus’ passion led to his passion. Much progress has been made in trying to remove from Jesus, the Son of God made man, the “apathy” which over the centuries hindered a full understanding of his humanity and led instead to the spread of a veiled monophysitism. As the Rector Major says, “Don Bosco’s programme re-echoes the expression ‘I thirst’, pronounced by Jesus from the cross when he was giving up his own life in carrying out the Father’s will (Jn 19, 28). Whoever makes this prayer of Jesus his own, learns to share his apostolic passion to the very end” (p. 7).

However, if we were to pause here, it would be tantamount to stopping halfway, because we would get the impression that Jesus’ passion was only the consequence of his Incarnation, of his having “loved with a human heart”, as the Second Vatican Council puts it so beautifully (GS 22). But, we would not know anything about Jesus as God; the passion of Jesus, in this case, would be not so much a revelation as a concealment of God.

c) Therefore, the deepest meaning of the word “passion” lies on the theo-logical level. As J. Moltmann sums it up, “Christ’s passion reveals to us the passion of a passionate God.”

In the final analysis, the human ideal of “apathy” was a reflection of the yearning to “become like God”, to resemble him as much as possible. In no way was such a desire negative or sinful because we have been created to God’s image and likeness! St. Thomas Aquinas puts it beautifully: “prius intelligitur deiformis quam homo” (The human being is to be understood first of all as a godlike being rather than as man). The error has been the incorrect image of God, viz., the belief that God has no feelings or passions; that, in the final analysis, he is an “apathetic God”; and his Omnipotence has been understood as: “God there, in his heaven, enjoying perfect happiness, and I here on earth wishing to be like this God.”

In this regard, Moltmann again asserts: “Man develops his own humanity in relation to the divinity of his God. He experiences his own being in connection with what manifests itself to him as the Supreme Being. He directs his life towards the Ultimate Value. He makes a fundamental option for what concerns him in an unconditional way (…) Theology and anthropology find themselves in a relationship of mutual interchange (…) Primitive Christianity was not in a position to decisively oppose the concept of apathy which the ancient world proposed as a metaphysical axiom and ethical ideal, because it epitomized the veneration of God’s divinity and man’s desire for freedom”.³

The Rector Major too refers to the root of our apostolic passion when, speaking of formation, he points out that “it is necessary to form passionate persons. God has a passionate love for his people, and to this passionate God the consecrated life looks up intently. It must therefore form persons who are passionate for God and like God” (pp. 27-28). In his Message for Lent, Benedict XVI states that “Ezekiel, speaking of God’s relationship with the people of Israel, is not afraid to use strong and passionate language (cf. Ez 16, 1-22). These biblical texts indicate that eros is part of God's very heart: the Almighty awaits the ‘yes’ of his creatures as a young bridegroom that of his bride.”

4.DON BOSCO’S APOSTOLIC PASSION

We shall try to render this “new image of God” more concrete in the Salesian context. It will undoubtedly be a particular enrichment from the theological point of view, but more especially from the perspective of proposing a practical way of carrying out our mission.

Certainly, it is not just a question of words; otherwise, we would run the risk of pouring new (and excellent!) wine into old wineskins. Instead, it must be said that genuine Christians – saintly men and women, in the first place – have instinctively grasped this point, perhaps without having the proper conceptual and linguistic categories to express it: after all, a genuine experience of the God of Jesus Christ cannot exhaust itself in ideas or words!

We can describe Don Bosco quite correctly as a passionate man, overflowing with the passion of Love, which in reality, from the Christian point of view, means that he was full of God, the God of Jesus Christ. But, over and above the beautiful description and so as not to remain on the purely rhetorical plane, we have to ask ourselves: What are the aspects that this new outlook can offer for a renewal – including a theological renewal - of Don Bosco’s passion?

* In the first place, we can say that our Father, Don Bosco, shared God’s passion for the salvation of mankind, and more concretely, for the salvation of young people, particularly those who are “poor, abandoned and in danger” (C 26). This is what it would really mean to feel “compassion with God”. If we do not take this point seriously, we fall back into theological apathy or into an exclusively inner-worldly preoccupation for the human promotion of the young. As we said before, to ask God to give us young people is a tremendously real way of saying that for their sake we want to collaborate with Him, feel with Him, suffer with Him…

* In the second place, Don Bosco was particularly mindful that he had to manifest God’s Love. “It is not enough to love…” was more than a marvellous expression emanating from his large heart and a formidable component of his work of education; it contained an extraordinary theological depth because, in the final analysis, God’s entire plan of salvation can be summarized in just one word: epiphany, which consists not only in God loving us but in manifesting his love for us in Christ (cf. Rm 8, 39). We shall devote a subsequent reflection to this theme.

* Don Bosco’s educative and pastoral passion emphasizes, in a radical way, the gratuitous nature of his love as an expression of God’s Grace, which is not a “thing” but God giving himself totally to us in his Trinitarian reality, without any merit on our part. This will also be a subject of further reflection.

* On the other hand, in Don Bosco’s life and educative system, the young person’s response occupies an important place. Even the phrase, “It is not enough to love…,” points in this direction: “One who knows he is loved loves in return, and one who loves can obtain everything, especially from the young” (Letter from Rome, p. 259). Our hearts resonate with the words, “Strive to make yourself loved…”, but perhaps we need to ask the question: does not such a response threaten the totally gratuitous nature of our love and the unconditional gift of ourselves?

On this point, in addition to a text we have already quoted, we have a deep insight given us by Benedict XVI when he speaks of God himself: “In order to win back the love of his creature, he accepted to pay a very high price: the Blood of his Only Begotten Son (…) On the Cross, it is God himself who begs the love of his creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us (…) In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a joy which eases the heaviest of burdens” (italics mine).

In the background of this problem there has been the idea that love is more “pure” if it is totally gratuitous and receives no response, otherwise it would appear to be an “interested” love. We shall attempt an answer to this objection later when we analyze the experience of love as agape and eros; for the time being, taking the cue from a beautiful phrase of St. Paul, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Rm 13,8), I would like to emphasize that in a total and generous love, gratuitousness does not disappear; on the contrary, we find, so to speak, “an encounter between two gratuitous elements”.

This is a fascinating theme in the phenomenology of love. Since it cannot be treated here at length, we give a few aspects that can serve to throw some light on the subject. According to a sharp observation made by E. Jüngel, we have to distinguish between an intentional “ut” (I love in order to be loved) and a consequential ‘ut’ (where being loved is a consequence, not the purpose, of my love).⁴ St. Bernard said this much earlier in a magnificent statement: “Every true love does not calculate; but, it receives its reward just the same. As a matter of fact, it can receive its reward only if it does not calculate… The one who in loving seeks as a reward only the joy of loving, receives the joy of loving. The one instead who in loving seeks something other than love, loses love, and at the same time, the joy of loving.”⁵ We can apply to love what Jesus said of the Kingdom of God: “Strive first for the Kingdom of God^* and his^* righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6, 33). Instead, the one who seeks “all these [other] things” while striving for the Kingdom, ends up without the Kingdom, without justice, and also without all the other things…

In the end, we have to go back to the ultimate Source of theology (and also of human life), to the acme of theo-logical reflection which is in no way a third-degree abstraction’, viz. we have to rise to a contemplation of the Trinitarian God. We know that, in God, to love is just as divine as to be loved. And we bear a resemblance to this God, having been created to his image. What, then, God has united, man must not put asunder…

In the light of all that we have said, then, we could raise an important question, and even a dangerous one if it is not properly understood: can we speak of an erotic love in Don Bosco? Already now itself, we can anticipate the answer: yes, of course, since it is the matter of a love after the image of the love of God Himself. But, this topic too requires a deeper and more incisive reflection later.

* To conclude: I believe that the traditional expression, “Don Bosco, Father and Teacher of youth”, has still a lot to offer us. In particular, I would like to highlight fatherhood, which is one of the deepest expressions of being a man, and which Don Bosco lived to the full. Here again, to avoid getting caught up in rhetoric, let me point out two typical aspects of fatherhood (and apparently of motherhood as well, even though the nuances are different in each case).

• the love of a father or mother is the highest and most radical way of expressing the unconditional nature of God’s love: in every other human love, in fact, there is a prior knowledge of the person loved – except in this one: parents love their son / daughter, even before he or she has a face or a name, even before they know whether it will be a boy or a girl…

• the love of a father or mother is not at all indifferent to the response of the son or daughter, but it does not depend on the response: in this way, it is a reflection of divine love which is good, even to those who are evil and unrighteous… (cf. Mt 5, 44-45).

Let us conclude with a phrase from our Constitutions, which has been turned into our prayer to Mary Immaculate, Help of Christians: Mary, teach and help us to love as Don Bosco did! (cf. C 84).