1486 Chapter 8 of Prevention not Repression (Braido)
austraLasia #1486
"...so matters in the Indies and Australia don't
interfere with those in Argentina".
ROME: 12th March 2006 -- If you don't read Italian, you
are unlikely to have read Don Bosco's collected letters or much else
that he wrote other than in the Memoirs of the Oratory.
And yet, as Braido says, "the best interpreter for theorising or
writing about Don Bosco's preventive system, is Don Bosco himself".
You now have a chance to read a few snatches from
some of the letters quoted by Fr Peter Braido in Chapter 8 of Prevention,
not Repression, a study of Don Bosco and the preventive
system. Braido says at one point that we can't leave
out any of Don
Bosco's written material (and there is a prodigious amount of it!) if
we want to understand how he operated and who he was.The
letters are one place where you gain an idea of Don Bosco's
extraordinary general knowledge and broad vision allied with downright
practicality.
In the snippet which forms the headline above, he is
writing to Cagliero in 1876 (not long arrived in Argentina) and says at
one point, "You're a musician, I'm a poet by profession; let's do
things so that matters in the Indies and Australia don't interfere with
those in Argentina". We know that the Pope had offered him a
Vicariate Apostolic in Australia in 1876, that he would be visited by
Bishop Matthew Quinn from Bathurst but wouldn't at that stage see his
way clear to be sending men, committed as he was to South America.
Possibly the reference to 'the Indies' was the East Indies, or today's
Indonesia and East Timor. The reference is only of superficial
interest here, though it helps one immediately understand the big
vision that was driving Don Bosco.
There is another extraordinary citation from a
letter to Fr. Dalmazzo in 1880, when DB is much strapped for cash. "Set
to work with everything you can ('in omnibus labora' are his
exact words) and if you can't succeed otherwise in getting donations,
then you'll have to carry out a robbery or do some mathematical
subtraction in some Banker's house!" Tongue in cheek of course,
and certainly out of context! We'll have to let that one slide.
The process of working through the heavily footnoted
text of Braido's work has been moving ahead a little faster than
expected. The fact that it has reached Chapter 8/19 is a bonus
for the English reader because that's about the extent that will be
made available until the translated work is eventually published,
whenever. You may read individual chapters, or download the
zipped file with all 8 chapters.
These first eight chapters form a unity in Braido's
mind. It is where he sets the scene for discussion of the
preventive system today. But the reality is that English-only
readers have not previously glimpsed the substance of Braido's work;
only, perhaps, heard that it is amongst the best we have for
understanding Don Bosco in context. It can only whet the appetite
for more. You will learn some details of his times, come to
realise that many of the things he said about his 'system' were in
fairly wide usage at the time, that there was a 'reality' out there of
preventive approaches long before the formula came into play, but you
will also learn just what is distinctively Don Bosco's about his
employment of these ideas and realities, and indeed, formulas. In fact
Chapter 6, the smallest chapter in the book, is a neat summary of DB's
originality as well as containing a summary of key moments in his
lifetime - and the footnotes are a subtext as long as the main text in
this instance!
You know where to find this material -
www.bosconet.aust.com/bnet06ut.htm is the complete reference URL. Enjoy.
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