3134 THA-Cambodia Don Bosco's Pedagogy seminar, Gustilo
austraLasia #3134

 
THA: Salesian Family Seminar as part of Year 2 Bicentenary Preparations
HUA HIN: 20 September 2012 -- "Salesian Pedagogy 2012 - towards the Bicentenary celebration 2015" has been the title of a series of seminars run for the Salesian Family in Thailand over recent days. There are two groups, the first having already completed an intense two days of study led by Fr Francis Gustilo, from FIN province. The first group had 65 participants from all sections of the Salesian Family in THA province. The sessions ran from 17-18 September.  The second series is now underway - same topic, same presenter.

In all there are 8 sessions per seminar.  Topics cover our heritage, youth today, loving presence, assistance and animation, reasonableness and dialogue, life identity, beyond borders - transcendence, and an epilogue called 'everything for God' to wind things up.

As an example of the approach taken by Fr Gustilo, one participant wrote of the first session, 'Our heritage': he was particularly struck by the well-known Duvallet quote which the Rector Major has more than once referred to -  "You have works, colleges, oratories for the young, but you have only on treasure: the pedagogy of Don Bosco. In a world in which youngsters are betrayed, squeezed dry, crushed, exploited, the Lord has entrusted to you a pedagogy in which respect for the young person, for his greatness and his frailty, for his dignity as a son of God prevail. Preserve it, renew it, rejuvenate it, enrich it with all the latest discoveries, adapt it to these twentieth century creatures and their tragedies that Don Bosco could not know about. But for heaven's sake, preserve it! Change everything, if necessary lose all your houses but preserve this treasure, forming in thousands of hearts the way to love and to save the young, which is Don Bosco's heritage".

As a matter of interest, and apart from the THA seminar - CISI, the Italian Provincial Conference, brought out a very successful booklet last year for Year 1 of the Bicentenary Preparations, and they have just published their Year 2 version. These are arguasbly amongst the best set of materials prepared on each year's special topic that we have in the Congregation. Of course, they are in Italian only, but as we were able to get hold of the digital copy last year and put it on SDL a number of Provinces took advantage of that to translate the parts (or find translated versions of some primary texts) into their own languages.  We are looking once again to get hold of the digital text of the second year's materials, and if successful, austraLasia readers will be the first to find out - and the texts will be once again made available to you.

And just a further codcil: one notes that these days the scholars are talking of the 4 'Lives' written by Don Bosco, rather than the three. In other words, the Comollo life is added to Savio, Magone, Besucco. The Comollo life has never, to our knowledge, been translated into English, nor in many other languages for that matter - it has largely escaped attention. But it is of considerable interest to us this year. It was first published in 1844, so the first of Don Bosco's efforts in this direction. He then republished an expanded and much altered edition in 1884. That very fact makes it even more interesting - that he saw fit to re-work and republish the 'Life'.  A slightly faulty version of both Italian editions was published in digital form by INE (and subsequently in SDL), but we have recently put an epub corrected version in sdb.org (look under Resources-esdb). Any takers for an English translation? It's about 30 pages worth of Don Bosco's Italian, so one has to be familiar with a few vocabulary items that have since dropped out of the language. Nothing too challenging however!