21
August
2013 -- As a number of readers requested a
copy of 'Severino', it
now seems reasonable to offer the story of Peter, who would
have
attended the Oratory shortly after Severino decided to
quit!
Don
Bosco was in the process
of formulating his experience of the primitive Oratory and
preferred
to do this through story-telling. Dominic Savio was still in
his second
year at Valdocco when Don Bosco
wrote Peter's story, but by this time (1855), Peter was
already on the
Crimean peninsula fighting the Russians, so he would have
attended the
Oratory maybe in 1847 or thereabouts. While Severino's
'adventures'
had been
those of a
country lad who had attended the primitive Oratory, quit,
launched out on his own somewhat disastrously, and
eventually became the mature adult, Peter was a city boy who
seemed to
avoid all disasters, at least those
that could be said to result from his own behaviour.
Peter's story
tails off at
the end and Don Bosco
leaves us uncertain (because he was unsure) whether he lived
or died as a
result of the war, but
it is essentially the story of the effects of his upbringing,
mainly at
home, in his parish and partly at the Oratory, and Don Bosco
is at
pains for us to see the results of good breeding.
But first things first. You will note that the original title
(La forza della buona
educazione)
is translated here as The
Power
of a Good Upbringing.
You may
not have read the story (it has not been previously
translated), but
you will have seen a number of references to it, and all of
these have
the title as "The Power of a Good Education". This
now
seems far too literal. If you actually do read the story
you see that
Peter, at eight years of age, was already employed at a Turin
match
factory, then a cotton factory at
age thirteen from where he was called up for military service
(we
assume rather later, at
around 18 years of age). His mother and father were
illiterate, he
attended some catechism classes in his parish
and some evening classes at the Oratory (which began around
1845). That
was as much schooling and education as we normally think of it
in
English, as he ever received.
Don Bosco makes it
abundantly clear in his conclusion that Peter was a
virtuous and
mature adult who brought honour to his city, family and
country because
he had had a good upbringing at home and even played his own
part in
'educating' his father, where religion was concerned! There is
no
question that this is
the thrust of the story and therefore its title should reflect
that. It
is also the case, even today, that to speak of 'buona
educazione' or its negative, in the 'maleducato', in Italian,
means essentially to speak of good
breeding
or the lack thereof. One may be well-schooled, even have the
best of social graces, but still be maleducato.
He did, of course, learn to
read and write and picked up the rudiments of Italian grammar,
some
arithmetic at the Oratory evening classes. DB does not miss an
opportunity to suggest he also
learned the 'Metric and Decimal System' - from his own
text, of
course, which stood Peter in good stead both at work and in
the army,
so we learn.
Again a warning, though of a different kind to the one issued
for
'Severino'. Peter puts Dominic Savio, Michael Magone and
Francis
Besucco in the shade for overall holiness - even if you roll
them all
into one! You may find
the chapters on his First Communion and Confession a trifle
cloying
for modern sensitivities, but Don Bosco is of course making a
point
about the two pillars of his educational approach.
By the time he wrote
about Savio, Magone and Besucco Don Bosco was already running
something
we
might call an aspirantate today. That was not the case
for Peter,
who was a child labourer, if we wanted to find a description
of him at
11 years of age when he first visited the Oratory. He lived
with his
family, a good one basically, once his father got back on the
straight and narrow, and he belonged to and frequented his
parish. He
did not indicate an interest in the 'ecclesiastical state', as
DB often
has his characters do. All
of that is important in this story.
Possibly the key 'mature' message in the entire story, though,
comes
when Peter writes to his mother from the Crimea and urges her:
"Tell my
brothers and sisters that work produces good citizens, and
religion
produces good Christians, but that work and religion lead to
heaven".
That message is for any time and place and offends no
sensitivities!
'Valentino'
will be next, which completes the set of stories of boys who
had direct
and historical connection with the Oratory. It is this group
in
particular which demonstrates features of Don Bosco's pedagogy
over a
more or less thirty year period.
