TURIN: 13
December
2013
-- Ceria's 1946 classic, Don Bosco With
God, comes back into the limelight with the 3rd and
final year of
preparation for the Bicentenary. A 2008 English edition,
translated by
Fr Michael Smyth and produced by St
Paul Communications, was
published in Nairobi and has almost certainly made its way
into most
English-speaking Salesian communities, but requests often come
in for a
digital version of this text. There has been a digital
text
floating around, a 1942 translation of the original 1930 and
first
edition by Ceria. But it was a scanned copy of what was
possibly an
Indian-published version, and had many scanning errors, making
it at
times difficult and often annoying to attempt to read.
There is now a corrected pdf copy of this 1942 translation
available in
SDL, so feel free to take a copy.
The translation is generally good and where it went wrong,
such as the
famous 'genial' for 'geniale' or 'whisper' for what we now
always know as 'Word in the ear' and similar, that too has now
been
corrected, so overall the 1942 translation, while not as
fluent as
Michael Smyth's (and we are unlikley to be able to have that
in digital
form since it would be with St Paul's Communication and not
'in-house')
is a worthy one.
Just as a reminder to the reader of what this item is all
about, I
quote from parts of the presentation of the 2008 edition by Fr
Joaquim
D'Souza, since the comments are also relevant in this case:
The author, Eugenio
Ceria (1870-1957) is well known in Salesian circles for
having
published, together with Giovanni Battista Lemoyne, the
monumental
nineteen-volume work, The Biographical Memoirs of St John
Bosco. In
1929, Fr Ceria was appointed to take up and complete the
work
interrupted with the death of Fr Lemoyne in 1916. In the
Preface to Don
Bosco with God, dated 31 January 1946, Ceria states that the
idea for
the book came to him at the time of the beatification of Don
Bosco in
1929. To quote his words (pp.15-16):
“[Don Bosco’s]
contemporaries were so taken up in admiration of his immense
activity
and various triumphs that they overlooked the fact that all
his glory
came from within – omnis gloria eius ab intus. Even the
generation that
came after his death preferred to dwell on the works of Don
Bosco
without paying much attention to the animating principle,
that which
has always been the secret of the saints: the spirit of
prayer and
union with God”
This book,
therefore, was meant to correct the rather one-sided
perception of Don
Bosco’s true greatness by attempting as it were, “to lift
the hem of
the veil that covered his inner life”. Its publication in
1930 was met
immediately with success. It is said that Cardinal Ildefonso
Schuster,
the Archbishop of Milan, on reading the book, remarked,
“Finally, the
Salesians have begun to understand Don Bosco!”
The central quote from Ceria himself about the spirit of
prayer and
union with God, is precisely what the 3rd year of preparation
for the
Bicentenary, focusing on Don Bosco's spirituality, is all
about.
It is a good indication, then, that this text will be very
useful
indeed for the coming year.
Hopefully tomorrow we can have something to say about a second
item along these lines which just arrived today.
