brocardo


brocardo

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DON BOSCO
PROFOUNDLY HUMAN
PROFOUNDLY HOLY
Pietro Brocardo

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Table of Contents
STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY ....................................................................... 1
PRESENTATION ........................................................................................ 3
Foreword ................................................................................................... 5
Introduction ................................................................................................ 7
Fifty years of sainthood ...................................................................... 7
Don Bosco’s second life ..................................................................... 8
Representative of the “Turin school of holiness” ................................. 10
Memory and prophecy ...................................................................... 12
An active saint ................................................................................. 13
The fulcrum of his spiritual vitality ..................................................... 14
A saint forever ................................................................................. 14
PART 1 KEY FEATURES ......................................................................... 17
Chapter 1 STRIVING TO BECOME A SAINT ............................................. 19
His was not an easy temperament .................................................... 20
The journey upward ......................................................................... 22
It also costs me ............................................................................... 29
Chapter 2: Profoundly human ................................................................... 31
Indomitable yet flexible will ............................................................... 32
Paternal but demanding kindness ..................................................... 34
Sensitive and strong ......................................................................... 38
Chapter 3: Holy in every respect ............................................................... 41
Hidden holiness ............................................................................... 41
Manifest holiness ............................................................................. 45
Chapter 4: Miracle worker who did not create fear ...................................... 47
The extraordinary – with lesser splendour .......................................... 48
Correct evaluation ............................................................................ 50
Chapter 5 A HOLY FOUNDER .................................................................. 53
His vocation ..................................................................................... 54
The young people in the dream ........................................................ 55
Luminous darkness .......................................................................... 58
He had the idea of a Congregation ................................................... 62
Chapter 6 AN ASTUTE SAINT ................................................................. 65
Playing at being simple – but not really ............................................. 65
He could not be fooled ..................................................................... 67
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DON BOSCO
Cunning without guile ....................................................................... 68
Chapter 7 HOLY CHEERFULNESS ........................................................... 71
The elventh commandment ....................................................................... 73
Cheerfulness: a way of holiness ........................................................ 75
Chapter 8 A SAINT WITH SOME BLEMISHES? ........................................ 79
Some slight imperfections ................................................................. 79
Propagandist hyperbole .................................................................... 83
PART TWO ESSENTIAL DIMENSIONS .................................................... 85
Chapter 1 THE MYSTICISM OF THE “DA MIHI ANIMAS” ........................... 87
Always and completely the priest ...................................................... 87
The unifying ideal ............................................................................. 90
Chapter 2 HIS COLOSSAL WORKLOAD .................................................. 95
Relentless activty ............................................................................. 95
The “mystical ladder” of work .................................................................... 97
Statements regarding work ............................................................... 99
His life a testimony ......................................................................... 101
Chapter 3 HIS PRAYER LIFE ................................................................. 105
Don Bosco a “man of prayer” .......................................................... 108
“Brief prayers” ................................................................................ 112
An attitude of prayer ....................................................................... 113
Chapter 4 THE ASCESIS OF TEMPERANCE AND MORTIFICATION ........ 117
Temperance ................................................................................... 118
Moderation and continence ............................................................. 120
Mortification ................................................................................... 123
Chapter 5 WORKING AS A PAIR ............................................................ 129
The Help of Christians a living presence .......................................... 131
Relevance of devotion to Mary Help of Christians ............................. 132
Mary built this house .............................................................................. 135
The painting created by Don Bosco ................................................. 137
Oh! Mother! Mother! ....................................................................... 138
Chapter 6 WORKING “WITH FAITH, HOPE AND CHARITY” ..................... 139
Let us work with faith ..................................................................... 140
Work with hope .............................................................................. 142
Work with charity ............................................................................ 143
Chapter 7 ACTION AS THE SPIRITUAL “PLACE OF ENCOUNTER” WITH
GOD ...................................................................................................... 147
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DON BOSCO
Union through apostolic activities .................................................... 147
Charitable activities ........................................................................ 148
Union through “secular activities” ..................................................... 150
Chapter 8 SUPERIOR GIFTS ................................................................. 155
Ecstasy of action ............................................................................ 155
Ecstatic phenomena ....................................................................... 157
A mystic of action .......................................................................... 158
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 161
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STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY
Published by the Institute of Spirituality, Theology Faculty, Pontifical Salesian
University
PIETRO BROCARDO
DON BOSCO Profoundly human – Profoundly holy
LAS-ROME
"Only a saint in modern guise
not a Party
nor a worldwview
will be the source
of the longed-for transformation of life."
(W. NIGG)
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PRESENTATION
The contents of this book might seem to have a somewhat journalistic feel to
them. But this is only a first impression.
In a crisp and fast-moving style, the author attempts to highlight some of the
more characteristic features of Don Bosco’s holiness. Those who expected a filial
commemoration on the 50th anniversary of the canonisation (1934-1984) of the
great 19th century educator, may be grateful to Fr Brocardo for offering it to us
in this work.
However, it is not only the spiritual figure of the “profoundly human, profoundly
holy” Don Bosco that is depicted here. We discover the thread of the essential
components of all Christian holiness, which make it ever relevant in faithful and
attentive adherence to God’s call, no less than to the various situations in which
individuals find themselves.
With good reason, then, we recgnise a brief essay on spirituality in this work, a
combination of intuition and experience, competene and love.
Pietro Brocardo offers us the result of a lifetime of work in this book, something that
has matured over many years of study and reflection, observation and teaching
in our Faculty of Theology. He has also been a much appreciated spiritual guide
for many confrere preparing for the priesthood and Salesian life.
As an expression of dutiful gratitude, we wanted to include this stimulating booklet
in the Studi di Spiritualità series.
Rome, 31 January 1985
]UAN PICCA
Director of the Spirituality Institute of the Faculty of Theology at the UPS
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Foreword
These pages meet the wishes of friends who have insistently requested them.
They are addressed to members of the Salesian Family, but also to anyone who
in some way feels attracted to the figure of Don Bosco.
The contents focus on the extraordinary humanity and holiness of Don Bosco,
though given the modest size of the work, these are more hinted at than
developed.
The text is in two parts: The first part takes into account certain features of him as
a human being; the second points out some major dimensions of his holiness.
The compilation – because that is what it is – draws freely from many sources: the
beatification and canonisation process, some archival material, official documents
of the Salesian Society, and the vast literature on Don Bosco about which I
separately offer a few pointers.
In order not to make the reader’s job more difficult I have not included footnotes
for any of Don Bosco’s words or excerpts from other authors I have indicated. The
reader should be aware, however, that everything referred to in inverted commas
is faithfully reflected in the text. A few insignificant changes in style do not alter
the meaning of the sentence: if anything, they make it clearer.
I hope that this book can bring some benefit, but above all stimulate direct access
to more wide-ranging works for an in-depth and stimulating knowledge of Don
Bosco, a character more alive than ever in the history of our times.
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Introduction
Fifty years of sainthood
Half a century after this historical event, a reconsideration and re-reading of Don
Bosco’s life from the point of view of holiness seems not only opportune, but
necessary.
In this age of transition, with its global dimension, an era characterised by a
new vision of the human being, the world, history, processes of personalisation,
socialisation, secularisation, liberation, a discourse on holiness would seem
destined for a small audience. It continues to be difficult if we consider, as Egidio
Viganò, the Rector Major of the Salesians, writes, that the very word holiness
can be easily misunderstood by a confused mentality that is
fairly common nowadays and born of an environment which
puts a kind of cultural blockage in the way of its genuine
meaning and implications. It can become identified with a false
kind of spirituality which veers away from practical things; with
an asceticism attainable only by rare heroes; with a feeling
of ecstasy that looks down on active life; with an outdated
understanding of the values of the present turning point in the
history of man. Such a caricature as this can only be deplored.
Yet, every time we come up against a genuine saint, this confused, distorted and
even caricatured depiction completely dissolves. “The saints” wrote Pascal, “have
their own kingdom, their own splendour, their victories and their majesty”.
The mystery of the saints has such a fascination that it often imposes itself – as
it did and does for Don Bosco – on the unbelieving themselves.
Much has been said and written about holiness. Leaving aside scholastic
discussions let us say, quite simply, that holiness, a gift from God and the human
being’s commitment, is none other than life “conformed to the image of his
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Don Bosco’s second life
Son” (Rom 8:29) – the “only Holy One”, the “Holy One” of God (Mk 1:24) – through
his Spirit and the power of the theological virtues. Holiness is the life of God who
is Trinity in us, and of us in God. Per se, all baptised persons living in grace are,
in their own right, ‘saints’, but not to the same degree and level.
When we say that Don Bosco is “holy” we mean to say that, distinct from the
band of ordinary Christians, he lived his baptismal life with greater determination
and intensity; that he achieved the goal that the Dogmatic Constituition Lumen
Gentium points to for all the faithful: the “fullness of Christian life”, “charity, as the
bond of perfection and the fullness of the law”, “perfect union with Christ” (nos.
40, 50).
Such fullness entails true martyrdom or Christian heroism, of which the Divine
Martyr is the archetype. After Him and in communion with Him come the other
martyrs, who by the shedding of their blood have given the supreme testimony
of faith and charity.
However, according to concepts and criteria widely elaborated in the processes of
beatification and canonisation, the faithful – think of Don Bosco – who practised,
at least for a long period before their death, the theological and moral virtues to a
supreme degree, that is, to a greater extent than the way ordinary Christians do,
even in arduous and difficult situations, have also been recognised as heroes for
centuries. Today it is recognised that the perfect, faithful and persevering practice
of the duties inherent to one’s condition and status entails true heroism and is
therefore a criterion of holiness. °Even the most common things can become
extraordinary when carried out with the perfection of Christian virtue° (Pius XI).
Don Bosco is a saint because his life was fully heroic.
Don Bosco’s second life
Canonisation is not only the supreme glory of a member of the faithful. It is also
the beginning of that individual’s second life in the history of the Church and the
world. In fact “by this holiness as such a more human manner of living is promoted
in this earthly society” (Lumen Gentium no. 40).
In reality, Don Bosco’s second life began immediately after his death, though not
with the fullness and universlity conferred on him by canonisation.
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Don Bosco’s second life
From then on, Don Bosco has been alive in worship. In fact, canonisation flows
immediately into worship. “To the honour of the holy and indivisible Trinity” the
formula of the canonisation recites, “… We decree
and define Blessed John Bosco a Saint, and we include him among the number
of the Saints, establishing that the universal Church shall honour his memory
devoutly.” True, not all saints are celebrated; only canonised saints are celebrated.
The veneration of the saints – and therefore of Don Bosco – in the Church’s
thinking is more important than their example, because it helps us to live in
mystical communion with them.
“Nor is it by the title of example only that we cherish the memory of those in
heaven,” Vatican II tells us, “but still more in order that the union of the whole
Church may be strengthened in the Spirit by the practice of fraternal charity. For
just as Christian communion among wayfarers brings us closer to Christ, so our
companionship with the saints joins us to Christ, from Whom as from its Fountain
and Head issues every grace and the very life of the people of God.” (no. 50).
Since Easter 1934, then, Don Bosco has been alive in the liturgy of the Church
which celebrates his universal memory: he is alive in the consciousness of those
who, attracted by his charm and charism, pray to him, venerate him, call on
him as a powerful intercessor with God. The feasts in his honour have wide
resonance in many local churches. They are distinguished by the great turnout for
the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist, which Don Bosco inculcated
so much. They are an authentic passage of the Lord into hearts.
They are characterised above all as “festive encounters of youth” who today, as
they did yesterday, acclaim him and invoke him as “Teacher”, “Guide”, “Friend”
and “Father”. The tribute of love rendered to Don Bosco is always, ultimately, a
tribute of love rendered to God. In the cult of the saints, every attestation of love in
fact terminates in “Christ”, “crown of all saints”, and through him, in God (Lumen
Gentium no. 50).
Don Bosco is alive as a model of Christian life. By canonising him, the Church
officially recognised the exemplary nature of his earthly life and has proposed it
as an “archetype” and “model” for imitation by the faithful.
The imitation of the saints has great importance for the Church because the saints
personify an ideal of Christian life and show people by what means it can be
achieved. Don Bosco’s life is also, in its own way, a fifth gospel that stimulates the
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Representative of the “Turin school of holiness”
desire to get as close to God as possible. It was said of many of the desert Fathers
that their life was a “Word”; the same should said of Don Bosco, whose life was
truly a tangible “sign” of the wondrous transformations that the Holy Spirit works
in people’s hearts. A life, then, in which people today can recognise themsleves;
people for whom not words but deeds, witness are what counts. In fact, as Maritain
pointed out, they “appeal to signs: they need facts, and above all sensible signs of
the reality of divine things. Faith must be a living, real, practical faith. Believing in
God must mean living in such a way that life could not be lived if God did not exist.”
Don Bosco’s holiness, his intact faith that seemed to create things from nothing,
is a response to this call. Don Bosco lives more than ever, finally, in his mission
and in the institutions in which he embodied himself. Undoubtedly, death had not
stopped the marvellous expansion of Don Bosco’s works, but he still lacked the
seal of holiness. In the life of a religious Family, the canonisation of the founder
has more ecclesial importance than the approval of the rules, because the founder
acquires an incontestable authority.
The canonisation of Don Bosco, therefore, represents an event of extraordinary
significance. Recognising the initiative of the Spirit of the Lord in his mission
as a founder, the Church has officially included him as a chosen portion in the
universal patrimony of the People of God; it has authenticated his validity; it has
implored and implores from God that, beyond the coordinates of space and time,
he continue his beneficial journey in history.
And, as Pius XI put it, this means “thousands and thousands of churches, chapels,
hospices, schools, colleges, with thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of
souls brought cloer to God, of youth gathered in safe places and called to
the banquet of knowledge and early Christian education”. It might sound like
hyperbole, but today these words are simply true.
Representative of the “Turin school of holiness”
Holiness is not quantifiable: only God knows its depth and its secret. There are
saints whose destiny seems to have been to remain somewhat in the shade and
others who, for the great services they have rendered to the Church and society,
have come to the attention of the faithful and continue to do so. Don Bosco is
among these. Msgr Giuseppe De Luca, distinguished scholar and man of letters,
a profound connoisseur of Italian religiosity, wrote about him: “In the history of
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Representative of the “Turin school of holiness”
19th century Italy, John Bosco is no less to sanctity than Alessandro Manzoni is
to literature or Camillo di Cavour is to politics: in other words il supremo.”
We could debate this comparison, however it is still true that Don Bosco is one
of the most representaitve figures of what has been called the “Turin school of
holiness”. This school, in the space of a century or little more, has seen the
flourishing of more than sixty Saints, Blesseds, Servants of God who have been
interdependent but different, and whose common yearning seems to be summed
up in two words: pray and do. In the judgement of those who are competent
to do so, this school has been characterised by its syncretism, the result of
the pragmatism that is very much ingrained in the Piedmontese temperament.
But also for its balanced practicality and common sense; for its prudence and
political non-alignment. And for its traditionalism that does not exclude – especially
in Don Bosco – full exposure for the courageous stance taken against the
dominant liberal anticlericalism through creative daring, a great spirit of initiative,
the ability to constructively open the frontiers of the new times to the needs of the
Church. Most of the key figures in this school were priests. In his address for the
Beatification of Leonard Murialdo, Paul VI drew up this lucid profile of the man:
The Turin school of holiness of the last century has given
the Church a type of holy cleric, one very faithful to orthodox
doctrine and canonical custom, a man of prayer and mortification,
perfectly adherent to the habitual pattern of life prescribed for
a priest. But precisely because of this generous and intimate
adherence, one who felt new and powerful energies rising in
his soul, and realised that serious and urgent needs around
him demanded his intervention. We will not look for new ways
of thinking in him, but will find new ways of acting instead.
Action is what describes him. Driven from within his spirit, called
outwardly by new vocations of charity, this ideal priest gave
himself over to the practical problems of the good that was
present to him; and so he began, without any other foresight than
that of abandonment to Providence, the unthought-of adventure,
the novelty of founding a new institute modelled according to
the genius of his initial fidelity, and according to the indications
of human needs he experienced, which love made evident
and imploring. Thus we have Cottolengo and Cafasso, already
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Memory and prophecy
declared saints, as well as Lanteri and Allamano, who followed
in their footsteps, and especially Don Bosco, whose great and
representative figure we all know. And so now we have Murialdo.
The family atmosphere that one breathes in the Turin school, the many
convergences that the servants of God have in common with one another, are not
an indication of uniformity. Each saint has his own face, his own style, his own
character, carries out his own mission, is both the same and different. Don Bosco,
for example, is not Cafasso, both because of his personal and historical qualities
and because he is a founder.
Being a founder entails a different configuration of holiness and a special charism.
That is, a “new gift” to the Church consisting of a typical “experience of the
Holy Spirit transmitted to their disciples to be lived, safeguarded, deepened and
constantly developed by them, in harmony with the Body of Christ continually in
the process of growth” (Mutuae Relationes no. 11), which Cafasso did not have.
Memory and prophecy
Don Bosco is both a saint of the past and a living prophecy of what God
wants in history. He must therefore be approached from both an historical and a
prophetic perspective. From the point of view of history, because only an historical
perspective is capable of resurrecting the past, as such, without distorting it. From
this perspective, Don Bosco is and will always be a typical Piedmontese saint of
Risorgimento Italy, just as Saint Ignatius Loyola is a typical Basque saint of 17th
century Spain. Don Bosco was sensitive to the values of the emerging culture
in need of evangelical leavening, sensitive to disvalues, ambiguities, evils to be
fought, curbed, prevented; sensitive to the new needs of religious life and of the
Church of his time, bitterly contested in its Head and its institutions. The approach
to Don Bosco must arrive at a knowledge of the “total Don Bosco”, such as the
seventy-two-and-a-half years of his life and the work he did on himself. It will then
be understood, for example, how he was nourished by the theology and spirituality
of his time, how he shared in the self-awareness that the Church had of itself
under the pontificate of Pius IX, how certain of his attitudes were a reflection of
his priestly formation at the time of the Restoration.
But memory is not archaeology; to be meaningful and faithful to the God of history
it must also read the past in a prophetic key, as bearer of the future and of
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An active saint
everlasting and perennial values. These values include: God’s ongoing intentions
for his life, the essential elements of his character and spirit, dynamically open
to the future, the vital and essential reality of his mission, the positive values of
his century – the Church has always appropriated all that is good in the lives
of peoples – relaunched as prophecy in our culture. “The human and Christian
principles on which Don Bosco’s educating wisdom is based carry values that do
not grow old,” says Paul VI, because “such an incomparable example of Christian
pedagogical humanism … has its roots in the Gospel.”
Discerning what is memory and what is prophecy is not easy. It involves the
authority of Don Bosco’s successors and of General Chapters. The supreme
guarantor, however, is always, in the final instance, the authority of the Church,
the vigilant guardian of the charisms that God causes to blossom in her womb.
The following pages aim to highlight some perennial elements of Don Bosco’s
holiness, with particular emphasis on his apostolic energy and the “grace of unity”
with which he was able to vitally unite prayer and action. Don Bosco in fact was
undeniably an active saint.
An active saint
Years later we can see that Don Bosco is at the origin not only of a plentiful spiritual
posterity but also of a true spiritual current in the Church which is permeating the
world, and of an authentic school of spirituality, as current research is proving. An
apostolic spirituality, however, or, as we prefer to say, a spirituality of action.
The spirituality of action in today’s cultural context can lend itself to quite a few
ambiguities. Indeed, there are many who think that action is the only category
by which human beings interprets themselves and act upon themselves, others
and the world. Praxis and orthopraxis are always a much debated issue in the
theology of spirituality, which is the science of human action vivified by the Spirit.
The Church is not new to these problems as the history of great apostles of past
centuries demonstrates. In a world that strongly emphasises words like praxis,
work, action, Don Bosco’s life, dominated, so to speak, by the vertigo of action,
can be paradigmatic for those who want to constructively engage in the building of
a world on a human scale leavened by the Gospel, their action being ineradicably
bound to and dependent on God’s saving activity. Action is a primary notion of
existence: it cannot be circumscribed within a strict definition.
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The fulcrum of his spiritual vitality
However, we can distinguish a twofold movement in it: the immanent movement
that justifies and commands external actions and works, and movement directly
aimed at transforming things. Only the former is truly perfective of the person
and human values. Don Bosco is valid for what he did or caused to be done,
but immensely more so for what he was and wanted. This is the correct way to
consider him.
The fulcrum of his spiritual vitality
Today’s Christian, tempted by the difficulty of combining being and action, love of
God and love of neighbour, prayer and work, action and contemplation in a vital
unity, will find a concrete model of spiritual unity in Don Bosco, one lived amid the
usual turmoil of active life.
There was no dichotomy or inner division in his case, but a perfect “grace of unity”:
God was truly the sun, the fulcrum of his life. A saint of action, he certainly did
not act like a muffler where prayer was concerned, but knew how to make action
the habitual place of his encounter with God. He valued the perfective richness of
prayer, but also considered action to be perfective. His sacramental way of being
church consisted precisely in his commitment to “act as church”. He knew that
there is a constant dialectical relationship between prayer and work: one refers
to the other; but he also knew that this relationship is governed by God’s will, the
supreme norm. We will speak of this in due course.
A saint forever
Because of his radical union with Christ who is of “yesterday, today and always”,
Don Bosco is also a timeless saint, a saint of all times. Undoubtedly, the saint of
tomorrow will have unprecedented traits and modulations; tomorrow’s saint will
be different from the saint of the past. But one thing is absolutely certain: this
diversity will never be one of substance. We can certainly say, with Cardinal De
Lubac, that the saint of tomorrow, like the saint of yesterday, will be “poor, humble,
devoid of self. These saints will have the spirit of the beatitudes. They will not
curse or flatter. They will love and will take the Gospel literally, that is, rigorously.
A touch of asceticism will have freed them from themselves. They will inherit all
the faith of Israel, but will remember that it came through Jesus Christ. They will
take upon themselves the cross of the Saviour and seek to follow Him.”
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A saint forever
Saints do not grow old, John Paul II said: “They are always men and women of
tomorrow, people of the evangelical future of man and the Church, witnesses of
the future world”. The fact that Don Bosco still captivates and powerfully attracts
hosts of young people and the faithful to himself, proves that he possesses
something within him that defies the centuries.
All those who live within his sphere of influence, or who in any case feel an
eagerness to become familiar with him, can take up, without fear, the message
of his simple and profound, captivating and likeable though also very demanding
holiness. Don Bosco, who was so amiable and understanding, wants us to be “in
the world, but not worldly; not aliens, but with our own particular identity; not relics
of the past, but modern proclaimers of the eschatological reality of the paschal
mystery; not blind followers of popular trends, but courageous promoters of a
pressing renewal; not remaining aloof from human events, but protagonists of the
history of salvation. In following Christ according to Don Bosco’s spirit we make
use of all the circumstances, events, signs of the times, and even negative or
unjust situations to promote our growth in holiness” (E. Viganò). The greatest gift
we can give to others is our holiness.
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PART 1 KEY FEATURES
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Chapter 1 STRIVING TO BECOME A
SAINT
What do we wish to know about a Blessed or a Saint?, asked Paul VI in his
address, which we have already mentioned, for the beatification of Leonard
Murialdo. And his answer:
If our mentality were that of outward curiosity, of a certain
naive medieval devotion, we might propose searching for the
extraordinary in someone exalted in such an extraordinary way:
singular favours, [ … ] mystical phenomena and miracles; but
today we are less greedy for these exceptional manifestations of
Christian life. We like to get to know their human figure rather than
their mystical or ascetic one: we want to discover in the saints
what they have in common with us, rather than what distinguishes
them from us; we want to bring them down to our level as people
immersed in the not always edifying experience of this world; we
want to find them to be brothers or sisters in our toil and perhaps
even in our misery, to feel we relate to them and share a common,
heavy human condition with them.
Don Bosco’s life overflowed with the supernatural and the marvellous – as we
shall see – but in the first instance we like to see him in his creatureliness, “a man
like us”, almost one of us although immensely greater. Therefore, a man marked
by the incompleteness of nature and its burdens, tempted by the world of sin and
the evil one.
This perspective, in which human limitation and divine grace are compared, is
already an encouragement to our weakness.
Don Bosco, like everyone else, was not born a saint; he became one by
surrendering himself to the power of the Holy Spirit, and by denying himself he
rose, step by step, to the heights of holiness.
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His was not an easy temperament
Here we note just a few quick sequences of his endeavour to become a saint.
His was not an easy temperament
Although endowed with splendid human qualities, which we will see further on,
Don Bosco was not by nature the patient, meek and gentle person we know. Of
Mamma Margaret’s two sons, Joseph and John, it could have been said that the
former was the most Salesian, not the latter. Joseph was remembered as a meek,
affectionate, docile and patient child and would remain such for the rest of his
life. He rushed to meet guests, talked happily with them and was immediately
liked. Some early accounts, on the other hand, describe young John as a rather
serious child, somewhat taciturn, almost mistrustful; he did not grant familiarity
to strangers easily, did not allow himself to be caressed, spoke little, and was
already an attentive observer.
“Though I was still pretty small,” he wrote in his Memoirs of the Oratory, “I was
studying my companion’s characters. When I looked closely at someone, I could
usually gauge what he was thinking.”
In the dream he had when he was nine or ten years old, he certainly showed
himself to already be reflective and generous, sensitive and zealous in defending
God’s rights,but he also revealed a fiery, impulsive and even violent temperament
when he impetuously pounced on the little blasphemers to silence them with “my
fists”.
He also felt, as he himself confessed, “great repugnance in obeying, in submitting
to others”. By nature he tended to tenaciously defend his point of view because
“I liked to do things my way and follow my own childish whims rather than listen
to those who gave me advice or told me what to do.”
His best qualities naturally led him to be proud: his strong willpower, superior
intelligence, good memory, his physical energy, all qualities that meant he
impressed his peers. His Memoirs record this smug statement regarding his
school mates: “…all of them – including those older and bigger than I – respected
my mettle and my strength”.
The testimonies during the beatification and canonisation processes highlighted
his fine qualities but also some underlying traits that were not entirely positive. His
parish priest, Fr Cinzano, said he was “eccentric and stubborn”. Cardinal Cagliero
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His was not an easy temperament
recalled his “fiery and haughty” temperament, such that he was not “able to suffer
resistance”. His friend Fr Giacomelli testified: “One could see how without virtue
he would let himself be overcome by anger. None of our companions, and there
were many of them, were as prone to this defect as he was.” “I believe it to be true,”
confirmed Bishop Bertagna, a distinguished moralist and a great friend of Don
Bosco’s, “that the Servant of God had a natural but rather prickly temperament
and at the same time one that was very hard and not at all receptive… to the
advice he was given when it did not conform to his plans and views.”
Fr Cerruti highlighted his “strong tendency to anger and affection… which led him
to be proud.” “It’s useless,” Fr Cafasso would say in turn, “he wants to do it his way;
yet you have to let him do it; even when a project would be ill-advised, Don Bosco
succeeds.” Resentful at not having won him over to her cause, the Marchioness
Barolo would accuse him of being “stubborn, obstinate, proud”.
Dr G. Albertotti, who looked after Don Bosco from 1872 until his death, also
stressed, in his brief Life of the Saint, the “rather impetuous liveliness” of his client,
his “ready and fiery” character and the “deep conviction of his ideas”.
Fr Girolamo Moretti, a pioneer of graphology that is becoming a branch of the
human sciences, recognised in his well-known book: I santi dalla scrittura, that
Don Bosco’s temperament was “a little difficult to define”. He was a saint who
“needs to undergo many renunciations which his innate tendencies rebel against”
in order to be moral. These tendencies want and demand unfettered action… “He
is,” he concludes, “a leader, no doubt, who in order to do good needs to go against
himself to the utmost degree in order to channel himself into righteousness of
intentions and works”.
Of course, these testimonies do not give us a complete picture of Don Bosco. They
leave out too many other aspects of his very rich personality. However, they do
provide us with some basic elements: his inclination to anger and impetuousness;
the tendency to autonomy, a strong sense of self, stubborn assertion of his own
beliefs, etc. Had he not reined himself in he would have been a failed human being
and saint. “If the Lord had not set me on this path [of the Oratories] I fear that I
would have been in great danger of taking the wrong path.”
Yet without these strong inclinations we would not have the real depth of Don
Bosco’s holiness. Natural inclinations, in themselves, are neither good nor bad;
they are not vices, they are not virtues. The morality of acts depends in fact on
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the individual’s intentions, on the good or bad use one makes of one’s energies.
There is no doubt Don Bosco employed his native qualities to the best of his ability,
but God alone knows at the cost of what effort and victorious struggle. It is this
aspect that we now wish to emphasise.
The journey upward
It has been said of the life of St Francis de Sales that it appears to be a true
masterpiece in how it developed, in its refinement and completion. A masterpiece
on which the sculptor worked slowly, reflectively, in confidence and with joy until
he achieved an intangible beauty such as only a few illustrious works of art can
achieve.
The same can be said of Don Bosco: a sense of measure, gradualness and
harmony are also characteristic of his path to holiness. But one must not overlook
the hard road he travelled, the constant and attentive work on himself that he
tackled tenaciously and perseveringly.
John learnt his first steps in virtue as a small boy at his mother’s knees. She
was illiterate but filled with divine wisdom. Mamma Margaret knew how to reach
her son’s heart with maternal delicacy, but also with unmoving firmness. She
indulged his temperament in the best way she could; later, when she saw him
busy doing good to his little friends, she was full of encouragement and help. But
at appropriate moments, faced with his outbursts, she knew how to correct him
with decisive but reasoned and faith-motivated interventions.
Love of God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary; the horror of sin, fear of eternal
punishment and hope of paradise were all things that Don Bosco learnt from his
mother’s lips. Religion was something natural in the little home at the Becchi;
evil was abhorred and good was loved – both by instinct. The recurring warning:
“Remember that God sees you” was deeply etched on little John’s very sensitive
soul. And in turn, he would never tire of repeating these words to his youngsters.
The maternal love that gladdened and educated his childhood remained one of
the deep roots throughout his life that the Lord used to make him a saint. We owe
it to the upbringing he received from his mother if Don Bosco’s personality was
able to expand in fullness without complexes or anxieties of any kind.
“In the thirty-five years I lived by his side,” Cardinal Cagliero said “I never heard an
expression of fear or doubt; I never saw him agitated by any anxiety about God’s
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goodness and mercy towards him. He never appeared troubled by anxieties of
conscience.”
So, let us ask ourselves: when was young John converted to the path of holiness?
When was it that he said to himself, like St Dominic Savio: "I want to be a saint,
and soon"? That remains his secret. An ancient Salesian tradition, however, would
see him as a saint at every stage of his life: a holy young man, cleric, priest,
educator. He would end up teaching a way of “youthful holiness” that he had
already tested and lived. His early youth, however, was exemplary: marked by
a profound sense of the divine, and prayer, apostolic activity among his peers,
the ability to control himself, courage in tackling the inconveniences of poverty, or
his step-brother Anthony’s demands, or the humiliation he had to undergo for two
years as a cowhand at the Moglio farm.
The Piedmontese phrase 'ndé da servito has a negative feel to it. It evokes a
scene of underpaid and excessive work, mistreatment and alienation from the
family hearth and home. So many young boys and girls from poor families were
forced to undergo this. We know that John Bosco was well treated by his masters,
who were convinced Catholics, and that he was also admired for his virtues. But
he makes no real mention of this period of his life in his Memoirs, perhaps out
of respect for his mother. The years he spent with the Moglias, as Pietro Stella
stresses, were
not useless, not a parenthesis, but a time during which the sense
of God and contemplation took deeper root in him. He was able to
introduce himself to this while alone or in conversation with God
while working in the fields. They were years that can be described
as years of pensive and prayerful expectation: waiting for God
and for other human beings; years in which perhaps the most
contemplative phase of his first five decades of life should be
placed, a phase where his spirit must have been more disposed
to the gifts of the mystical life flowing from the state of prayer and
hope.
Under insruction from Fr Calosso (November 1829 – November 1830) John, who
was by then a teenager, made new progress in virtue. This holy priest forbade
him from adopting certain penances that were not suited to his age, but which did
reveal a real leaning towards holiness; he initiated him into regular meditation,
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brief though it may have been, and to spiritual reading; he encouraged him to
make use of the sacraments. “From then on I began to savour the spiritual life” he
wrote in his Memoirs. “Savour” does not mean just knowing God and divine things
theoretically, but relishing them, having an experience of them; it is the result of
the gift of wisdom, the most perfect of the gifts of the Holy Spirit because it perfects
charity which is the sum of all virtues; it includes intelligence but especially love
which goes beyond it and is greater than it. And for a fifteen or sixteen-year-old
teenager, that is no small thing.
As a student at Chieri, John developed a strong friendship with Louis Comollo, a
pearl of a young man and then a cleric who died prematurely, and about whom Don
Bosco write a brief Life. The friendship with Comollo marked a shift in the saint’s
spiritual life. It marked the beginning of intense emulation, a genuine journey
towards priestly holiness. One could truly say of them, along with Kahil Gibran:
“No sunrise finds us where sunset left us.” They were meant to integrate and
complement each other; on a spiritual level first of all, but not only that.
“We needed each other” Don Bosco wrote. “I needed spiritual help; he needed a
bodyguard.” There were, in fact, some malicious students who took advantage of
Comollo’s shyness and goodness and mistreated him; John shook with rage. One
day, some bullies gave poor Comollo’s pale and frightened face two resounding
slaps, and he suffered the affront without reacting, forgiving them in his heart. But
Bosco was there, and faced with such a scene he could no longer stand it; his
blood boiled, and mayhem resulted. Here is how he described it: “At that I forgot
myself completely. Brute strength moved me, not reason. With no chair or stick
within reach, I grabbed one of my fellow students by the shoulders and swung
him round like a club to beat the others. I knocked down four of them; the rest
took to their heels yelling for mercy.”
His friend did not approve: “I’m amazed how strong you are,” he said “but, believe
me, God didn’t give you strength to massacre your companions.His will is that we
should love one another, forgive one another and return good for evil.”
Comollo’s influence on Don Bosco was remarkable, as we can draw from his
Memoirs. He could only “wonder” at this “marvellous companion” and “model of
virtue” from whok he had learned to “to live as a Christian”, that is, to live a life
with a strong sacramental and Marian focus, intense practice of charity, sense of
duty and strong leaning towards the ideal of the priesthood. It was an ideal based
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on the model of the priest of the Tridentine reform and restoration, more liturgist
than apostle, more withdrawn than immersed in human reality, a man more of the
eternal and less of the temporal. The priest is certainly all this, but more than this.
Yet Don Bosco woiuld be a different kind of priest while always carrying with him
the keen awareness of high priestly dignity and responsibility that was instilled in
him in the seminary. He would always consider priesthood not as a privilege but
as a risky ministry where one risks one’s eternal destiny for the slightest neglect
of one’s duties. “Unfortunately, it is certain,” Cafasso preached, “that some priests
will go astray and each of us can run this grave danger if we are not on our guard.”
In his own time Don Bosco would say that “The priest will either die of work or die
of vice.” And in his case he entered the seminary aiming to “radically” change his
life: “The style of life I had lived up to then had to be radically reformed.” Hence his
resolution to “never again attend public festivals,” or do “conjuring tricks… sleight
of hand,” since these things were “contrary to ecclesiastical dignity and spirit.”
He would live “a retiring life” and with “temperance in eating and drinking”. He
would combat “with all [his] strength” anything “contrary to the virtue of chastity”.
He would give himself to prayer and apostolate among his companions. In a
word, he would go against even his legitimate tendencies, giving himself over,
as Fr Stella put it, to continuous “ascetic effort that urged him along the path of
fasting, abstinence and self-recrimination when he sometimes surprised himself
by indulging in his former worldly skills, such as brilliant displays of agility or
playing the violin. It was an ascetic tension that contributed to his friend Comollo’s
death and brought Don Bosco himself to the extreme limits of his endurance.”
Dr Albertotti’s testimony confirms the fact that the hardships he had imposed on
himself in his seminary years were at least a cause of his physical breakdown and
his eventual death. He wrote: “Having seen his impetuosity as an evil, he made
such effort to correct himself, as he did in the past in his secondary school years,
that, as he told his disciples from time to time, he was exhausted and ready to die.”
This episode in Don Bosco’s life gives us a measure of the tough, close contact
struggle he undertook to rectify deviant tendencies of nature, to master himself,
give himself completely to God and others, especially the young. “Every life
fulfilled in beauty, O Lord, bears witness to Thee; but the testimony of the saint
is as if torn with fiery pincers from the living body.” Bernanos used this image,
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recalling Dante’s Inferno, to express a true law of Christian holiness. Don Bosco
lived it in his own flesh.
In the three years he spent at the Convitto Ecclesiastico of St Francis of Assisi
(Pastoral Institute) in Turin (1841–1844), Don Bosco moulded and remoulded
himself, his priesthood, along pastoral and practical lines: “Here one learnt to be a
priest”. Fr Louis Guala and Fr Joseph Cafasso, “luminaries of the Turinese clergy”,
along with Felix Golzio, who also worked there, were the “three models placed in
my path by Divine Providence. It was just up to me to follow their example, their
teaching, their virtues”.
Fr Cafasso became his confessor and spiritual director. Don Bosco wrote in his
Memoirs: “If I have been able to do any good, I owe it to this worthy priest in whose
hands I placed every decision I made, all my study, and every activity of my life.”
“Tenacious and almost stubborn in his ideas as he was,” reports Bishop Bertagna,
“he always obeyed Fr Cafasso without question.” It was “out of obedience to Fr
Cafasso,” he would tell his sons, “that I remained in Turin, and with his advice and
guidance began gathering urchins in the square to teach them catechism. It was
through his support and assistance that I began to gather the most abandoned of
them in the Oratory of St Francis de Sales so they could be kept from vice and
formed in virtue. Remember that!”
Don Bosco’s virtues as a young priest shone with new light in the foundation and
running of the festive Oratory at the Convitto (1841–1844), then at the Refuge
and finally in the permanent premises at Valdocco where he took up residence on
12 April 1846, Easter Sunday. And here the saint had to tackle huge difficulties
of various kinds. Difficulties from outside: hardships of poverty, abandonment by
his co-workers, harassment by the municipal authorities; difficulties from within
brought about by the very different ypes and characters of the youngsters who
came to the Oratory from the poorest parts of the city, or jobless wanderers,
collarless young "puppies" who were intolerant of order and discipline. They
required steady nerves and much, much patience.
We have an idea of what the Valdocco Oratory was like in those distant beginnings
in this realistic, later recollection by Don Bosco.
When I think about the present times compared with past times,
I am overwhelmed. Thirty-five or thirty-six years ago, what was
there [here in Valdocco]? Nothing, absolutely nothing. I used
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to run hither and thither after the most disorderly, dissipated
youngsters; but they didn’t want to know about order and
discipline, they laughed at religious matters, of which they were
ignorant, blaspheming the holy name of God, and I couldn’t do
anything about it. Those youngsters were really street and square
types and there were stone fights and constant brawls. Things
then were more at the level of ideas than deeds.
Later, splendid young men like Michael Rua, John Baptist Francesia, John
Cagliero, Dominic Savio and others would “stay with Don Bosco”, but how much
violence he would have to impose on himself, dealing with obstinate and difficult
elements, to remain faithful to the resolution he made at the time of his ordination:
“The charity and gentleness of St Francis de Sales will guide me in all things.”
It was one of his maxims that the Salesian must have “the gentleness of St Francis
de Sales and the patience of Job”. Not a lethargic or weak gentleness but one
which is the result of pastoral charity that is ”patient and kind … bears all things,
hopes all things, endures all things”. To preserve it “means that much effort and
sacrifice are needed to maintain such gentleness and that sometimes it can be
preserved only by the shedding of one’s blood”. This is the admonition in the so-
called Dream of the Sweets addressed to all Salesians and which had already
been tested in Don Bosco’s life experience.
One day, his friend Fr Giacomelli came to Valdocco while Don Bosco, red in the
face, was chasing a group of boys who had sought to dodge the time for prayers:
“This is the second time I have seen you all worked up,” he told him. “These
blessed kids!” was the only reply he got, but how eloquent it was. He had also
surprised him as he was about to strike some boys who were arguing among
themselves, but his hands remained steady, simply raised. He did not beat young
people, even though a certain custom then led to this in many cases and he did
not tolerate others behaving in this way. We know from the testimony of Fr Rua
and Cardinal Cagliero that the occasional slap escaped Don Bosco’s hands when
he was still quite young. But these cases were just with the tips of the fingers of
one hand and related to very particular situations. When it happened, however,
he was not happy about it.
Instead, he knew how to be understanding, tolerant, patient even when he felt
the blood “boiling” in his veins. Blasphemy, in particular, wounded him deeply as
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this episode, which did not make it into the Biographical Memoirs, shows. Ambré
Roda, a former friend of Dominic Savio’s, when the Servant of God’s heroic virtues
were proclaimed, came to Rome and was received in audience by Pope Pius XI.
They went back over old times. Roda, who was in his nineties by then, told the
Holy Father about this little episode:
It was one day during recreation, and I’m sorry, Holy Father, but
a very rude word escaped my lips. I put my hand over my mouth
but it was too late. My friends had heard it. Dominic came up
to me and said: “Have you forgotten our resolution not to use
bad language? Go to Don Bosco immediately, and tell him what
you did. He is so good, he will fix everything. Meanwhile I will
go and pray for you.” Without pulling a face, I went off straight
away. But where to find Don Bosco? He was in the parlour,
surrounded by some gentlemen. Rude as I was, I broke into the
group. Surprised, Don Bosco said: “Look, I am very busy; can’t
you wait just a moment?” The people there thought I might have
some urgent task so moved aside: “Hear him out, Don Bosco;
we will wait.” I then got up on tip-toes and whispered in our good
Father’s ear: ”Savio sent me to you. I uttered a blasphemy.” I was
trembling like a leaf. Don Bosco didn’t shout at me; but I saw
such sorrow on his face! I understood the gravity of my error. His
eyes pierced my heart. “Don’t do it again, my child, don’t ever do
it again.It is an offence against God, you know! The Lord does
not bless us for that. Go to the church and say many Our Fathers
and make three signs of the cross with your tongue on the floor.”
I ran to the front of the altar, said the Our Fathers, dusted the
floor, looked around me then promptly made the sign of the cross
three times with my tongue on the floor. I ran out, feeling as if a
huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I forget the number
of Our Fathers but I will never forget the three signs of the cross
and Don Bosco’s look. (S. Giovanni Bosco nei ricordi e nella vita
degli Ex-allievi, Turin 1953).
This little story has all the flavour of those early times. It breathes the family
atmosphere of the trust there was at Valdocco under Don Bosco’s gaze. One also
glimpses the acute suffering that an offence against God gave rise to in the saint’s
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It also costs me
soul. The rather special penance aimed at arousing disgust for sin and a sense
of genuine reparation was of course an exceptional one in Don Bosco’s usual
practice.
It also costs me
In full maturity and old age, Don Bosco truly possessed a heroic and confident self-
mastery: patience and calmness beyond all praise and an unparalleled gentleness
of touch. He was the artist who had sketched out his masterpiece and finished
it with care. But the “foundation laid down by nature”, while mastered, was not
extinguished, still had its rumblings: “I too know how much it costs” he said on the
morning of 18 September 1876 to retreatants gathered at Lanzo Torinese. “Do
you think that it is easy for me to keep calm when, after entrusting an important or
urgent task to someone, I find that task not done or badly botched? Believe me,
sometimes my blood boils and I am about to burst. But what good would that do?
Things will still not get done, nor will my anger correct anyone.”
He acted as he taught others to act: “Let us admonish, advise, and exhort, but
always calmly,” adding, “and even when circumstances call for a reprimand, let us
give it, but let us first pause a moment and ask ourselves: How would St Francis
de Sales act in this case? Be assured that this is the way we will obtain what the
Holy Spirit promises: In patientia vestra possidebitis animas vestras.”
His first biographer made this penetrating observation in this regard: “When Don
Bosco felt some anger stirring in him, it seemed that his nature was complaining,
and his words took on such a gentle and affectionate tone that it could bend the
listener to his will.”
A reflection of his capacity for self-control was his numerous and varied
correspondence. Someone who was not habitually united with God would hardly
have resisted the temptation to respond in kind to certain provocative and insulting
letters. Instead, he knew how to be conciliatory and gentle. It was his law not to
answer when he felt moved by anger: he would pray, let hours and days pass until
absolute calm returned to him.
“Several times yesterday I tried to answer,” he wrote, for example, to Fr Valinotti
regarding the painful dispute over the Catholic Readings, “but I was too agitated
to do so. This morning, only after having celebrated the sacrifice of the Holy Mass
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It also costs me
and having commended everything to the Lord, do I reply simply by presenting
things as they really are…”
Cardinal Cagliero recalled an episode from the saint’s life during the canonical
process that gives us an idea of his heroic ability to react calmly to negative
moments. It was January 1875: Don Bosco was dining quietly with the confreres
when Fr Rua came up to him and told him he needed to find L. 40,000 – a huge
amount at that time – to endorse a promissory note signed in favour of a friend
who had died suddenly and which the heirs refused to pay. And Don Bosco’s
reaction? “He was having his soup” the witness noted. “I saw that between one
spoonful and the next (it was January and the room was not heated) drops of
sweat were falling from his forehead onto his plate, but he continued calmly and
did not interrup our simple meal.”
There is much truth in what Fr Ascanio Savio said: “He had so mastered his wilful
nature as to appear phlegmatic; and so meek that he always acquiesced to his
pupils, provided the glory of God or the good of souls were not at stake.”
The effort sustained by Don Bosco to become a saint was indeed great, though
not overt and not always apparent. Referring to how complete his holiness was, in
his address on 17 June 1932 to the students of the Pontifical Roman Seminaries,
Pius XI summed it up in these powerful words:
His life at all times was continuous self-sacrificing charity,
continuous prayerful recollection; this is the most vivid impression
one had of his conversation… One would have said that he paid
no attention to anything that was said about him; one would have
said that his thoughts were elsewhere, and that was indeed so;
he was elsewhere: he was with God in a spirit of union. But then
there he was, answering everyone, and he had the right word
for everything and himself, so much so that he made people
amazed: first surprised and then amazed by him. The Blessed led
this life of holiness and recollection, constant attention to prayer
at night and amidst all the continuous and relentless occupations
of his daytime hours.
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Chapter 2: Profoundly human
Bossuet writes: “If God wants to make saints that are worthy of him, then he needs
to turn them on all sides to mould them entirely in his way, and have only as much
regard for their natural dispositions as needed in order not to do them violence.”
Where sanctity is concerned, it is all a gift from God, including the heroic response
to his call. But God is infinitely respectful of the personality of the saints and
more than Bossuet suggests. His grace, his divine action in us, takes place
through nature and respects it, not limits it. Certainly God can achieve great
things in limited creatures. This was the case, for example with St Joseph of
Copertino; lacking though he was in basic human resources, God made hium a
vessel of choice that had no match in the Bollandists’ collections. But the great
masterpieces of grace normally arise in very gifted creatures, as in the case of Don
Bosco, whom Joergensen describes, with a touch of hyperbole, as: “one of the
most complete and absolute men history has ever known”. And of course there is
the strong impression recorded by Pius XI of the three days he spent at Valdocco
with the saint (1883): “We saw him up close, over some time, in more than one
conversation; a magnificent figure that his immense, unfathomable humility could
not conceal … a far more dominant and enthralling figure: a complete figure, one
of those souls who would certainly leave his mark whichever direction he took, so
magnificently equipped was he for life.”
Hertling too, a recognised Church historian, associates Don Bosco’s name with
the more gifted spirits humanly speaking: “Augustine, Francis, Catherine of Siena,
Don Bosco should be counted among the peaks and pinnacles of humanity.”
What struck one first about Don Bosco was the man before it was the saint. While
his profound union with God was not immediately observable, his splendid human
qualities, enriched and sublimated by grace, certainly were. And there were so
many of them; distinct yet complementary, interlinked and harmoniously fused
together.
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Indomitable yet flexible will
It could be said of Don Bosco that he was, at one and the same time, someone
who was joyful and austere, frank and respectful, a free yet exacting spirit, humble
and magnanimous, tenacious and ductile, traditional and modern, optimistic
and foresighted, diplomatic and sincere, poor and charitable; someone who
cultivated friendship but did not play favourites, was quick to conceive ideas but
prudent in executing them, loved things done well but was not a perfectionist,
saw the big picture but had a genius for the concrete, was bold to the point
of recklessness, went ahead with circumspection, knews how to make friends
with an adversary without abandoning his principles, was dynamic though not
extroverted, courageous not reckless, turned everything to his own ends but did
not manipulate people, educated by preventing and prevented by educating, ran
with the world – he sought to be in the vanguard of progress – but was not of
the world.
These and other positive opposites give us an idea of Don Bosco’s true greatness:
“To measure the wingspan of an eagle, one must stretch out the wings and note
the opposite ends, then one can judge their strength: the same happens with
the virtues of the saints, whose greatness can only be assessed by noting the
opposites.” (H. Petitot).
The positive opposites that stand out in the human figure of Don Bosco,
transfigured by pastoral charity, are a splendid accord of nature and grace. His
human richness, it has been appropriately pointed out, was so integrated into
holiness that it almost became its sacrament, and the gifts of grace, when they
manifested themselves, were like a glorification of his humanity.
Nature is first and foremost the form that God has given to his grace and, when
the human being corresponds, it also shines outwardly. “Everything is human in
Don Bosco,” said Daniel Rops, “and at the same time everything mysteriously
gives off a supernatural light.”
Among the positive opposites of his life we would like to briefly highlight three of
them here: his indomitable yet flexible will; his paternal but demanding kindness;
and his profound sensitivity combined with great fortitude of spirit.
Indomitable yet flexible will
In Huysmans’ judgement, Don Bosco was “an unprecedented business agent of
God” in his century. It is difficlt not to agree with this judgement extolling the Saint’s
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Indomitable yet flexible will
talent for organisation and achievement and, by implication, his “indomitable and
untameable” iron will (Pius XI). It is the trademark of people from Asti and Langa
but something he had inherited to an uncommon degree.
He carried it, so to speak, in the vigour of his mind and muscles, in his innate
capacity for action, in his strong self-confidence; a will that did not seem to know
the word “impossible”. He had exercised it as a child in the rough work of the fields,
in overcoming the obstacles that stood in the way of his studies and his vocation;
he exercised it on a grand scale as an adult. Inclined to action, he shunned the
abstractions of scholasticism. “Bishop,” he would say one day to the Bishop of
Casale, Bishop Ferré, who wanted to engage him in a philosophical argument,
“I do not have time to bother about these things because the field that God has
assigned me is not one of ideas but works, and while it is true that right action
come from right thinking, thinking and feeling with the Pope is sufficient for right
action.”
Strong-willed as he was, he was slow to make a decision. He considered his plans
at length, compared them with his experience, sought advice, quetioned the Lord
in constant prayer, but when he had taken a decision, no obstacle then seemed
to stop him. “Don Bosco is not a man to stop halfway once he has put his hand to
something” he said. And on another occasion: “When I encounter a difficlty, I do
what someone who comes across a boulder on his path does. I first try to push
it out of the way, but if I do not succeed then I climb over it or go around it. So,
when I have set out to do something, if I find an obstacle in the way, I suspend
what I am doing and put my hand to something else; but I always keep an eye
on it. Meanwhile, time solves the problem [loquats ripen! the Italian says] and the
difficulties are smoothed out.”
Being constantly inspired by the “criterion of the possible” does not mean that
he was always the pure pragmatist and made pure practice his law of life. His
activity could always be seen in the light of solid supernatural principles and well-
considered religious convictions. His blunt optimism – another criterion of action
– was based on higher motives. He knew and felt that God was with him.
Strong-willed to the utmost, Don Bosco was, however, also flexible and yielding,
not only in pursuing the goals he set himself “in small steps”, but also in the
very exercise of wanting or not wanting something. His “pedagogical system” is
a masterpiece of “reason, loving-kindness and religion”. There is no room for the
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will to commit, for the law of inflexibility. Reasons of kindness and the heart must
prevail over the “coldness of regulation”.
For Don Bosco, education was a “matter of the heart”. He knew from tried and
tested experience that the soul of the young “is a fortress always closed to rigour
and harshness”. One only becomes its master through the ways of the heart and
free consent.
There was nothing rough or tough about him, as his strong-willed temperament
might make us think there was, but a paternal, loving approach capable of
understanding and adapting to the tastes of children, to make them love the things
that grown-ups love, even when they don’t like them.
But, beyond what refers explicitly to the preventive system, there was the vast field
of obedience that Don Bosco never refused religious authorities nor the legitimate
prescriptions of civil authorities. Given his “resist or attack” kind of temperament,
as someone described him as having, he was not naturally inclined to submission.
By canonising him, the Church has proclaimed that his obedience was heroic,
as demonstrated, for example, by his unconditional acceptance of the famous
Concordia commissioned by the Holy See to settle misunderstandings that had
been dragging on for years between him and his archbishop. The document
imposed heavy and unjustified retractions on Don Bosco. When he read the text
of the document to his Council there was general consternation: everyone, except
Cagliero, advised him to take his time, to assert his good reasons. But Rome
had spoken and for the Saint it was over: the Concordia was accepted and fully
observed.
Later, Don Bosco would say that this act of obedience cost him a lot. The Supreme
Pontiff had laid his hand on him because he knew he could count on his virtue.
Inwardly, Don Bosco’s will power and flexibility complemented one another.
Paternal but demanding kindness
“None of the great realities of human life” R. Guardini wrote, “have sprung from
pure thought: they have all been from the heart and its love.”
It is not possible to think of Don Bosco and his work without evoking his gentle,
paternal kindness, his great “oratorian heart”, the basis of his pedagogy.
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Not the “monumental heart of the philanthropists,” Fr A. Caviglia expalins, “made
of marble and bronze”, but the heart in which “paternal kindness and maternal
tenderness for the little ones and the poor among the little ones“ beats. Don Bosco
said, “These poor boys move me so much that if it were possible I would give
them my heart in so many pieces.” This was the real image of what St Gregory
of Nyssa called the “philanthropy of God”.
The liturgy salutes him as “Father and Teacher”; teacher because a father. This
title was dear to him because it embraced a constant aspiration and preoccupation
in his life: to build a family of “those without a family” around their father.
“More than a society,” Fr Philip Rinaldi, his third successor, said, “Don Bosco
intended to form a family based almost uniquely on the gentle, loving, vigilant
fatherhood of the superior and the filial, fraternal affection of his subjects; rather,
while maintaining the principle of authority and respectful subordination, he did
not want distinctions, but equality between everyone in everything.”
He enjoyed hearing himself called father: “Always call me father and I will be
happy.” This sense of fatherhood and family was a feture of his time, which was
also a time of paternalism. The central role of the father and the respect of his
children were both a part of culture and an act of virtue.
The ideologies of our time, that have placed a heavy burden on the father figure,
are in difficulty today. We are witnessing a shift towards the father, no longer a
dark continent to be removed but a figure who is central and essential to the
harmonious, balanced growth of the children, both through his presence and in
new ways.
The father today is meant to be more authoritative than authoritarian, closer to a
model than to a law, more brother and friend than a dominant personality. From
this point of view Don Bosco, beyond certain modes of expression typical of his
environment, reveals himself to be one of our contemporaries: so much so that
his way of being a father is in tune with modern aspirations. He recommended that
his rectors be “More than superiors; be fathers, brothers, friends.” Undoubtedly
his way of being a father found its most essential raison d’etre in the fatherliness
of which St Paul often speaks (1 Thes 2:7-8,10-11). A fatherhood, however, that
does not lack human splendour.
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Despite losing his father at just two years of age, Don Bosco had everything a
father should have, except of course, the fatherhood of flesh and blood: tender,
strong love for his adopted children, resistance to the fatigue and pains a father
must undergo, the acute sense of responsibility as head of the fmaily, and the
endless dedication of the kind found only in maternal heroism. His entire life was
proof of it, as we find in sincere statements of the following kind: “On any day, at
any hour, take advantage of me, but especially in matters of the soul. For my part
I give you all of myself: it may be paltry, but when I give you everything it means
that I reserve nothing for myself.”
To the superiors and young people at the college in Lanzo he wrote, “Your letter,
signed by 200 friendly and very dear hands has taken possession of all of this
heart of mine. Nothing of it is left except the keen desire to love you all in the Lord,
to do good for you, to save all your souls.”
A sublime expression of fatherly tenderness is the famous letter from Rome in
1884 to his “most beloved children”. We find in it an entire summary of his spirit, his
pedagogical experience, his spirituality and, above all, his “heart”. Let us mention
just two sentences from it: “I feel the weight of being away from you and not seeing
you, not hearing you, causes such a pain for me that you can hardly imagine.”
“He who wants to be loved has to show that he loves.“ How? through “familiarity”,
“gentleness”, “charity”, “confidence”, “trust”. A beautiful testimony of this “knowing
how to make oneself loved” of his came from his young secretary at the time,
cleric C. Viglietti.
Curiosity had led him to read certain confidential letters; he felt bad about it and
told Don Bosco. And what was the saint’s reaction? “He held me close to his heart,
collected as many letters as he had on the table, confidential or not, and gave
them all to me.”
This “kindness set up as a syustem” went directly to the heart of the youngsters,
and it left an indelible impression on the most sensitive of them.
St Leonard Murialdo was truthfully able to say: “The charity Don Bosco showed
his youngsters meant that they also loved him with sincere affection and to such
a degree that no other example could be found to compare.”
Recalling the time he spent with Don Bosco, Fr Orione ventured to say: “I would
walk on burning coals to see him just one more time and say thanks.”.
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Fr Paul Albera, his second successor, offered this splendid testimony:
It needs to be said that Don Bosco loved us in his own
unique way: it meant an irresistible fascination. I felt as if
taken prisoner by an affective power that fuelled my thoughts,
words and actions. I felt I was loved in a way I had never felt
before, singularly, superior to any affection. He enveloped us all
almost entirely in an atmosphere of contentment and happiness.
Everything in him had the power of attraction; he acted on our
young hearts like a magnet from which it was impossible to
escape, and even if we could, we would not have done so for
all the gold in the world, so happy were we with this singular
ascendancy over us, which was the most natural thing in him
without study and without any effort whatsoever; and it could not
have been otherwise, because from his every word and deed
emanated the holiness of union with God that is perfect charity.
He drew us to himself by the fullness of the supernatural love
that blazed in his heart. From this singular attraction sprang the
conquering work of our hearts. In him, the manifold natural gifts
were made supernatural by the holiness of his life.
“Always a father”, though Don Bosco was never a permissive or weak one;
he never abandoned his responsibilities. The unplesant parts he left to his co-
workers. Howver, everyone knew that he was intransigent and firm, especially in
cases of theft, blasphemy and scandal.
“Don Bosco“ he himself said, “is the kindest man on earth: ruin things, break
things, get up to mischief, and he will have mercy on you; but do not ruin souls,
because then he becomes inexorable.” Cardinal Cagliero tells us, “During my time
as a cleric, a simple and innocent boy had been the victim of a scandalous act by
an adult. As soon as Don Bosco came to know about it he felt extreme sorrow,
was disturbed and began weeping in my presence. He repaired the betrayed
innocence with fatherly kindness, but with equal firmness he saw that the culprit
was immediately sent away.”
Even in such cases, however, his great fatherliness was not lacking. He did
not chastise the offender but called him to come to him, made him realise the
gravity of the evil done; he urged him to repent, then, always reluctantly, referred
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him to relatives or benefactors; he still remained his friend. Willful, obstinate
disobedience found him particularly severe. On the spur of the moment he
disbanded the band, the pride of the Oratory, in 1859, because it had contravened
his repeated and firm instructions; all but four members were sent away from the
house.
He was fatherly but intransigent even with his closest co-workers, his Rectors.
Fr Celestino Durando, the Councillor for Schools, went against one of his orders,
changing the programme for the so-called “school of fire”; the weakest ones were
discouraged and withdrew. Don Bosco was upset and showed his displeasure.
“This disgrace would not have happened had you been obedient.” Fr Durando
tried to clarify matters. “That is not the point“ Don Bosco interrupted firmly. “The
point is that we had agreed on things and obedience means they should have
been carried out.“ The saint demanded greater perfection of those who were
obliged to be so.
It would be a never-ending task to explore the depth of Don Bosco’s paternal
kindness, but if we did not find positive complementarity, gentleness and firmness,
kindness and severity all combined in it, we would no longer be dealing with true
fatherhood.
Sensitive and strong
We would now like to focus our attention on the third set of positive opposites. Don
Bosco was a man of exquisite and profound sensitivity. He was easily given to
emotion and affectionate intent, able to rejoice and suffer with others. His doctor
confirmed that he was struck, in the intimate conversations he frequently had with
Don Bosco, by his “extreme sensitivity proper to the most sublime geniuses” never
separate from the “exceptional exquisiteness of moral sensitivity,” It was an innate
sensitivity that had in it something tender and maternal drawn from his upbringing
by Mamma Margaret, but also from the Blessed Virgin who was an ever-active
presence in his life.
This sensitivity, which became more refined over his lifetime, was already clearly
manifest in his youth.
All little boys cry easily enough but they soon forget it. Little John, instead, wept
at the death of his little blackbird and suffered for days over it. Later, the sudden
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death of Fr Calosso and then of his friend Comollo threw him into lasting and deep
consternation. As a young priest he was deeply moved at the sight of neglected
youngsters he met in the streets and squares of Turin, and behind bars in prison.
He could not bear his mother’s death throes and had to retire to pray in the
neighbouring room. Later, reading her Life written by Fr Lemoyne, he could not
hold back his tears. Even the simple memory of Dominic Savio moved him: “Every
time I correct these drafts I have to pay the toll of tears.”
He shared intensely in the suffering of his boys who were ill, at the death of
relatives, and misfortunes. He was moved by the smallest shows of affection,
the reception he received after lengthy absences from the Oratory, gestures of
kindness from benefactors and friends.
This softness of heart became even stronger in old age. He was moved at the
simple thought of his faraway missionaries: “You left and my heart was broken.”
Tears always welled up when he was told he had no need of prayers: “I very much
have need of them!” He also wept during Fr Rua’s sermon on the love of God.
Other than this natural tenderness, Don Bosco also had the spiritual “gift” of tears,
as we read in the case of other saints. Today we are less sensitive to this aspect
of Christian asceticism since humanity has become more “adult”. Yet, if we think
about it, the “gift” of tears, when they are real, points to real holiness. It comes
from a soul filled with God when the soul feels awe at God’s infinite greatness,
contemplates his saving love, his mercy, his goodness and his justice; when it
meditates on the Lord’s passion, the seriousness of sin, on eternal damnation
and, in general, on the mysteries of our faith.
Cardinal Cagliero, whose testimony is always very trustworthy, was able to say:
“While Don Bosco preached on the love of God, the loss of souls, on the Passion
of Jesus Christ on Good Friday, on the Blessed Eucharist, on a happy death and
the hope of paradise, I and my companions often saw him shed tears, some of
love, some of sorrow, some of joy; and some of holy rapture when he spoke of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, her goodness and immaculate purity.”
Don Bosco’s sensitivity was so intense that it could have interfered with his
delicate inner equilibrium had he not possessed, as a complementary virtue, the
full command of his senses, his higher faculties and complete fortitude of soul.
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Sensitive and strong
Well-known in the case of certain very sensitive human beings is the extreme
vulnerability of their self-love, their shifting moods, irritability and upset over trivial
things, and the ease with which they can go overboard in things.
We have already mentioned how heroically Don Bosco was able to master and
turn the more wayward aspects of his temperament to good, ones that might
otherwise have doomed him and made him a failed saint. We will not repeat these
but will recall only that without his deep sensitivity, we would not have had Salesian
“loving-kindness”, which is the capacity to love and make oneself loved through
visible signs, something essential. This would not have been possible without his
flawless purity and the supreme respect he bore for the personality of the young.
He did not caress or kiss young people as their mothers would.
When giving a reward or offering a sign of benevolence, he would simply place
his hand on their head or over their shoulder or on their cheek for an instant,
barely touching it with his fingers. “In acts of this kind” Fr Reviglio, said “there was
something so pure, so chaste, so paternal that he seemed to infuse us with the
spirit of his chastity to such an extent that we felt enraptured by it.”
Here too, “sensitivity” and “self-control”, “tenderness” and “strength” were
complementary virtues: it is not possible to describe one without involving the
other.
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Chapter 3: Holy in every respect
When British journalist Douglas Hyde told Ignazio Silone of his resolve to write
a life of Fr Orione, the novelist who has most contributed to an understanding
of Italian literature in the world today, said as follows: “Whatever you do
when you write about him, I beg you not to turn Fr Orione into some kind of
Catholic Beveridge (a well-known British economist). It would diminish his stature.
Certainly Fr Orione was involved in charitable works like many others, and also in
social justice. His exceptional strength lies, however, in the fact that in everything
he did, he relied solely and completely on God.”
We could not think of Don Bosco any differently. His life can be explained only
with God; only in the light of his holiness both hidden and manifest.
Hidden holiness
During his earthly life, Don Bosco hid rather than manifested his holiness. Many
passed by him without noticing it and even when his repitation as a “saint” had
gone beyond the borders of Italy and Europe, were there those who, paradoxically,
regarded him as more scheming than virtuous. “Don Bosco! Don Bosco is a liar”
said Cardinal Ferrieri, “a fraud, a bully who wants to impose himself on the Sacred
Congregations… But really, what does Don Bosco want? He is without knowledge
and holiness. He would have been better following the directions of an Ordinary
without persisting in founding a congregation.” He considered him too “shrewd”,
too “stubborn” too “greedy for money”, too easily given to “speaking about himself
and having others do so”.
The law of gravitation applies in the world of the saints: saints attract one another,
and they immediately understand one another. Yet St Leonard Murialdo, who
got to know Don Bosco around 1851, confessed that he struggled to believe
in his holiness. He only changed his mind later when he “beganm to enter
into confidence with him” when he realised that “his works, which revealed an
extraordinary man” spoke in his favour.
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Hidden holiness
His reputation for holiness had been established in the Oratory setting for a long
time. The Commission set up to record any deeds or words of Don Bosco that
revealed “something of the supernatural” about them went back to 1861 when
he was little more than forty years old. But even for those whol had lived with
him from the outset, his life, as Cardinal Cagliero noted, “seemed as ordinary and
commonplace as that of and exemplary priest”.
Eugene Ceria wrote that “Few people were so extraordinary beneath such
ordinary appearances. In great matters as in small ones, there was always the
same naturalness that at first glance revealed no more than a good priest.”
A “good priest” for sure, but not such that it would lead one to think of great
holiness, canonisable holiness. “I saw and I knew” Fr Gresino said, “that Don
Bosco was an excellent priest, that he worked only for us and was well loved
by everyone. But the thought of likely canonical processes and sanctity never
entered my mind.”
That is what Philip Rinaldi thought and so did others. The real essence of his
holiness lay hidden by his simply, kindly and completely natural way of acting.
It was a desire not to reveal God’s secret to others, a deep sense of humility,
but it was also natural. The Piedmontese temperament generally shuns intimate
outbursts. When the husband addresses his wife, even today, he is unlikely to
call her by name. He simply says ‘ti’ to her. But a ‘ti’ said in the Asti area or “up
there in the Alta Langa,” writes F. Piccinelli, “means ‘listen’; it means real bonds
of affection.”
Don Bosco always had a lot to say about his plans, his works and always confided
in his sons with great simplicity. “I have no secrets with you”, but his own intimate
life he displayed to no one. “His autobiographical pages,” P. Stella writes, “his
personal recollections are not like those of St Teresa of Avila, nor like those
of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Most came later and very rarely – only fleetingly –
do we manage to catch Don Bosco expressing intimate religious feelings, the
motivations for his actions.”
This was not only temperament playing its part: those who looked at Don Bosco
from the outside were impressed more by his incessant activity than by his
genuine holiness, at first glance; by his talent for organising things and the
impressive nature of his works. The outer façade could thus conceal the inner
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depths, as E. Ceria well points out. “We could say that during the years of his
greatest activity not everyone noticed what a man of prayer Don Bosco was; and
would we venture to say that not even those who had been asked to recount the
great things he did, and who wrote about them, had penetrated to the intimate
depths of his spirit of prayer.”
The apparent lack of order that reigned in Don Bosco’s houses during their difficult
beginnings was another factor that did not seem to testify to his holiness. Anyone
who did not know the family spirit that was experienced at Valdocco, where
superiors fraternised with students, where fear of God and gospel charity reigned
supreme, or anyone who had other educational models in mind, could also have
doubted that the approach adopted by the saint could truly be a valid and formative
one. “Had Don Bosco really had a spirit of prayer,” the future Cardinal Parocchi
said to himself when upset by the noise the boys were making in the sacristy, “he
would have put a stop to such disturbances.”
Archbishop Tortone, the official representative of the Holy See with the
Government, in his report on how the Oratory was going sent on 6 August 1868
to the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, could not hide his “sorry
impression” of clerics and youngsters “running, playing, jumping and even being
involved in a few escapades” during recreation, “some with little decorum, others
with little or no respect. The good Don Bosco, content that the clerics were
recollected in church, takes little care to form their hearts to the true ecclesiastical
spirit.”
Certainly Don Bosco liked things to be well done, but he was never a perfectionist.
He kindly and patiently tolerated the youthful exuberance of his co-workers so
long as he could see a true spirit of piety, love for work, well-proven morality in
them. No one was more convinced than he that things are neither born perfect
nor adult; they only become so with time.
His maxim was that “God’s works are ordinarily brought to fulfilment only
gradually.” Facts proved him right: his undertakings generally began with a degree
of disorder. but ended up in an orderly way.
In 1875 he said:
In the early days of the Oratory there were quite a few outward
disturbances [… ]. I saw those disturbances, warned those who
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needed it, but let them go on as they could, because it was not
an offence against God. If I had wanted to remove the various
inconveniences at once, I would have had to send all the young
men away and close the Oratory, because the clerics would not
have adapted to a new regime. There was always a certain air of
independence that made all fetters disappear.
Fr Bonetti would have liked everything in his college to be done to perfection. Don
Bosco wrote to him: “We seek the best” but he added realistically, “Unfortunately
we have to content ourselves with the mediocre amid so many things that are
wrong.” His reply to Cafasso who insisted that “What is good must be done well”
was a convinced “Sometimes it is enough to do as best you can amid so many
difficulties.”
His regular statement, “The good is the enemy of the best” really does interpret
one of the most firmly-rooted convictions in his life. The urge for perfection never
paralysed his charitable undertakings. He always considered it more useful for
the cause of the Kingdom to do good even if it was the best one could do, instead
of putting it off in view of some hypothetical future “better”. Passable lemonade
could still be made from a lemon well past its use-by date. The saint knew how
to work miracles with half personalities.
Finally, we could say that some of the saint’s witty and casual mannerisms, his
very way of presenting himself to the public, were not of the kind to give us a
precise idea of his holiness.
Madame Beaulieu from Nice, who had know the saintly Curé of Ars, was
convinced that she had a fair idea about holiness. She was surprised when, as
part of a dinner in honour of Don Bosco, she saw him stand up with glass in hand
and happily offer a toast in honour of the guests. “Is this a saint?” she thought to
herself. She changed her mind when she heard him say, benevolently, “Whether
you eat or drink, do everything in the name of the Lord.”
When the Benedictine Mocquereau saw him before him “unshaven, uncut and
dishevelled hair going in all directions, and then his worn out clothes …” he felt
rather disappointed: “That was my first, purely natural impression.”
However, for anyone who had not been led astray by first impressions and
observed him more carefully, especially in the final period of his life, it would not
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have been difficult to see “the stamp of a man created by God for something” in
his face. “What strikes one about him is his refined smile, his shrewd gaze and
an air of great kindness and indomitable will.” (Saint Genert, a correspondent for
Le Figaro).
Manifest holiness
Hidden and manifest holiness at the same time; here is another of the many
paradoxes of Don Bosco’s life. By temperament and a deliberate spirit of humility
he was led to hide his inner world and cover up the best of himself, but holiness,
flashing in his eyes, filtered like light through alabaster from his whole being, could
be discerned in the his behaviour as a whole. Just as the artist leaves his imprint
on his works, so Don Bosco had left the imprint of his holiness in what he had
thought, said, written and done. The goodness of the tree is judged by the fruits;
holiness by the works of holiness. They are so many glimpses through which the
Church enters into the souls of the saints and evaluates their gospel heroism.
The thousands of pages of the acts of the canonical processes are an uplifting
hymn to Don Bosco’s virtues. While studying the Cause, consultors and judges
did not take long to become aware that while his life seemed to be apparently
spread across a thousand outward activities, in reality it was only God, God alone
who was his supreme centre of gravity. What Paul Albera wrote about Don Bosco
is true: “If working until death is the first article of the Salesian code, then he [Don
Bosco] wrote more through example than by pen. Throwing himself into God’s
arms and never leaving him was his most perfect act.”
It was clear that at the roots of his multifaceted activity there were only
supernatural motives: his total adhesion to Christ, to his Spirit, to the Church.
And it was also evident that the richness of his intimacy with God had known no
respite, having intensified to the point of invading his entire existence in a more
absolute and transparent form.
It has been said that all saints are, in general terms, children of the Gothic period:
filled with infinite aspiration on high, where the sufficient is never sufficient. Don
Bosco was such. “I am happy,” Cardinal Vives y Tuto, the proponent of the Cause,
wrote “that I have had to study Don Bosco’s life in depth, because I have been
able to get to know that he is a great saint. I have touched him by hand: what
treasures of virtue! A love for Our Lady that equals that of the greatest saints; a
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love for the Passion that suffused his being and, as an infallible sign of holiness,
the extraordinary in the ordinary, so that nothing transpired outwardly in ordinary
life. You see, I have studied Don Bosco’s life a great deal and to me his figure
appears to be ever more providential.”
“I have leafed through so many processes to do with Causes,” he went on to say,
“but I have never found one so overflowing with the supernatural.”
The Promoter of the Faith, the future Cardinal Salotti, having deepened his
knowledge of Don Bosco, confessed that he was struck not so much by his
“prodigious apostolate” as by “the wise and sublime edifice of his Christian
perfection,” adding, as he addressed St Pius X: “Holy Father, if everyone had an
intimate and complete understanding of this other side of the figure of Don Bosco,
how much more appreciated this man, who enjoys such deep and universal
esteem, would be.”
“Awesome is God in his sanctuary” says Psalm 68:35. More awesome and varied
still, however, is the church he builds with the living and chosen stones that are
the saints. Don Bosco is one of these stones, indeed a corner stone for his role as
founder and progenitor of a great spiritual e capostipite di una grande discendenza
spirituale lineage. “To trace another figure of the same proportions as Don Bosco,“
said Cardinal Schuster, “we need to go back centuries in the history of the Church
to the holy founders of the great Religious Orders.”
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Chapter 4: Miracle worker who did
not create fear
The reputation as a miracle worker that accompanied Don Bosco, especially in
the last years of his life, was justified. He was a priest who could read the secrets
of a conscience, had prophetic dreams and visions, knew of hidden matters and
acted at a distance, had the gift of healing and miracles, experienced diabolical
activity, and at the end of his life experienced ecstatic phenomena.
Even though a certain aura of legend may have amplified some episodes, while
others were not sufficiently ascertained, no one can question the overwhelming
amount of critically certain preternatural facts with which Don Bosco’s life
abounded.
Just because human beings today, by comparison with the Middle Ages, are
over-suspicious of anything that smacks of the extraordinary, this is not sufficient
reason not to talk about it. There is room for respectful verification somewhere
between naive incredulity and systematic disbelief. Paul VI said that “If the
Church is often cautious and wary of the possible spiritual illusions of those who
envisage singular phenomena, she is and wants to be extremely respectful of the
supernatural experiences granted to certain souls, or of the prodigious facts that
God sometimes deigns to miraculously insert into the fabric of natural events.”
Therefore, any a priori distrust of the “marvellous” that overflowed in Don Bosco’s
life is unjustified. For sure, we cannot confuse miracles, prophecies and other
extraordinary deeeds with sanctity, which is the heroic dynamic of theological life
and an entirely inner fact. But these gifts, which essentially work to the Church’s
benefit, can make it manifest and encourage it.
Now, the miracle worker is a saint who generally inspires reverence and even fear,
because of their closeness to God and the divine power that acts through them.
For the most part, this kind of saint seems to be a reserved, priestly and serious
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The extraordinary – with lesser splendour
figure. This type of representation does not at all suit Don Bosco, the “miracle
worker who did not create fear”.
The extraordinary – with lesser splendour
Divine power broke silently, almost unseen, into his life, to the point that not
everyone noticed it. “He manifested the extraordinary” wrote GB Lemoyne, “with
such simplicity that it almost seemed a lesser splendour, less intrusive to our poor
nature.”
For example, if the consecrated hosts seemed to multiply in his hands, then only
he knew about it. If bread rolls multiplied in their hundreds for breakfast, the
only one who noticed it was Francesco Dalmazzo who was hidden behind the
saint, suspecting the miracle. If, in order to make his children happy, he multiplied
chestnuts or hazelnuts – delicacies of the time – he did so with the natural ease
of the ancient conjurer who pulls one thing after another out of his sleeve. And
if news of some extraordinary deed spread, or one of the boys in all simplicity
asked him how he did it, then the saint would deal with it somewhere between the
serious and the facetious, make a quick joke about it and deflect the conversation
elsewhere.
Though he possessed the gift of healing to an uncommon degree, he was easily
able to convince people that the true worker of miracles was Mary and her alone.
“She is the miracle worker,” he would say, “the worker of graces and miracles
through the power she has obtained from her Divine Son.” He was so convinced
of this that he did not hesitate to publish graces obtained in her name.
Quite a number of these, by their very nature, were destined to remain shrouded
in oblivion. One thinks of the manifestation of sins, the reading of hidden thoughts,
certain prophecies meant for individuals. Thus one could live for years with Don
Bosco and not hear of them. Such was the case for Angelo Savio, professed since
1860, who declared at the canonical processes: “Some of my confreres assure
me that Don Bosco had special gifts from God: the scrutiny of hearts, the gift of
prophecies: I am not in a position to pronounce on these facts.”
Bishop Bertagna said the same: “I have never had a sure reason to believe these
things.”
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The extraordinary – with lesser splendour
Don Bosco was endowed with penetrating psychological intuition, so it was not
always easy to draw the boundary between charism and nature. Was it the
charismatic or just the man speaking in his surprising statement to Dr Giuive me
a youngster under fourteen years of age and I will be abel to do what I wish with
him.” It was probably both.
His “dreams” need separate treatment. It is known that the dream is the realm of
the unbridled imagination, the product of the unconscious. Dreaming is essential
to the total life of a human being: it is not possible to live without dreaming. Like
everyone else, Don Bosco dreamed every night, but some dreams were different
from ordinary dreams.
Sometimes, as he himself said, “fables” or “stories” or “allegories” were “invented”
in his mind that he happily told his boys and his Salesians for their moral and
formative content. “The little story I am about to tell you will also teach us
something”.
Other dreams were not only characterised by perfect logic, but anticipated future
events, shone light his destiny as a founder, heralded imminent deaths and so on.
At first he “did not put faith in them”, exorcised them as subtle tricks of the devil,
but in the end he had to give in, because these dreams came true. In his later
years he did not hesitate to call them “supernatural”.
Dream-visions, then, coloured by the background of his peasant life and then
his Valdocco experience; dreams with strange representations, but always with
dense moral and spiritual content which the saintly educator skilfully used to keep
God’s offence away from his home, to extol the beauty of the life of grace and
friendship with God and enkindle the enthusiasm of those who had believed his
word about the glorious future of his work.
Alongside these dreams that we could describe as minor ones, since they mostly
involved life at the Oratory, worth recalling are the larger frescoes of his major
dreams related to the origins and development of the Congregation. examples are
the dream at nine years of age in its various versions, dreams about the missions,
the Salesian charism and spirit such as the dream of the “Pergola of roses”, or
the “Ten diamonds”, or the dream of the “Devils convention” to devise the most
suitable means to destroy Salesian work, and so on. There are not many of these
major dreams but their importance is difficult to estimate, because under the veil
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Correct evaluation
of symbol and vision they are very real concentrations of asceticism and Salesian
spirit.
Our tradition has never ceased referring to them as a source of primary
importance.
It is curious, though, that while on the one hand Don Bosco attaches the greatest
importance to his dreams in general, on the other hand he seems, once again, to
resort to the image of the dream to conceal his charisms. He seems to say, and
in fact did say that “dreams come about while sleeping”, they are only “dreams”;
nevertheless they can teach us many things. “Do not make of this dream anything
other than you would make of similar kinds of things.” “This is my dream: let each
one interpret it as he wishes, but always know how to give it the weight that a
dream deserves.”
So a miracle worker, you can see, who looks as if he is not, and who knows how
to cleverly conceal the fact.
Correct evaluation
The extraordinary, the preternatural, takes up quite some space in Don Bosco’s
life. It is a question of giving it its correct value, neither exaggerating nor
undervaluing it. We should not exaggerate it because Don Bosco, as A. Caviglia
said, “is not a saint for whom miracles slip through his fingers like St Joseph of
Cupertino or Francis of Paola, nor is he a Cottolengo, who, trusting in Providence,
follows his heart case by case.”
What counted in his life were not the miracles, prophecies or visions, but the
heroic nature of his virtues, the arduous daily effort to uplift, both humanly and
spiritually, countless hosts of poor young people and ordinary folk; his unwavering
commitment to the advent of the Kingdom and his constant industriousness as if
everything depended on him while relying only on God, convinced as he was that
“Providence wants to be helped by our immense efforts”.
And we should not undervalue it. “The extraordinary permeated the religiousness
of Don Bosco and his environment and was the stimulus for a type of asceticism
and apostolic action.” (P. Stella). Above all, it significantly marked his work as a
founder.
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Correct evaluation
For example, when the approval of the Salesian Constitutions encountered
insurmountable difficulties in Rome, Don Bosco wotrked two immediate cures
which were without explanation, humanly speaking. He cured Cardinal Berardi’s
nephew, and Cardinal Antonelli, who had been forced to remain in his chair due
to serious ailments. His intervention on behalf of these two prelates was decisive
for the success of his cause.
“Tell me,” he confided to his sons one day, “what could poor Don Bosco do unless
some special help did not come from heaven at every moment?”
Seeing the success of his undertakings, he said, “Here we see the finger of
God, Our Lady’s protection.” He was so convinced he lived under the special
influence of the divine that he could say, “The Congregation took no step forward
without some supernatural deed advising it; there was no change or refinement
or expansion that was not preceded by an order from the Lord.”
We could ask ouselves: what was his inner reaction to the supernatural that ran
through his life? A blameless, deeply humble reaction. The reaction of the faithful
servant who felt he was an instrument, only an instrument in God’s hands, that
God was the only hero of his miracles: “I am but the humble instrument of these
works.” “It is Our Lord who does everything… If he had found a poorer, meaner,
more unqualified priest in the archdiocese of Turin,” he confided to Fr Felice
Giordano of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, “he would have chosen him and not
others to be the instrument of those works you speak to me about; and he would
have left poor Don Bosco aside.”
We finds this timely recommendation in his Spiritual Testament: “I strongly advise
all my sons to be vigilant, both in speaking and writing, never to say or assert
that Don Bosco has obtained graces from God or has in any way worked
miracles. He would be committing a harmful error. Although God’s goodness has
been generous towards me, nevertheless I have never claimed to know or work
supernatural things.”
The backlash of the marvellous in his personal life brought about a twofold
reaction. One of the prophet dismayed at the divine power invested him: “These
things make Don Bosco’s responsibility before God grow in a frightening way.”
“When I think of my responsibility for the position I find myself in I tremble all over.
The things I see.”
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Correct evaluation
And the reaction of Mary who magnified the Lord for the great things done in her.
Within the circle of his intimate friends or benefactors Don Bosco did not hesitate
to humbly recount the supernatural facts that punctuated his life as educator
and founder, guided by the principle that “It is necessary for God’s works to be
manifested.” He felt that his life was inextricably linked to that of the Congregation,
so let us speak about it: “I see that Don Bosco’s life is all mixed up in the life of
the Congregation: and so let us talk about it. It is necessary for the greater glory
of God, for the salvation of souls and the greater increase of the Congregation,
that many things be made known.”
The things that need to be made known are the magnalia Dei: the miracles,
prophetic dreams, prodigious healings that accompanied his life as educator
and founder, which wrung expressions from him that were filled with trust and
abandonment in God: “God is with us!”'; “It is his work that is done and is being
done”; “God does his works with magnificence”; “Our Congregation is led by God
and protected by Mary Help of Christians.”
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Chapter 5 A HOLY FOUNDER
Don Bosco belongs to the group of holy founders and is the father of a great
spiritual posterity. The Salesians, the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the
Salesian Cooperators were directly founded by him; other groups, raised up by
the Holy Spirit, live his spirit and carry out his mission through different specific
functions, thus giving origin to the Salesian Family. They are all heirs of his
charism as founder, that is, of his typical and original “experience of the Holy
Spirit” that he “transmitted to [his] disciples to be lived, safeguarded, deepened
and constantly developed by them, in harmony with the Body of Christ continually
in the process of growth” (Mutuae Relationes no. 11).
This experience, a gift of the Spirit for a more radiant configuration to Christ
the servant and for the edification of the Church, is marked by the classic light–
darkness contrast that characterises every mystical vision or higher calling. In
this set of opposites, the consciousness of being under special pressure from the
divine in view of a mission that surpasses the forces of nature and that of feeling
a mere lowly instrument in the hands of the Lord clash and combine. The need
for absolute docility to the Spirit, which is inexhaustible creativity, and the need to
know how to overcome the resistance and opposition that every novelty entails;
the clarity that rains down from above and the darkness that rises from below.
This apparent paradox gives form and substance to Don Bosco’s holiness. The
ups and downs of his life show us how he “found no other way to realise his
vocation and holiness than that of being a founder” (E. Viganò).
The action of the Holy Spirit in his life as a founder was constant, we could
say. God inspired him and spoke to him, normally indirectly, through the signs
of the times, through people and things. He spoke to him directly through inner
illumination, prophetic lights, dreams and visions.
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His vocation
His vocation
We can ask ourselves: When did he sense the action of the Holy Spirit in his life?
When did he perceive, albeit vaguely, that he was called and sent to be a sign
and bearer of Christ’s love for the young?
For Francis of Assisi this moment coincided with the “revelation” that urged him
to “live under the form of the holy Gospel”. For Don Bosco it was the dream he
had at home around nine or ten years of age. He confirmed this in a confession
he made later: “Things began for us in an extraordinary way from when I was nine
or ten years old. I thought I saw very many boys in the farmyard near the house.
Then a person said to me, ‘Why don’t you go and instruct them?’ ‘Because I don’t
know how.’ ‘Go, go! I am sending you.’ I was so happy after that, that everybody
noticed.”
The dream is well known but it would not hurt to recall it again. Young John dreamt
that he was in front of a multitude of youngsters who were yelling and screaming.
Some were cursing. He sought to silence them with “words”and “fists”.
A “dignified man” appeared and called him “by name” (= his vocation),
commanded him to “take charge of these children” ( = his mission) and win them
over “not by blows but by gentleness and love” (= his method), and teach them
“about the ugliness of sin and the value of virtue” (= the essential content of his
message).
The youngster felt he was not up to the task: he was not capable, didn’t have the
knowledge, but the Man in the dream came to his aid: “I will give you a teacher.
Under her guidance you will become wise. Without her, all wisdom is foolishness.”
And it was here that a “Lady of stately appearance” entered the scene. She took
him “kindly by the hand” and indicating a “large number of goats… and other
animals” she told him: “This is the field of your work. Make yourself humble, storng
and energetic. and what you will see happening to these animals in a moment is
what you must do for my children.” John looked: “where before I saw wild animals,
I now saw gentle lambs” who were all jumoing or bleating as if to welcome that
man and lady. He wanted to know more; he was upset and began to cry. Then the
Lady “placed her hand on my head and said, ‘in good time you will understand
everything.’”
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The young people in the dream
The dream ended here. But we believe we are not exaggerating if we say that
this was the greatest moment in Don Bosco’s life. It was a unique, unrepeatable
moment because that night the Lord’s hand was laid upon him and brought about
the most profound transformation of his life. From then on it became a mysterious
giving on God’s part and a mysterious giving on Don Bosco’s part.
“The dream at nine years of age conditioned Don Bosco’s entire way of living and
thinking. And in particular, the way he thought about God’s presence in everyone’s
life and in the history of the world.” (P. Stella). The saint never forgot it: “The dream
stayed with me for the rest of my life.”
The architecture of the dream is perfect: whe, after an order fronm Pius IX Don
Bosco consigned it to his Memoirs of the Oratory, he was close to sixty years old
and could recall it in the light of its fulfilment. But at nine years of age, no. The
inspiration filtering down from above still has, in reality, all the depth and mystery
of a natural dream. It is a light in a shadowy state that is at the root of the indelible
presentiment of a superior sacred mission yet to be defined and verified. The
dream, which then repeats itself with slight variations, instils confidence and hope
in its main character, but not so much as to remove the uncertainty, anxiety and
doubt about his future that tormented his early years.
This explains the “crisis of vocation”, as Fr Ceria calls it, that he had just as
he was about to enter the seminary. This was not about his call to the priestly
state to which he was strongly inclined. It was a question of the choice between
being a secular or a religious priest. at that moment his preference was more in
the direction of religious life: he decided to become a Franciscan and was duly
accepted into the Order. The advice of prudent individuals and a dream that he
described as “very strange”, induced him to desist from his intention and enter
the seminary. “The Lord is preparing another place, another harvest for you” he
was told.
We have already said that the year at the seminary were decisive for his holiness.
But more decisive for his life as a founder were the years he spent at the Convitto
and beyond.
The young people in the dream
The first impact the city of Turin made on him affected him deeply.
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The young people in the dream
The spectacle of misery and abandonment of so many youth marginalised by the
construction and demographic expansion in the city’s suburbs, or the youngsters
who had migrated from the province in search of work and were left to their own
devices challenged him in an acute and new way. The Spirit that had come upon
him now spoke to him through the imploring voice of so many “poor, at risk and
abandoned” youth and urged him to action, made him realise that these were the
young people seen in the dream at nine years of age and to whom he was sent.
We need to do something for these poor young people, Don Bosco thought, and
we need to do it quickly. He was just waiting for the auspicious occasion to offer
itself for “attempting a project on behalf of young men wandering through the city
streets, especially those who have just come out of prison.”
God’s hour struck on 8 December 1841, feast of the Immaculate Conception,
when he met Bartholomew Garelli, apparently by a stroke of luck, in the sacristy
of St Francis of Assisi church. It was the first catechism lesson, the first seed of
the Festive Oratory.
It did not take long for other young men to join the bricklayer’s rouseabout. He
invited them. Don Bosco wrote that they were just a “small army of bricklayers,
stonemasons, cobblestone cutters and squarers” but destined to grow.
It was the humble beginning of a grand work that Don Bosco had not the least
idea about at the time. He was not even sure what direction his priestly ministry
would take. God guided his steps, but like Abraham “he did not know where he
was going”.
The idea of religious life kept coming back to him and this time he thought about
the Oblates of the Blessed Virgn founded by Lanteri, another great figure of Turin’s
school of holiness. He was also strongly attracted to the missionary ideal and
began studying languages with this in mind. Fr Cafasso’s clear “no” saw him
abandon that idea.
Meanwhile, the three years at the Convitto were coming to an end and it was time
for him, too, to be part of one of the pastoral activities of the archdiocese. He
was offered three possible roles: tutor at the Convitto, assistant parish priest in
Buttigliera, Rector of the Little Hospital of St Philomena, founded by Marchioness
Barolo, as well as being assistant to Dr Borelli at the Refuge. He preferred not to
make the decision but that Fr Cafasso decide for him. “My inclination is to work
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The young people in the dream
with young people,” he said, “so do with me what you want: I shall know the Lord’s
will in whatever you advise.” And to his confessor’s question, “At the moment,
what’s the wish nearest your heart? What’s on your mind?” he replied without the
least hesitation: “At this moment I see myself in the midst of a multitude of boys
appealing to me for help.”
As a prudent man, Fr Cafasso wanted to think more about it. He finally called
his disciple and told him without any hesitation: “Pack your bag and go with Dr
Borelli… Meanwhile God will show you what you have to do for the young.”
Of the three suggestions, this was the one that went most against his natural
inclinations. In the end, however, it was the most providential. The Oratory which
had begun at the Convitto was able to move to the Refuge, continue and develop.
So two years passed, full of unforeseen events and adventures for the Oratory,
whose young people, having grown in number, kept Don Bosco seriously occupied
and forced to work on two fronts: the young people and the work of the Refuge.
This situation could not last, though. Marchioness Barolo, authoritarian as she
was, did not take long to confront the saint with the dilemma that seemed to have
no solution: “Give up either the work for the boys or the work at the Refuge.”
Don Bosco did not hesitate in choosing his boys: he was dismissed and sent off
somewhat brusquely.
“I accepted my dismissal, abandoning myself to whatever God’s plans for me
might be.”
From then on, Don Bosco would give himself completely to abandoned youth. He
would be fully and ultimately comforted by the dream at nine years of age that
was repeated in great detail. As before he saw himself at the head of a “strange
flock” of animals when again “a lady dressed as a shepherdess signalled me to
follow her and accompany that strange flock while she went ahead.” While doing
so many of the animals turned into lambs, and many of the lambs, in turn, became
young shepherds together with Don Bosco. The final stage of the journey was
the fixed location of the Oratory. The Shepherdess gave him a glimpse of future
development: buildings, poticoes, clerics and priests and finally, a “wondrously
big church” inside which hung a white banner on which was written: “hic domus
mea, inde gloria mea. Here is my house from which my glory will go out.”
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Luminous darkness
This view from above on his life and work, this foresight into the future, did not
remove Don Bosco from the hard uncertainties of daily life, nor did it mean that
these clarifications from above were not also accompanied by states of inner
darkness.
For example, on Palm Sunday – 5 April 1846 – Don Bosco went through one of
the most bitter “nights of the senses and spirit“ of his life. Evicted by the Filippi
brothers who had rented him a field for his Oratory, abandoned by his co-workers,
exhausted in strength, weak in health, he felt terribly lonely. He no longer knew
where to gather his boys the following Sunday, which was Easter. An infinite
sadness assailed him; he withdrew to a corner of the field and broke into tears.
From his heart, this simple prayer went up to God: “My God, why don’t you show
me where you want me to gather these children? Oh, let me know! Oh! Show me
what I must do.” The Lord heard him.
The rental of the Pinardi shed – immediately transformed into a chapel – and the
purchase of an adjacent strip of land, were the first stable core of the Oratory.
Through painful ways, Providence had led him to the place indicated to him by
dreams, and there he was to fulfil his mission. That his awareness of being a
founder had become clearer is clearly proven by these confidences he shared
with his rectors in 1876: “I vaguely hoped to do poor boys some good in that very
spot. The thought haunted me, and I had no idea how to carry it out. Nevertheless,
it kept haunting me and determined every step arid action of mine. I wanted to do
a lot of good, and I wanted to do it here. That poor priest’s hope seemed but a
dream then, yet God made it come true and fulfilled that poor priest’s desire.”
Luminous darkness
How these “desires” came true, and how the work grew in his hands, the saint
was unable to explain. “How did He do that? I can hardly say how myself.” God’s
ways are always mysterious, and were doubly so for Don Bosco the founder. The
goal that “never began from me” was clear: do good for abandoned youth and do
it there, in the fields at Valdocco.
But the saint was not the only priest concerned about poor young people: there
were other institutions with which, perhaps, he could have joined and ensured
the future of his Oratory more easily. It was not just a fleeting idea that occupied
his mind and prompted him to check it out. But however much he looked around,
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Luminous darkness
however much he compared himself to others, he did not recognise himself in any
of the existing institutions. His “Oratory” experience was too typical, too different
from the others: to remain faithful to his original inspiration he would have to carry
it forward – alone, with the Lord’s help; he would have to develop it, bring it to
maturity slowly, laboriously.
The Holy Spirit, who led him along both ancient and new paths, made him realise
that, unlike other founders, who could count on “tried and tested members” he
would have to rely solely on young people whom he himself “had to choose,
instruct, form”. This is what we learn from a very interesting testimony of his, in
1847, when he had recently taken possession of the Pinardi Chapel.
In a vision the Virgin Mary had indicated the field I had to work
in. I therefore possessed the premeditated, complete outline of
a plan from which I could not and absolutely would not detach
myself. I was absolutely responsible if this were to succeed.
I clearly saw the strings I had to pull, the means I had to adopt to
succeed in the undertaking; so I was not able to expose myself
to risk of having such a plan thwarted by submitting it to the
judgement and will of others. Despite this, in the same year 1847 I
wished to observe more diligently whether any Institution existed
in which I could be sure of fulfilling my mandate, but I was not
long in realising that there was not. No matter how holy was the
spirit that animated them and the purpose they aimed at, they did
not correspond to my ends. These were the reasons that kept
me from joining some Order or Congregation of religious. So I
ended up being alone, and instead of bringing in members who
were already tried and tested in community life and practised in
the various works of the apostolic ministry, I had to go in search,
according to what had been indicated to me in my dreams, of
young companions whom I myself was to choose, instruct, and
form.
We see in these words the certainty of a founder who feels he is called and sent
by God to fulfil an unmistakeable mission in the Church: he has the awareness
of someone who, as the bearer of a special experience of the Holy Spirit to be
transmitted to posterity, feels he “absolutely responsible” for its success.
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Luminous darkness
This invincible certainty might make one think of a visionary rushing towards the
goal confident, safe from all practical doubts, all existential uncertainty.
It was not like that. As happens with the mystics, in his dreams – some with
worldwide dimensions, such as the ones about the missions – Don Bosco is lifted
above himself and brought to summary visions that impress themselves strongly
in the deepest core of his being. But they are like flashes in the night: suddenly the
panorama is illuminated, then everything plunges back into darkness. The seer
must then resort to his ordinary faculties to remember, recount, describe what
he has seen. And this would not be an easy task, as the tormented editing of
Don Bosco’s handwritten pages, retouches, erasures, word substitutions prove.
F. Ciarli has done well to write,
The transition from inspiration to its realisation in a given religious
family involves a translation into structural terms of which the
founder is unaware. He has seen the fundamental contents from
which a new way of presence in the Church must “take on a
body”, but he does not yet know the shape that such a “body” will
acquire. Sometimes it is not even clear to him to what extent what
he has been shown is to be translated into a specific religious
institute. Only the gradual unfolding of the work in its various and
gradual realisations will bring to light, in the eyes of the founder
himself, all the riches inherent in the inspiration.
Don Bosco’s life fits this description perfectly.
“I always went ahead as the Lord inspired and circumstances demanded.”
Unpredictable, uncertain, difficult circumstances that forced the saint, from time
to time, into a long and patient work of spiritual discernment. The most accurate
idea of Don Bosco is therefore that of Jacob struggling with God, of a man who
always lived with his feet firmly planted on the ground grappling with unpredictable
daily difficulties.
Everything is clear for Don Bosco yet everything was shrouded in mist. This
luminous ignorance is the objective proof that the plan was in God’s hands; is
proof that the path would not develop along a very short straight line, but by trial
and error, with courageous steps forward, and with appropriate adjustments to
the route.
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Luminous darkness
Taking possession of the Pinardi house was the landing in the promised land, but
it did not coincide with the purchase of property, nor with the short-term fulfilment
of dreams.
He was therefore always amid the anguish of finding how to
survive in Turin, and despite the poverty of means, trusting in
God, in Fr Cafasso and in his circle of friends. He found himself
at odds with his colleagues in the priestly apostolate such as he
had never experienced before, a victim of misunderstandings,
of blows dictated more by the passion of the moment than
by calculated malice, because others also felt – and in many
respects they were not wrong – their cause to be a matter of life
and death for themselves and for the work of the Oratories. He
was also at odds with the parish priests (P. Stella).
Even later on Don Bosco never had an easy life. One day he confided to Fr
Barberis: “You could say that everyone is against us and that we have to fight
against everyone. The legal world is absolutely against us; even certain religious
Orders, seeing themselves in decline and us in continual progress, look at us like
this. The wind blows against us in the curias, in families, in society. If it were not
God who wants it, it would be impossible to do what we do.”
But he was comforted by the thought that “the Master of [his] works is God, God
is the sustainer, and Don Bosco is no more than the instrument.” This luminous
certainty made him rock solid in the face of the difficulties and obstacles that
blocked his path: “This is the reason why in adversity, in persecution, in the midst
of the greatest obstacles I never let myself be intimidated, and the Lord was
always with us.”
Amidst difficulties of all kinds, an original “experience of the Spirit” had really
blossomed at Valdocco in less than a decade, a new educational and pastoral
model whose consequences went far beyond what Don Bosco thought. The best
young men were also involved in this experience, including St Dominic Savio.
On 25 March 1855, in Don Bosco’s little room, without witnesses, without fuss,
Cleric Rua pronounced his first annual vows into Don Bosco’s hands at the age of
sixteen. At various intervals, other vows were placed in the hands of the Saint. His
institution did not take long to establish itself rapidly; first in Piedmont, then in Italy
and around the world. Don Bosco’s concern now became less that of cultivating
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He had the idea of a Congregation
his charism with infinite patience, and more one of securing it for history, having
it approved and authenticated by the Church. A task that took him decades.
He had the idea of a Congregation
It is not our task to write the history of the approval of the Salesian Society, its
Rule, its privileges. But it was a history with all the shape of prolonged martyrdom:
“If I had known beforehand how much pain, toil, opposition and contradiction it
costs to found a religious Society, perhaps I would not have had the courage to
set out on the task.”
His ideas did not always coincide with those of the Church authorities, as can be
seen from the extensive written reports sent to the relevant authorities.
Up until 1874, the year the Rule was approved by the Holy See, it does not appear
that Don Bosco had any plans to found a Congregation as it in fact turned out.
On 18 October 1878 he said, "I went along with three-year vows because my
original plan was to found a Congregation which would assist the bishops. Since
this was not possible and I was forced to do otherwise, a three-year commitment
is now more of a hindrance than a help.” He expressed the same opinion to rectors
gathered at Alassio a year later: “When we introduced the triennial profession my
idea of the Congregation was quite different. I intended to found something far
different from what we have today, but I was forced to do things this way, and
so be it.”
Should we say that the Church distorted Don Bosco’s charism? It would be a
grave error to think so, because her task, as Lumen Gentium says, is “not indeed
to extinguish the Spirit, but to test all things and hold fast to that which is good.”
The Spirit who gives birth to charisms is, let us not forget, the soul of the Church;
the Spirit does not contradict himself. By bringing Don Bosco’s institution back
into the fold of the classic Congregations, the Holy See placed it in a position to
expand as best it could while still remaining itself. Under the pressure of events
and the indications of the Church the saint clarified and specified aspects that
were not yet well defined.
It is in fact the unfolding of events which are the bearers of grace that “shaped the
Congregation not as he would have wanted it, or as he believed it should become.
And this does not mean that he did not want it as it came to be, nor that he was
dissatisfied with it” (P. Stella). Nor does it mean that the Congregation as it came
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He had the idea of a Congregation
to be has not preserved its originality and modernity, or that it does not reflect
the true face and thought of Don Bosco. The following reflections by Fr Filippo
Rinaldi, the saint’s third successor, are very significant in this regard.
He had conceived of a pious society that, while being a true
religious congregation, did not have the traditional outwardr
appearance of one. It was enough for him that there be a religious
spirit, the only factor in the perfection of the evangelical counsels.
For the rest, he believed he could very well bend to the needs
of the times. This elasticity of adaptation to all the forms of good
that are continually arising in the bosom of humanity is the proper
spirit of our Constitutions, and the day that any variation contrary
to this spirit were introduced, our Pious Society would be finished.
The concept that our Venerable Founder had in creating his
Religious Society has not yet been fully illustrated. He injected
an ingenious modernity into it that, while rigidly preserving the
substantial spirit of his educational method, would at the same
time prevent it from becoming fossilised in secondary matters that
are subject to change with the passage of time.
Our Constitutions are pervaded by a breath of the perennial
vitality that emanates from the holy Fifth Angel who is, precisely
for this reason, the angel of all times and ever rich in new sources
of life.
His “I was forced to do things this way, and so be it”, therefore, was not an act
of bitter resignation, but the joyful Amen of the prophet who has reached the
end of his race. Proof of this is the solemn declaration with which he opened his
“Introduction” to the Salesian Constitutions: “Our Constitutions, O beloved sons
in Jesus Christ, were definitively approved by the Holy See on 3 April 1874. This
fact must be hailed by us as one of the most glorious of our Society, as that which
assures us that in the observance of our Rules we rest on a stable, secure and
we can even say infallible basis, since the judgement of the Supreme Head of the
Church who sanctioned them is infallible.”
The Constitutions were not only the “steady” way that leads to love for the saint,
but also the seal of approval of his charism and spirit, a living and dynamic
and constantly growing reality. This is the only way to explain his recurring
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He had the idea of a Congregation
recommendation on the importance and practice of the Constitutions. “Let every
point of the Rule be a reminder of me”; “The only means of propagating the spirit
of the Congregation is the observance of the Rules”; “Let no good thing be done
contrary to them”.
Only at the end of his long journey could Abraham grasp the breadth and depth
of God’s will in his regard.
The same must be said of Don Bosco,comparatively speaking. Celebrating Mass
in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Rome, in May 1887 just a few months before
his death, his eyes were filled with tears fifteen times. It was as if he were taken
up into a far away world: he saw himself again in the little house at the Becchi and
the words of his first dream came back to him: “In good time you will understand
everything.”
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Chapter 6 AN ASTUTE SAINT
The Italian terms furbo or furbizia (shrewd, astute, cunning…) can have a
pejorative sense in current usage. And this was the sense implied by the Gazzetta
operaia in a malicious article on 15 October 1887 entitled: Furbo Don Bosco,
presented him as a priest of intrigue and cunning, someone capable of twisting
everything to his own advantage.
But there is also a positive connotation. Astuteness “can in fact be an expression
of intelligent common sense, of sharp prudence in taking sane and healthy
advantage of situations” (E. Viganò). Foresighted, shrewd individuals who know
how to extricate themselves from difficulties by playing smart are exercising
astuteness, as are those who who do not allow themselves to be fooled and know
how to achieve their goals using honest, even unpredictable means.
This is how we should look at Don Bosco’s astuteness, not forgetting that, since
he is a saint, it refers to the gift of “understanding”, the property of which is to
perfect, under the illuminating action of the Holy Spirit, the virtue of faith, which
leads one to judge righteously about created things in their relationship with God,
but in a manner superior to that of the ordinary Christian.
Playing at being simple – but not really
Don Bosco had practically always had the reputation of holy astuteness. G.B.
Lemoyne writes that “we have heard strangers, other than those who knew him,
often say ‘he is really special: this man gets it right all the time. What a crafty old
devil!’” There was always the old cunning of the conjurer in him, enchanting his
small audience; something of the refined peasant wisdom that can defend its own
interests so well.
He loved the Piedmontese proverb fé 'l bonom sensa eslo. One day he said to
one of his priests, “Do you know what it means to be astute? Pretending to be
simple! That’s what I do: I let everything be said, I listen, I pay attention to the
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Playing at being simple – but not really
words, but finally in deciding I take everything into account and come to know
everything perfectly.”
The house in Nice went through a period of serious economic difficulty. The
Rector, Fr Ronchail, no longer dared to turn to benefactors who felt harrassed by
his frequent requests for help. “Play it smart,” Don Bosco told him, “the money is
for your children; the mortifications are yours.”
What he was really saying was “Don’t give up; insist, but do so with holy cunning.”
To do good, A Caviglia, noted, his kind of good, he needed everyone, “be they
Guelphs or Ghibellines”. His skill lay precisely in “benefitting from what they don’t
realise and the good side – we don’t want to be overly pessimistic – in every
person, even when they are devoted to a party that seems to have little good in it.”
To release the good in the heart of every individual, his first biographer noted,
he was able, by honest means, to ally himself with each one’s self-love. When
he had to deal with people who were hostile, ill-disposed, when “he realised that
motives of convenience, charity or duty would have come to nothing, with refined
skill and without a shadow of flattery or falsehood he made their self-love his ally
and was able to pluck this chord in such a way as to get them to respond to the
note he had in mind. A word of praise, an honourable remembrance, an act and
a word of esteem, confidence, respect, meant that most of the time all difficulties
or dislike would disappear.”
He did the same with those closer to him, always abounding in praise with
benefactors and everyone else. When he could make a mother feel she was her
daughter’s age, or praise his parish priest friend’s stingy housekeeper, he knew
he was paying welcome compliments from which only good came, and that is
what he wanted.
His prophecies regarding the Royal House, “funerals at court”, raised the ire of
the Count General d' Angrogna. The latter hastened to Valdocco, and seriously
threatened Don Bosco with insults. The saint reacted very calmly, appealed to
the man of arms' honour – that he could not strike down someone who was
defencelss, praised his courage and valour and made a friend of him. The two
toasted one another.
The telegraph-style letter in which he thanked Countess Girolama Uguccioni who
gave him what he needed for his trip from Florence to Rome, shows how gracefully
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He could not be fooled
and shrewdly he knew how to win over his benefactors. “My good mamma. Our
journey stupendous; excellent chicken stupendous service. Excellent wine: bottle
entirely empty.”
He could not be fooled
Given his holy cunning, Don Bosco was not a man to let himself be fooled or to
be told fibs. He did not let people set traps for him. Writing to Fr Dalmazzo, he
told him “The Cardinal was waiting to make a court jester of you. We will also get
out of this [situation].”
The Foreign Minister promised him the moon (mari e monti, oceans and
mountains) for his missionaries' voyage: “Let’s see,” he wrote, “leaving the ocean
and mountains to him, if he will give me something to get over them.”
The construction of the Sacred Heart Church in Rome swallowed up huge sums
of money that gave poor Don Bosco no respite; too many people were involved
and everything became complicated. So the saint took a short cut and wrote to
Fr Dalmazzo: “I think it essential that the Cardinal Vicar not be bothered about
material matters and leave the handling of affairs to the one priest who pays for
things.” “Instead of complaining about what we are building in Rome, I would like
certain gentlemen to give us some money.”
When the national industry Exhibition was held in Turin in 1884, Don Bosco
took part in it in a big way with the best printing press that was then on the
market, the “queen of all machines”, as it was immediately called. Visitors could
watch the transformation of strips into paper, from paper to printing, from printing
to bookbinding. Everyone, experts and visitors alike, considered Don Bosco
deserving of the first prize. Instead, the anti-clerical and Masonic commission
only awarded him the silver medal. The saint refused to accept it, proudly but
with dignity: He also imposed press silence. In his letter of protest he declared,
among other things: “It is enough for me to have been able to contribute with my
work to this grandiose exhibition of Italian ingenuity and industry and to have thus
demonstrated the concern that I have always given, over more than 40 years, to
promoting the true progress of science and the arts together with the moral and
material wellbeing of poor and abandoned youth, the true progress of science and
the arts.”
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Cunning without guile
Cunning without guile
Don Bosco’s cunning was also expressed in simple, almost irrelevant gestures
but ones that had their own significance. In order to show his gratitude to the
Archbishop of Buenos Aires he had him sent two boxes of specially chosen wines
from Italy: Bordeaux, Malaga, Grignolino, etc. But the bottles had to have the
appearance of being very old wines. So what did Don Bosco do? He wrote to his
secretary to sprinkle some dust over the bottles “to ennoble the birth of the wine
and give it a rather ancient existence”. A little bit of cunning that would make the
gift more pleasing.
In order to show his gratitude to his most distinguished benefactors, he made
efforts to obtain both ecclesiastical and civil honours for them. “If there are
expenses,” he wrote to Fr Dalmazzo in Rome, “they will be paid, but I want to
pay them in such a way that I can say that it is a gift, which will be much more
profitable.” He then wished that, as far as possible, the awarding of certificates
should take place solemnly, going into details that in our changed cultural climate
might even make one smile, but that had a certain psychological effectiveness
at the time.
Writing to Fr Cagliero he said, “After receiving the brief for Mr. Benitez and
the certificate for Father Ceccarelli, make plans with Father Fagnano. Bring
everything in person. Invite the school committee and the friends of both
concerned. Have Father Tomatis neatly write a dialogue to be recited by some
boys. Two boys should carry the brief bestowing the title of Commendatore and
the diploma, each on a salver; you and Father Fagnano will accompany the pupils,
however, and personally present the certificates. These things must be given the
importance they deserve.”
His shrewdness – he also called them “holy ploys” – was not just euphemistcally
“holy”. It had nothing devious or murky about it and did not become slyness; it
was sound practical sense that moved him to use every lawful means to draw
attention to his work for the “the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls”.
He also wanted his youngsters to be shrewd in this holy way. “In the world,” he
told them, making his own the words of St Philip Neri, “there are many fools and
many clever people. The clever ones are those who toil and suffer a little to gain
paradise; the foolish ones are those who go to eternal damnation.”
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Cunning without guile
Having spoken of the “wiles” used by St Athanasius to foil the snares of his
enemies, he ended his sermon with this convinced exhortation: “I would like you
all to become saints of this sort. Yes, my dear boys, seek earnestly to become
saints but saints who know how to seek the means, do not fear persecution, do
not spare effort when it is a question of doing good – shrewd saints who prudently
seek all the ways to succeed in their intent.”
Astuteness, yes, but as a way to holiness. This was Don Bosco.
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Chapter 7 HOLY CHEERFULNESS
“The first aspect that strikes us in Don Bosco’s holiness (in fact it would seem
designed to hide the remarkably intense presence of the Spirit) is his simplicity
and cheerfulness, it made what was difficult and supernatural appear easy and
natural.” (E. Viganò).
Joy, of which cheerfulness is the external manifestation or outburst, is part of
Christian holiness. It is indeed, as Paul VI expresses it in his Exhortation on
Joy, Gaudete in Domino, “spiritual sharing in the unfathomable joy, both divine
and human, which is in the heart of Jesus Christ … [it] can only spring from the
simultaneous celebration of the death and resurrection of the Lord.”
It is the joy that the Holy Spirit poured into Our Blessed Lady, her cousin Elizabeth,
Simeon, Jesus. There are no sad saints, they would be sad saint, St Francis de
Sales said. And Don Bosco in turn said that “The devil is afraid of cheerful people.”
But not all saints manifested their cheerfulness in the same way. The lives of St
Thomas More, St Philip Neri, Don Bosco were so overflowing with joy that they
could offer material for a “theology of joy”.
Whether he was joking, or speaking of serious things or praying, Don Dosco
gave colour to life and spread cheerfulness. You could read the joy in his
bright, deep-set eyes, on his face which was “invariably smiling, attractive and
unforgettable” (P. Albera). One could grasp it in his retorts full of wit and good
humour. After the shot that almost killed him he exclaimed, “Poor cassock, you
were the one that paid for it.”
He would say: “Go as you wish, as long as you go well.” “As soon as we find an
ox without a master I want us to be chherful.” And he would often say, “Lietare et
benefacere and let the sparrows sing.”
He told a barefooted boy, “Come to Turin and I will get you to mend your shoes.”
He did not disappoint even on his deathbed: “Viglietti, give me some iced coffeee,
but make it very hot.”
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The expansive and deep joy that filtered from Don Bosco was, as E. Viganò wrote
acutely, many things at once:
This was Don Bosco’s joie de vivre in daily evidence; it was his
acceptance of events as the hard and practical road leading to
hope; it was his intuitive understanding of people, their talents
and their limitations, with a view to forming a family; it was his
acute and practical sense of goodness with its conviction that in
man’s past and present history good prevails over evil; it was his
predilection for the young that opened his heart and imagination
to the future, and engendered a creative adaptability capable of
facing up to the values of the new generations with equilibrium;
it was the affection of a friend who could make himself loved,
and build up an educative confidence and dialogue that led to
Christ; it was his bed of roses that he trod with a smile and a
song - though well shod with boots as some protection against
the innumerable thorns.
Youth feels the yearning for happiness with greater freshness. Don Bosco had
understood this, ever since, as a juggler and improvised acrobat, he knew how to
keep his young friends happy in order to make them feel better.
As a student in Chieri he founded the “Society for a Good Time”. Its aim: to keep
sadness away and always be cheerful, and “exactness in the performance of
scholastic and religious duties”. Every Oratory or institute of his would become a
“Society for a Good Time” and at every gathering he himself would take the lead
in being cheerful. He would greet his friends with a “be cheerful!” which made
them jump with delight.
“Not a day passed, one can say,” writes G.B. Lemoyne, “without his witty ways
or amusing stories arousing amusement, either in public gatherings or in his talks
to his pupils or in the groups that his Salesians and young people formed around
him, in his travels, in citizens' homes or buildings, in short, wherever he appeared.”
Although we can be sure that his life was a silent martyrdom, he always put on a
happy face. The more he suffered, the happier he looked.
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The elventh commandment
Cheerfulness is “the eleventh commandment of Salesian houses” (A. Caviglia).
It is one of the great secrets of the preventive system. Just like St Philip Neri,
Don Bosco never tired of telling his boys, ²Always be cheerful”; “serve the Lord in
gladness”; “Live as happily as you can so long as you do not sin.”
Guided by experience and sure pedagogical intuition, he knew that to grow well,
in spirit as well as in body, young people need joy just like they needed bread.
Fr Braido writes that “Don Bosco, who was much more understanding and intuitive
than many parents, knew and understood that a boy was a boy and allowed
him, indeed wanted him to be such. He knew that a boy’s way of life is about
joy, freedom, games, the ‘Society for a Good Time’. He knew that for normal
and profound educational impact the boy must be respected and loved in his
naturalness, and that does not permit oppression, coercion, violence.”
Paul VI, in his exhortation to joy, says that Christian joy presupposes a person
capable of natural joy: “There is also needed a patient effort to teach people, or
teach them once more, how to savor in a simple way the many human joys that
the Creator places in our path: the elating joy of existence and of life… the joy and
satisfaction of duty performed; the transparent joy of purity, service and sharing;
the demanding joy of sacrifice. The Christian will be able to purify, complete and
sublimate these joys; he will not be able to disdain them.”
Don Bosco can be found in these statements. He always did his utmost to ensure
that young people did not lack the ringing joy of noisy recreations, sport, outings,
music, singing, theatre, gymnastics. As long as his strength allowed him, when he
was at home he was himself the soul of entertainment. The last running challenge
he took part in was in 1868; he was fifty-three years old, his legs were already
swollen but still impressively fast.
On Carnival day, people went mad with joy at the Oratory. Fr Ruffìno’s chronicle
describes how the fday went: Holy Mass in the early morning, then breakfast
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followed by an hour and a half of games; special lunch with wine and fruit; in
the afternoon recreation with the classic rottura delle pignate (breaking open a
container filled with sweets, chocolates etc.), class by class. Vespers followed,
cheered up by the hilarious dialogue between Dr Borelli and Fr Cagliero, and
Benediction. Theatre and special dinner closed the day. After evening prayers
and Don Bosco’s fatherly word, dead tired, but with their souls filled with joy, the
youngsters went to rest.
Unlike Canon Allamano, who did not allow any levity during Carnival, Don Bosco
liked to teach by deed that one could have fun in a cheerful way without offending
the Lord.
By indulging the young in the things they liked, Don Bosco succeeded in making
them love those things which they were not naturally inclined to, such as study,
work, fulfilment of duty, piety. He was convinced that a human being’s destiny is
played out in youth and said, in The Companion of Youth, “A young man according
to his way—even when he is old, he will not depart from it; in other words, if we lead
a good life when we are young, we shall be good when we are old.” “Remember
that you are in the springtime of life at your age. Anyone not accustomed to
working at a young age will become lazy and ignorant in old
age.”
He wanted them to be hard-working, quick off the mark, active, always busy. He
didn’t leave lazy ones in peace. He was able to educate the young to savour the
satisfaction and joy felt when duty was well done, and to see the truth of the three
words he often gave them: cheerfullness, study/work, piety. Three great values
inseparably linked in his pedagogy. He did not believe in piety that did not lead
to commitment, nor in commitment divorced from piety. He placed the source of
happiness in this synthesis: '“Piety, study and cheerfulness will give you many
satisfactions as sweet as honey.”
“If you want to be good,” we read in the Life of Francis Besucco, “practise just
three things and all will go well… They are: cheerfulness, study and piety. This
is the great programme, and by practising it you can live happily and do much
good to your soul.”
Francesco Orestano truthfully wrote: “If St Francis sanctified nature and poverty,
St John Bosco sanctified work and joy. He is the saint of Christian euphoria, of
hardworking and happy Christian life.”
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Cheerfulness: a way of holiness
He wanted Christian euphoria to bear the same imprint of practices of prayer,
relationship with God. He therefore banished the monotonous and repetitive
drudgery that generates tedium and rejection in young people. Even the time
spent in church had to resolve itself into “an hour of joy”, of “celebration”. “Easy
things,” he wrote, “that do not frighten, do not tire – no lengthy prayers.” He wanted
the practices of piety “ to be like air, which does not oppress, never tires, although
we carry a very heavy amount of it on our shoulders.”
The school year was studded with liturgical feasts, devotional exercises, triduums,
novenas, but one did not feel the burden. Don Bosco knew how to prepare
young people for the “feast”; he knew how to have them experience it as a
joyful sacramental encounter with Christ. He knew how to havae them savour it
as a prelude to eternal happiness through the magic of song, the splendour of
ceremonies and rites. The celebrations that took place at Valdocco became, over
time, a true centre of attraction for the faithful of the city of Turin.
From the church, joy overflowed into life, into carefree recreation, and the
merriment of an abundant meal. Don Bosco, who never admitted dichotomies
between soul and body, wanted “the body to be cheerful too”; melancholy was
to be banished. “The clashing of bowls and glasses” was to form “a beautiful
harmony”. All the positive elements not destroyed by sin were, as can be seen,
optimistically taken up in his educational method.
Cheerfulness: a way of holiness
When Don Bosco wrote that “Only religion and grace can make a man happy”, or,
as we already read in the first edition of The Companion of Youth, “those who live
in God’s grace are always cheerful and have a contented heart even in affliction”,
while “those who give themselves over to pleasures, experience anger… are more
and more unhappy”, he wanted to get the youngsters to understand that their
earthly and eternal happiness depend on their relationship with God.
So there is but one way to achieve happiness and joy: the way that passes through
the religion of love and salvation; through friendship and intimacy with Christ and
his Spirit.
Don Bosco’s pedagogy would therefore be “radically and essentially a spiritual
pedagogy of souls” (A. Caviglia); a pedagogy, that is, of the life of grace, of growth
and maturity in Christ or put brifefly, a “pedagogy of holiness and joy”, since joy
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Cheerfulness: a way of holiness
is the constitutive element of holiness. The Turin school believed in the universal
vocation to holiness. St Joseph Cafasso spoke of his “hanged saints”; St Leonard
Murialdo also urged the wayward girls at the “Good Shepherd Retreat” to holiness;
Don Bosco proposed it as the highest of goals to his “urchins” and “rabble”, as well
as to his better boys. A “youth-friendly” but demanding and also heroic holiness.
When Roman processes considered the cause of beatification and canonisation
of young people impracticable, on the assumption that only an adult could practise
virtue to a heroic degree, the saint stated, alluding to Dominic Savio: “I can assure
you we will have boys from the house elevated to the honours of the altars.” The
Church has proved him right.
It is certainly of no small worth that he believed in youthful holiness, but it is more
worthy still that he presented it to young people from the encouraging perspective
of cheerfulness, not an obstacle but a way to holiness.
“I am happy that you have fun, that you play, that you are cheerful. This is a way to
becomne saints like St Aloysius, so long as you see that you do not commit sin.”
After the famous sermon on holiness (1855), of which we only know the trenchant
words: “It is God’s will that we all become saints; it is so easy to become saints; a
great reward is prepared in heaven for those who become saints”, Dominic Savio
presented himself to Don Bosco and told him: “I didn’t think I could become a saint
so easily, but now that I realise that this can be done even while being cheerful,
I absolutely want and need to become a saint.”
Carried away by his adolescent fantasy, he would have liked to imitate the great
ascetics, with strict fasts and devoting himself to long prayers. The teacher
praised his intention to become a saint, but restrained his excessive idealism,
realistically tracing out for him a programme of holiness suited to his age
and circumstance: “First” he suggested “constant and moderate cheerfulness”
then the exact fulfilment “of his duties of piety and study”, “recreation with his
companions”, “striving to gain souls for God, because there is no holier thing in
the world”.
This is the advice he developed in his biographical notes on Savio, Magone and
Besucco, a clear effort to show how the lives of these main characters were,
from beginning to end, a gradual and progressive journey towards the fullness
of holiness.
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Cheerfulness: a way of holiness
Everything, once again, can be summed up in those three insistent words:
cheerfulness, study/work, piety. That “here we make holiness consist in always
being cheerful” which Dominic Savio told his friend Camillo Gavio, is a profound
conviction, a touch of the Spirit: “a divine treasure, therefore, clothed in simplicity
and joy as if to conceal the wonder” (E. Viganò).
This is because the holiness that Don Bosco proposed has nothing complicated,
arcane, or extraordinary about it. It was the holiness of the everyday, of customary
gestures lived uncommonly, as did Dominic Savio, whose holiness the saint
praises “his exemplary life and steady progress in virtue which could hardly have
been surpassed”.
The proposal of holiness contained in those three words we have mentioned does
not exclude but clearly implies the other Christian virtues that the holy educator
always inculcated. The importance that obedience and purity have in the young
person’s life leads him to emphasise them more strongly. “The foundation of every
virtue in a young person is obedience.” Addressing his pupils familiarly, he asked
them to let their heads be cut off, to let themselves be guided almost blindly, to
give the key to their hearts to those who knew and loved them.
When he spoke about purity he became the poet and enchanted the boys. What
Scripture says about Wisdom he happily applied to purity: Et venerunt omnia bona
pariter cum illa. All good things come from the virtue of purity.
When we speak of the great holiness that flourished at Valdocco as the most
beautiful fruit of the preventive system, we immediately think of the action of the
Holy Spirit, the author of holiness. However, we cannot forget that the Spirit made
use of the delicate and discreet action of his faithful servant Don Bosco, of his
extraordinary ability as spiritual director of young souls. One of the greatest of
all time.
The criteria and guidelines that inspired him in his mission as spiritual guide and
accompanier we are told by A. Caviglia, in a delightful synthesis that is worth
recording: “Freedom of spirit and movement, respect for the freedom of grace,
sanctifying practice of duty, attention to God, orientation towards Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament and Mary, mortification of life: at the head of it all, trust in God,
serenity, joy, cheerfulness, without fearful terrors and grumpiness, but with a view
to Paradise: everything with love and for love, inside and outside.” It is not all of
Don Bosco, but Don Bosco it certainly is.
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Cheerfulness: a way of holiness
Let us add, finally, that the proposal of holiness made by Don Bosco was
never separated from the idea of the “reward”, heaven. “A great reward is
prepared in heaven for the one who becomes a saint.”. On the firmament of
Valdocco “Paradise always appeared, by day and by night, with clouds or without
clouds” (E. Viganò). The saint often spoke about heaven: “A piee of Paradise
agguts everything”; “In hardship and suffering, never forget that we have a grand
prize prepared in heaven”; “Bread, work and Paradise”. For three consecutive
nights, on 3-4-5 April 1861, he dreamed he was on an outing with his boys in
Paradise. What he liked to stress in the Lives he wrote of his boys, as they lay
dying, was the expectation of Paradise they felt, more than the horror of death.
The thought of Paradise is one of the fruits of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and
Don Bosco was a “soul of the Holy Spirit”. He walked on this earth but his heart
and mind were turned to heaven.
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Chapter 8 A SAINT WITH SOME
BLEMISHES?
The rigour of the Beatification and Canonisation processes is such that it would
be enough for any deliberate error commited during life to compromise the cause
for any candidate to the glory of the altars.
Yet the Church does not demand absolute perfection of Saints or Blesseds,
something that clearly belongs to God alone. Perfection on this earth, even of the
most elevated kind, always carries with it “something incomplete, lacking, even
precarious; something yet unfinished” according to J. De Guibert.
There are some practical consequences that must be borne in mind, as a result,
for the imitation of the saints. De Guibert goes on to say that when the Church
proposes the lives of the saints and blesseds as an example
to be imitated, it in no way intends to sanction the perfection
of every act of theirs, and even less so their imitability, their
formative value. Only the totality of their lives is proposed as
a model, together with one or other aspect emphasised by the
pontifical decrees, one or other virtue particularly highlighted in
them. These saints, we know, have had slight weaknesses from
which no one is exempt. Even after giving themselves to God,
they did not suddenly reach the summit. In many of them we
notice “holy foibles” that are admirable when judged according to
the spirit that determined them, but hardly imitable without a very
extraordinary inspiration of grace.
Some slight imperfections
These considerations should be kept in mind when speaking about Don Bosco
offered as a life model. A few small imperfections in a picture of pristine beauty,
when immediately redeemed by acts of intense charity, do not hurt. St Jerome
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Some slight imperfections
crticised St Paula’s obstinate attachment to penance; St Bernard was judged to
be excessively rigorous with his monks; St Vincent de Paul found traces of fault
in de Chantal. It is no wonder that slight blemishes of unwonted fragility are also
found in Don Bosco’s life.
The future Cardinal Salotti, the Promoter of the Faith in Don Bosco’s Cause,
wrote that “Though we find some blemishes in such an extraordinary man, which
of course makes them stand out, that does not obscure the splendid light that
emanates from his many virtues or from his holy actions.”
Bishop Bertagna, authoritative supporter of Don Bosco’s holiness, testified in turn:
“If I look at some parts of his life, at the tenacity with which he sometimes tried to
succeed, I think I see some humanity in him. Thus, at first glance he sometimes
seemed rather importunate in asking for donations, a bit over zealous, and more
than agreeable to receiving them, even to the point of being too ready to promise
rewards from the Lord to those who gave them. He could leave people afraid
that nothing would go well for them if donations were denied him. Likewise, he
sometimes seemed too reluctant to abandon his own opinions.” But the witness
did recognise that the saint’s intentions were upright and the means he used
to achieve his goals were impeachably correct. In fact he had a very delicate
conscience.
One February evening in 1879, while reminiscing with a few confreres at Alassio
about his many vicissitudes, he made them realize how much he had suffered
then because of obstructed audiences, intercepted letters,
secret and open opposition on several sides, harsh and humiliating words…. But,
suddenly, Don Bosco stopped
talking, remained pensive a moment, and then said in front of them all: ‘Ihave
talked too much.’ That same evening he made his confession to Father Rocca.
At the origin of the long and painful conflict that pitted two great men and formerly
close friends, Archbishop Gastaldi and Don Bosco, against each other for a
decade, were errors of calculation on Don Bosco’s part and over-confidence in
human ability. By intervening with Pius IX so that then Bishop Gastaldi would be
transferred from the diocese of Saluzzo to the Archdiocese of Turin, he hoped
to be able to count on his help. Instead, it was the beginning of a painful Way of
the Cross: he humbly recognised that “trusting too much in a man” like that “did
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Some slight imperfections
not please the Lord.” He bore the consequences with strength of soul and heroic
obedience, but nature claimed its rights.
Fr Rua attested to having seen him “weep for the pain he felt at being in conflict
with his superior,” and of having heard him exclaim: “There would be so much
good we could do and I am so disturbed that I cannot do it.” Weeping and bitter
words whispered more to himself than to his Archbishop, whom he respected and
loved, were the result, at times, of extreme anguish. “A resounding slap in the
face could not have mortified me more”; “By dint of accumulated distaste… the
poor stomach breaks down.”
One could say that he had spoken in too human a way, but Don Bosco never
succumbed to the impulse of resentment or rebellion; these outbursts only took
place in a very close circle of intimates. He suffered, he kept silent, he continued
to do good.
To those who one day reproached him for not having used the same weapons as
his adversary, he calmly replied: “It is the Lord who has guided everything.”
The Argentine Consul in Savona, Comm. Gazzolo, claimed that he was a
benefactor of the Salesians. But in fact he only sought his own interests. “Comm.
Gazzolo,” Don Bosco wrote to Fr Cagliero in America, “after a week of calculations
and chatter has reduced his request to 60,000 lire for his 700 metres of land… As
you can see, he paid 19 and he gives it to us at 60,000 lire to make a profit. Ah!
Rogna, rogna!” A subtly ironic but strong Piedmontese expression on the saint’s
lips.
Apart from the theoretical errors common to every age, no one is exempt from
unforeseen, unintended, inculpable practical errors. They are part of the human
condition and Don Bosco was not exempt.
The accounts did not always add up: it happened that the trust placed in some
of his collaborators was betrayed, or that works begun with so much hope had
to be abandoned. It also happened that certain projects “after long, complicated
and tedious paperwork to the point of losing my mind” fell apart. For example,
his patient effort to put order into the Institute of the "Hospitaller Brothers of
Mary Immaculate", known as the Concettini, who were going through a period of
great difficulty, went awry. Don Bosco had gladly accepted the difficult assignment
because it was a wish of the Pontiff and, perhaps, also because he thought of
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Some slight imperfections
incorporating the Institute into his work in some way. But the undertaking failed.
And then there were those who put him in a bad light with the Pope as we can
see from this letter from Cardinal Bilio, his sincere admirer.
Dear and Very Rev. Don Bosco… I am sorry to have to tell
you that the Holy Father does not seem as well disposed as
last year. Unless I am mistaken there are two main reaosns
for this: 1. The Concettini affair; 2. That you are taking on too
many things at once. I have endeavoured to remove any less
favourable impression of you from the Pope’s mind. I do not know
if I succeeded.”
The saint was certainly the victim of insinuation and slander; but it must also be
said that the choice of Fr Giuseppe Schiappini as his representative had not been
the most judicious.
As we have said, Don Bosco was certainly a great charismatic: he read hearts,
he made prophecies, but he could also be wrong. One day one of his young men
reminded him of a prediction that did not come true. The saint became serious;
then joking and smiling he said: “And even if it didn’t come true, what does it
matter?” and diverted the conversation elsewhere.
The Bulls of Beatification and Canonisation recognised his extraordinary charism
of healing. But it did not always happen. Fr Rua was able to assert that Don Bosco
“gladly recounted certain events where the result contrary to the wishes of those
who implored his blessing was obtained.”
Fr Guanella, future founder of the Servants of Charity and the Daughters of Our
Lady of Providence, now Saint, became a Salesian after he was ordained a priest.
But God directed him back to the diocese. Don Bosco did everything to retain him.
He wrote to him saying “Anyone who is bound by religious vows must relinquish
all counsellors and all endeavours which are alien to the substance of his vows
and have not been approved by his superior, if he is to take his vocation seriously.”
This letter and others of the same tone were “a serious thorn” in Fr Guanella’s
delicate soul, but he decided, nonetheless, to leave Don Bosco. Two saints
compared: the Spirit who guides them gives one enlightened understanding that
he does not give the other. History is full of similar examples.
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Propagandist hyperbole
Propagandist hyperbole
We will note once more that not even the saints were exempt from certain
harmless anomalies, little quirks, holy cunning that make holiness more human
and closer to our nature.
St Francis of Assisi sometimes accompanied himself in his singing by tapping a
piece of wood like children do; St Catherine of Siena kissed children in the streets
and sent bouquets of flowers made with her own hands to friends; St Philip Neri
had an old pet cat with red hair and a dog called “Capriccio”, and expressed his
joy in leaps and bounds (literally!). Don Bosco’s life also offers aspects that do
not easily fit into our current ways of thinking.
As practical and realistic as he was, when speaking of his projects and works Don
Bosco would indulge in exaggeration to impress his hearers and win them over
more easily to his cause: “All of Italy and political and religious Europe are talking
about our plans for Patagonia.”
When he described his abilities as a conjurer in his Memoirs, he must have even
smiled to himself when he made the following statement, for example: “People
sat wide-eyed at the sight of an endless stream of balls coming out of a little box
too small to even hold one, or eggs tumbling out of a little bag. But when they
saw me producing balls from bystanders' noses… they began to whisper that I
was a sorcerer.”
This modern saint instinctively understood the importance that propaganda was
assuming in the new society and used it in a big way through newspapers, books,
pamphlets and conferences. “It is the only means,” he said, “to make good works
known and to support them: today’s world has become material, so it is necessary
to work and make known the good that one does.” He also adopted the language
and approach of propaganda, without compromising his conscience.
Ever engulfed in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, when addressing his
benefactors or public opinion, he considered the use of hyperbolic language not
only to be permissible but proper. “Hyperbole,” he said, “is a rhetorical figure, and
this means we are not forbidden to make use of it.”
His prophetic dreams and “his big picture way of acting that quickly led him
to grandiose plans of worldwide dimensions that were no sooner conceived
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Propagandist hyperbole
than they were unhesitatingly implemented” (F. Orestano) probably led him to
exaggerate.
Don Bosco also had a strong tendency to inflate numbers of his works and of
his young people. “It’s amazing!” he told Fr Barberis alluding to the “twenty”
foundations in 1878 alone. In reality, the twenty foundations were the houses
that the official catalogue listed for 1878, three more than the previous year. In
his report to the Holy See in 1880, he was keen to assure Leo XIII that his five
thousand young people were praying for him; a few years later the figure rose to
two hundred and fifty thousand, to three hundred thousand…
Fr Ceria comments that “Don Bosco was not subtle in his calculations, indulging
in modern forms of publicity commonly in vogue that proclaim even three times
as much so that half as much is understood.” Fr Stella is more subtle: "His
propagandist hyperbole is explained by the atmosphere of enthusiasm, wit,
facetiousness and cunning involving the familiar and the popular that prevailed at
Valdocco and in the various cicles within which Don Bosco moved.”
But this was still Don Bosco.
Yet we can never forget that he always remained someone immensely greater
than we are; a masterpiece of the Holy Spirit who translated the Gospel into action.
His life was governed by laws superior to our common experience; a saint who
had the glory of God and the salvation of souls as his sole aim in everything he
said or did.
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PART TWO ESSENTIAL
DIMENSIONS
NB. There are certainly many of the most defining aspects (or essential
dimensions) of Don Bosco’s holiness, so rich and complex was his personality.
We have chosen to examine just a few of them.
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Chapter 1 THE MYSTICISM OF THE
“DA MIHI ANIMAS”
The words that the king of Sodom addressed to Abraham, Da mihi animas, cetera
tolle, give me the people and take away the rest, sounded as follows in the
interpretation that Don Bosco gave it as taken from long tradition: “O Lord, give
me souls and take away the rest”.
In this version “the key term is the word animas, i.e. the term which for centuries
in Christian language designated the spiritual element of man, placed in time
but immortal, between salvation and eternal ruin, sin and grace, Jerusalem and
Babylon, God and Satan” (P. Stella).
“If you save your soul,” Don Bosco wrote, “all is well and you will have eternal
joy; but if you fail, you will lose your soul and body, God and Paradise; you will
be damned forever.”
Today we have a more all-encompassing view of human destiny and ultimate
realities. However, Don Bosco, in the language of his time, indicated the right
direction to look. He insisted that the human being is not made for the earth, but
is a witness to the yearning and hope for the future that awaits us. We can listen
to him with confidence. It is true when they say that his deepest aspiration, his
most ardent prayer was for “souls to be saved” and secured for the Kingdom.
Always and completely the priest
Da mihi animas was his motto, his obsession, his form of mysticism.
It was a mysticism focused on God and Christ, but also the direct consequence
of his being a priest, called essentially to collaborate with Christ in the ministry
of Redemption. It is not possible to think of Don Bosco as anything other than
a priest.
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Always and completely the priest
For what was his youth if not a conscious, deliberate, assiduous preparation for
the priesthood? “Te be a priest soon,” he said to himself, “to be among young
people, to help them.” And what was his life if not the fulfilment of this vow made
in his youth?
He wanted to be the most perfect image possible of Christ the priest, the one
and only Mediator between God and man, the most transparent sacramental
mediation. Awareness of his unfailing priestly responsibility was never missing:
always the priest, completely the priest and nothing but the priest.
“A priest,” he said “is always a priest and this must be seen in his every word”;
“Let whoever becomes a priest be a holy priest.”
The word prete, ‘priest’ – an uncomfortable term at the time when good mothers
in Turin taught their children not to say prete, a term of disrepute, but sacerdote
– occurs seven times in the brief period that opens the historic conversation with
Minister Bettino Ricasoli in Florence in December 1866: “Your Excellency, I want
you to know that Don Bosco is a priest at the altar, a priest in the confessional, a
priest among his boys, a priest in Turin, and a priest in Florence. He is a priest in
the house of the poor and a priest in the palace of the king!”
When the idea of the secluded priest closed within his world and his church still
prevailed, Don Bosco revealed himself to be a forerunner, showing himself by his
deeds to be a priest wholly dedicated to the mission, open to the historic breath
of the Spirit, focused on the social sphere and his neighbour, open to the service
of all, but especially of the young and the least. There was no opposition for him
between spiritual life and pastoral life.
The profound conviction that the priest is not sanctified and not saved except in
the exercise of his ministry and his specific mission, transpires in some of his
stronger and more evocative statements: “The priest’s reward is souls and nothing
more”; “The priest does not go to hell or heaven alone but always accompanied
by souls lost or saved by him.”
“Every word of the priest must be the salt of eternal life everywhere and with
everyone. Whoever approaches a priest must always draw some truth from him
that benefits their soul.” “The priest must have no other interests than those of
Jesus Christ.”
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Always and completely the priest
The “interests of Jesus Christ,” Revealer and Adorer of the Father, Redeemer of
humanity, are, in sum, the “glory of God,” “the salvation of mankind”. And these
were precisely the supreme interests that Don Bosco pursued throughout his life.
Saving and sanctifying souls was the overpowering yearning of his heart.
John Paul II reminded the members of the 22nd General Chapter on April 1984:
“It is important to emphasise and always bear in mind that Don Bosco’s pedagogy
had an extremely ‘eschatological’ value and perspective: it is essential – as Jesus
repeatedly says in the Gospel – to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Entering the Kingdom means entering into final salvation. “Saving souls” and
cooperating in the “salvation of souls” were terms that Don Bosco constantly
repeated to the youngsters, Salesians, people from the humblest as well as the
highest classes. “I recommend the salvation of souls to you.”
In a set of draft regulations back in 1854 that were never printed, he quotes those
notable words from John’s Gospel, Ut filios Dei qui erant dispersi congregaret in
unum commenting that “It seems to me that the words of the Holy Gospel, which
tell us that our divine Saviour come down from heaven to earth to gather together
all the children of God scattered all over the world, could be applied literally to the
young people of our times.”
The image of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who had come to gather and save the
scattered children of God, spurred Don Bosco to do all he could for the youth of
his time, especially the poorest, most wayward, most exposed to the danger of
being lost.
The thought of the salvation of souls – all of them, but especially those entrusted
to him by God – was truly at the heart of Don Bosco’s heart; it was “the essential
and irresistible core, the deepest root of his interior activity, of his dialogue with
God, of his work on himself, and of his labours as an apostle who knew he was
called and born for the salvation of poor and abandoned youth” (P. Stella). The
motto Dominic Savio read in his office: “Da mihi animas, coetera tolle: "O Lord,
give me souls and take away the rest”, was the strong emphasis of the resolutions
he made during his retreat in preparation for his priestly ordination: “Suffer, act
and accept humiliations in everything and always if it is a case of saving souls.”
Truly his heart “always beat with the impulse of the ‘Da mihi animas’” (E. Viganò).
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The unifying ideal
The unifying ideal
This was the unifying ideal of his entire life: he lived only by it and for it, as
evidenced by his labours as a teacher, pastor, catechist, writer and founder, and as
evidenced by his most convinced and recurring statements: “Our young people”
he said, “come to the Oratory: their relatives and benefactors entrust them to us
with the intention that they be educated… but the Lord sends them to us so that
we may take an interest in their souls and so they may find here the way to eternal
salvation. Therefore everything else must be regarded by us as a means and our
supreme end is to make them good, to save them eternally.”
“All skills are important, but the skill of all skills, the only work that counts, is the
salvation of the soul”; “Every expense, every effort, every trouble, every sacrifice
is little when it contributes to gaining souls for God.”
He prayed: “O Lord, give us crosses, thorns, persecutions of all kinds so that we
may save souls and our own among others.”
“My affection [for you],” he explained to the trade students at Valdocco, “is founded
on the desire I have to save your souls, which were all redeemed by the precious
blood of Jesus Christ, and you love me because I seek to to lead you along the
path of eternal salvation.”
Even on his deathbed, assailed by nightmares, he suddenly shook himself up
and clapped his hands together, shouting, “Run, run quick to save those boys! …
Mary Most Holy, help them! … Oh! Mother, Mother!” He went so far as to say:
“If I were as solicitous for the good of my own soul as for the good of another’s
soul, I would be sure to save it.”
Just as the artist feels the torment of not being able to express in human terms
the dazzling intuition he carries within, so Don Bosco regretted not being able to
express to others his thoughts about the salvation of the soul just as he felt it:
“Oh! if I could tell you how I feel about it! But I lack the words, so important and
sublime is the matter.”
His efforts, his institutions, the founding of the Salesian Society, the Institute of
the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Cooperators, were all in view of
this supreme aim. “The sole aim of the Oratory is to save souls”. “The purpose of
this Society, in so far as it concerns its members, is to offer them an opportunity
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The unifying ideal
to unite in spirit in order to work for the greater glory of God and the salvation of
souls. We find inspiration in the words of St. Augustine: Divinorum divinissimum
est in lucrum animarum operari.” He then added, “This is the noblest aim one can
imagine”; this must be “what every Salesian continuously breathes”.
With absolute truth Fr Rua was able to state during the process that “He took no
step, he said no word, he took up no task that was not directed to the saving of the
young. He let others accumulate wealth, seek pleasures, go after honours; truly,
the only concern of his heart was for souls: he said, in deed not just in words, Da
mihi animas, coetera tolle.”
Fr Albera, who had a long association with Don Bosco, also attested that “The
animating concept of his entire life was to work for souls to the point of total self-
immolation… Saving souls… was the only reason for his existence.”
In the solemn audience granted on 3 April 1934 in St Peter’s Basilica to the whole
Salesian Family, in which he wished to emphasise the connection between the
auspicious event of canonisation and the values of the Holy Year of Redemption,
Pius XI spoke these very true words:
Don Bosco is telling us today: “Live the Christian life as I have
practised and taught you.” Yet We
believe that for you, his own sons, Don Bosco has something
more to add… He is teaching you a secret of primary importance
[which is] love for Jesus Christ, for Jesus Christ the Redeemer!
We might say that such a love was one of the thoughts, one of the
feelings, which dominated Don Bosco’s whole life. He revealed
it to us in his watchword: Da mihi animas. This is a love which
is continuously, uninterruptedly concerned with what souls are,
not as seen in themselves only, but as seen in the thought, in
the work, in the Blood and Death of our Redeemer. And the
love of the Redeemer becomes love of Redeemed souls, which
according to his way of thinking and evaluating, appears not to
have been bought at too high a price, if they are bought with His
Blood…
The great religious Orders and Institutes have condensed aspects of the spiritual
life which are paradigmatic for their charism into very concise phrases: think
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The unifying ideal
of the Ora et labora (“Pray and work”) of the Benedictines; the Contemplari
et contemplata aliis tradere (“Contemplate and transmit to others the things
contemplated”) of the Dominicans; the Ad majorem Dei gloriam et ad salutem
animarum of the Society of Jesus (“To the greater glory of God and the salvation
of souls”).
Fr Vigano wrote that “My conviction is that there is no other summary expression
that better describes the Salesian spirit than this choice of Don Bosco himself: Da
mihi animas, coetera tolle.” It indicates an ardent union with God that enables us to
penetrate the mystery of his Trinitarian life manifested historically in the missions
of the Son and the Spirit as infinite Love ad hominum salutem intentus.
But what we take from this motto and from the energy of pastoral charity embodied
in the gift of predilection for the young and characterised by “kindness” does not
fully reproduce the authentic aspect of Don Bosco’s holiness.
All this attention and predilection for souls to be saved should not lead us to think
that the soul was all that the human being was for Don Bosco or that it was the
soul disconnected from the body. No. “Man is endowed with a body and a soul”
and if the soul, free and immortal, is the “divine breath” that reflects the “image
and likeness” of God, the body too is a “gift”. In Don Bosco’s Month of May we
read that “God created the body with the beautiful qualities that we admire in it.”
Don Bosco always extolled the values of the body and our creatureliness, even
though he warned against the danger that the body, through the failures of sin,
can pose to the soul. In The Companion of Youth he warns: “If anyone tells you
that it is of no use to chastise your body, tell him that he who does not suffer with
Jesus Christ upon earth will not rejoice with Jesus Christ in heaven.” But when
he speaks of the salvation of souls he always has in mind, beyond the dualistic
conception he shares with the spirituality of the time, the concrete young person.
Salvation of the whole young person, of every young person, and, through them,
salvation of the whole of society.
“Realistic as he is, Don Bosco takes the young person in all his concreteness as
an individual destined for heaven, but who has a mission to fulfil on earth: as a
citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, a member of the pilgrim People of God moving
towards the homeland, and as a citizen of the earthly city, with all his needs of
growth, physical, affective and cultural development and gradual involvement in
society.” (C. Colli).
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The unifying ideal
Don Bosco’s efforts as priest, educator and pastor were all realistically aimed at
three practical objectives.
First: satisfying the material and basic needs of the poorest and most marginalised
young people, offering them “shelter, food and clothing”, making them “capable
of earning an honest living” by means of a trade, a profession. As he wrote to
Count Solaro della Margherita, “If I deny a morsel of bread to these at risk and
risky young people, I expose them to grave risk of soul and body.”
Second: helping them, through patient educational activity, to become
themselves, to mature and grow into men on a human and social level and to
making “upright citizens” of them. Every self-respecting educator true to their
cause “must be ready” he said, “to face every trouble, every effort to achieve their
goal, which is the civil, moral, systematic education of their pupils in knowledge.”
Third: Christian education. That is, to initiate young people into a convinced and
robust practice of the Faith. “Without religion,” he said, “it is impossible to educate
the young.” Education in the life of grace, to friendship with Christ, was pushed
to the heights of true holiness.
Don Bosco, we have already recalled, has the great merit of having “inserted
holiness into the world of education” in the sense that he made “Christian
pedagogy mature to the point of becoming a source of youthful holiness" (E.
Viganò). For the first time in the history of the Church and as a fruit of the
pedagogical method, a young man, Dominic Savio, was canonised as a confessor.
Let us add, as Fr Braido rightly points out, that these three objectives which
were all a real and simultaneous part of Don Bosco’s educational activity, were
“a single supreme, religious and moral, supernatural end which included earthly
individual and social influences.” It was nothing but that. The mysticism of the
Da mihi animas thus indissolubly links human and superantural advancement,
with a particular insistence on the religious aspect. This intrinsic link is reaffirmed
today by the Council: “the Church must be concerned with the whole of man’s
life, even the secular part of it insofar as it has a bearing on his heavenly
calling” (Gravissimum Educationis, with reference to Gaudium et Spes).
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Chapter 2 HIS COLOSSAL
WORKLOAD
The importance that the subject of work has assumed in our time is demonstrated
by the impressive literature that has dissected all its aspects and values. Even if
disfigured by certain ideologies, work is indeed a central value in today’s society
and culture. It brings out one aspect of man’s mission in the world: that of
mastering nature in order to humanise it and put it at the service of the human
person.
In recent years, there has been talk of a “theology of work”. Theological reflection
has focused on two main elements of the mystery of salvation: creation and
redemption. God the Father who creates the world; God the Father who sends
Jesus Christ to save it.
In his Encyclical Laborem Exercens, the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II traced
the outlines of a spirituality of work that exalts its value, but demythologises any
idolatry in this regard. Work, in fact, is not an end in itself, it is not an absolute.
Instead, "it is an important way of expressing the human being as ‘co-creator‘, ‘co-
redeemer’ on earth and in time. For us, it becomes a witness to the spiritual triad
of faith, hope, charity. In this sense, it is not so much the quality of the work that
makes the person great, but the motivations and the heart with which it is done,
that is, the measure of the love of charity that permeates it” (E. Viganò).
Don Bosco made work his banner, he sanctified himself by working and working
hard. Let us see him in action.
Relentless activty
Italian academic Francesco Orestano, writing about Don Bosco, continues in the
following terms after emphasising his moral greatness and strength of will:
However important the characteristics of the man and his
work may be, the originality of Don Bosco does not lie there.
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Relentless activty
Educational and social needs, profoundly grasped in perfect
relation to the new times, led him to discover the great law of
educating through work and to work. With regard to work as an
educative tool, Don Bosco felt the extraordinary edifying power
of the human personality in all senses and moments. Work,
an eminent way of ennobling the spirit: “I do not recommend
penances and discipline but work, work.”
And even on his deathbed, he recommended it to all Salesians.
He wanted them to be like a social militia not committed to
ascetic practices, but fully imbued with the needs of modern life.
He did not value work just as an educational tool, but as the
content of life. He fully appreciated the dignity of work even in
its most modest manual applications, all of which he sought to
learn and practise in an exemplary manner and thus ennoble
work. He never considered work to be a way of becoming rich.
On the contrary, and like his saintly mother, he though of that as
a misfortune. Work for him was fullnes, health and a holy life.
The quotation is pertinent because it captures, with penetrating clarity, perhaps
the most original aspect of his pedagogy and holiness, which is that of the
elevation of the human being and Christian through work and with work. On
one condition, however, that the word “work” be understood with the range of
meaning it had for Don Bosco for whom it was, at different times, synonymous with
all kinds of activity: craft, technical and professional; intellectual, school, study,
culture; apostolic, catechesis, evangelisation, pastoral zeal; priestly, liturgical
action, sacraments; charitable work in its various forms; duty of one’s state in life.
“By work is meant the fulfilment of the duties of one’s state.”
Hence it becomes the context that will give us the meaning intended by Don Bosco
when he speaks of work.
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The “mystical ladder” of work
Don Bosco understood how great hard work was as a sanctifying virtue and for
its apostolic, charitable and humanising value, and he did not hesitate to use it as
his “mystical ladder” for reaching God.
He did not separate work from prayer: “If there has been a saint in modern times
who has so marvellously united and embodied in himself the two elements of the
Benedictine tradition ‘praying and working’, it was precisely Don Bosco” (Cardinal
C. Salotti). But it was not prayer or his habit which distinguished him. “What the
world saw was his intense and disinterested work. Don Bosco was an extremely
concrete saint: to put it crudely but truly, he did not believe in piety that is not
expressed in life and does not become action, active charity, or that does not
translate into relentless work for the love of God and neighbour” (C. Colli).
Let us add that in the 19th century, prayer was still so strongly embedded within
Christian behaviour that Don Bosco did not see fit to insist on it as he probably
would have done in a different situation. Instead, it was urgent to sanctify work
and divinise action. This was his charism.
He felt inspired and drawn to this. He knew that words are not persuasive except
when they become action, and he wanted action to become words, his ideas to
have hands, as in fact they did.
He was a man of action by temperament, a successful operator, an organisational
wizard. Work was second nature to him. “God,” he said, “gave me the grace that
work and effort would always be a relief to me instead of being a burden.”
But he was attracted above all by the example of Jesus, the divine worker of the
little house in Nazareth, the friend of children and the humble, the apostle of the
Father continually at work for our salvation: “My Father is still working, and I also
am working” (Jn 5:17); “all that Jesus did and taught” (Acts 1:1). This is the model
he proposed to his sons when he wrote the Constitutions.
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“Jesus Christ began to do and to teach” we read in the second article; “likewise
shall the members begin by perfecting themselves through the practice of interior
and exterior virtues.”
When Don Bosco quoted the Word of God, which he was thoroughly nourished
by, he showed a marked preference for texts that highlight the action category, like
proclamation, evangelisation. Quotations relating to prayer were less freqeunt.
Strange as it may seem, quotations relating to prayer in his collections of letters,
where mentions of prayer are almost constant, are entirely lacking. Only beginning
with the first missionary expedition does he quote Jesus' words, “Rogemus
Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem suam” (Mt 9:38): “therefore ask
the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest”.
In the almost three thousand letters in the collection, the most quoted lines are
those that came from his heart most naturally because they were the ones he
most lived, words like “Opus face evangelistae” (2 Tim 4:5): “Do the work of
an evangelist”; “Tu vero praedica Verbum opportune et importune” (2 Tim 4:2):
“proclaim the message… whether the time is favourable or unfavourable”; “Opera
Dei revelare et confiteri honorificum est” (Tob 12:7): “It is good… to reveal the
works of God”.
He was not a pragmatist in the sense that he did not elevate praxis to a criterion
of truth: he always put both the doctrine of the faith and the Magisterium above
everything else. But he was “God’s business agent”, the realist who instinctively
put the practical before the theoretical, the lived before the abstract, deeds before
words. He did not believe in faith without works, nor in a Gospel that was not
incorporated into life. Only “those who do what is true come to the light” (Jn 3:21).
Only the language of facts and deeds seemed credible enough to him.
“Today’s world has become material, so it is necessary to work and make known
the good that one does” he said. “One might work miracles by praying day and
night in one’s cell, but the world does not care and does not believe it any more.
The world needs to see and touch. The world today wants to see the works, wants
to see the clergy working … ”
At a time when religious were looked upon as idle people, useless to the progress
of society, he wanted his institution founded on the great law of work and said,
not without a touch humour, his Salesians’ habit would be “shirtsleeves”.
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Statements regarding work
Statements regarding work
The bold statements other saints made in praise of prayer, Don Bosco made in
praise of work
“Ninety percent of his addresses to the confreres” wrote Fr Caviglia “were about
work, temperance, poverty.” He then added with a touch of wit, “Here is the
scandal of a saint! An ‘American’ saint who said ‘Let’s work’ more often than he
said ‘Let’s pray.’”
Eugene Ceria said: “It would be difficult to find another saint who conjugated the
word work to the extent that Don Bosco did.”
He wanted his Salesians to be happy, poor, frugal but above all hardworking:
“Work, work work!” he would say, “This is what the aim and glory of priests should
be. Never tire of working. How many souls would be saved!”
He wanted work to be as constant as breathing: “Always working… This must be
the aim of every Salesian and his continual breathing.”
The idea of toil was not meant to be a restraining thought, but to serve as an
incentive to do more. “We don’t want money, we want effort.”
“We need to take on work that seems beyond our strength and, who knows, we
might even end up doing as much as can be done.”
Laziness and idleness inspired horror in him. He went so far as to say that “The
priest either dies of work or dies of vice.”
Other Institutions had penances and lengthy fasts but Don Bosco had work: “I do
not recommend penances and discipline, but work, work, work!”
It gave him great pleasure to see the great work his sons were doing. “When I
go to the houses and I hear that there is a lot of work, I am at peace. Where
there is work there is no devil.” “It is true,” he added, “that your work is beyond
your stregth, but no one is dismayed, and it seems that after material nourishment
comes the nourishment of toil.”
He was convinced that “Times have never been so difficult since the time of St
Peter,” but “instead of whinging and complaining” he wanted the reaction to be
more work: “More work than you could ever talk about”.
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Statements regarding work
Pius IX told him, “I consider that a religious house where there is not so much
prayer but much work is done is in better condition than another one where there
is a lot of prayer but little work is done.” On another occasion he told him: “Do
not put the novices in the sacristy where they become idle, but keep them busy
with work, work!”
This is what Don Bosco always did, arousing questions and mistrust in other
religious and even among ecclesiastical authorities.
He was criticised, for example, for sacrificing the “ascetic novitiate” and
“traditional” methods of formation by recklessly committing young brothers to
apostolic activities that others thought were a form of dissipation and beyond their
capabilities.
In his defence Don Bosco said that “Thirty-three years of experience have taught
us that these regular occupations are an impregnable bulwark of morality. And I
have observed that the busiest and the most industrious ones are better mindful of
what life was like before, enjoy good health, are more virtuous, and once ordained
have a much more fruitful sacred ministry.”
Confirmation of how good this approach was also came to him from the mysterious
dreams that marked the decisive turning points in his life.
In the “Lanzo dream” (1876), for example, the guide accompanying him showed
him the vast field of Salesian activity and told him emphatically, “Take heed:
you must have these words engraved on your coat-of-arms as your watchword,
your badge. Note them well: Work and temperance will make the Salesian
Congregation flourish. Have these words explained repeatedly and insistently.”
Extraordinary importance has always been attached in the Salesian tradition to
the dream of the “Ten diamonds”, or the ten virtues which shine with dazzling light
on the mantle of the person who personifies the “model of the true Salesian”. Two
of these diamonds bear the inscription: “Work”, “Temperance”. They are placed
on the right and left shoulder respectively, almost as if to silhouette the figure of
the Salesian.
Finally, let us recall what might have been the greatest words of his lifetime, written
in his Spiritual Testament. “When it happens that a Salesians yields up his life
whilst working for souls, you can say that our Congregation has registered a great
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His life a testimony
triumph and that on it will descend in abundance the blessings of heaven.” Twice
on his deathbed he told Bishop Cagliero: “Please tell all the Salesians to work
zealously and fervently. Work, work.”
His life a testimony
But higher than words is the testimony of his life. A life, as Pius XI called it, “which
was indeed a true, genuine martyrdom. His was a life of colossal work, which
impressed everyone who saw the Servant of God.”
It is hard to believe that one man could work so hard and attend to so many things
at once. Fr Caviglia said that several people seemed to be at work simultaneously
in Don Bosco:
Educator and pedagogue, father of orphans and gatherer
of abandoned children, founder of religious congregations,
propagator of devotion to Mary Help of Christians, instigator of lay
unions extended throughout the world, and instigator of practical
charity, proclaimer of distant missions, popular writer of book
on morals and religious apologies, proponent of an honest and
Catholic press, creator of Christian workshops and bookshops, a
man of religious piety and charity, and a man of human affairs or
public interest, all at work and advancing together as if they were
so many individuals born or destined for that alone, and merging
into the one person of the simple priest. His serene and simple
appearance remained undisturbed by grand gestures or grand
rhetoric.”
Yet these many facets were unified, deep down, by the one notion that dominated
his life. And that, as we have seen, was the salvation of souls.
Providence had tempered Don Bosco by work, right from the stunted, poor years
of his boyhood. We know that he did everything, having been herdsman, rural
worker, servant, tailor, blacksmith, coffee maker, confectioner, acrobat, tutor,
student, sacristan, barber; he went from one master to another, experiencing how
much other people’s bread “tastes like salt”.
This experience would leave an indelible mark on him. He would forever be as
sensitive to the problems of poor and marginalised youth as he was to those of
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His life a testimony
the humble working classes and he would forever be a formidable worker and
achiever: “Things are not going just at the speed of steam,” he wrote to Countess
Uguccioni in 1878, “but like the telegraph. In one year, with God’s help and the
charity of our benefactors, we were able to open twenty houses. You see how
your family has grown?”
Faithful to one of his old resolutions, he did not allow more than five hours per
night for sleep in his older age. Bishop Bertagna deposed during the Process
'“that he spent half the nights working: and I heard him say several times that,
when he was healthier, he would sometimes spend even two nights at his desk
writing. Nevertheless, in the morning he was in the sacristy to say Mass and hear
confessions for several hours.” Under certain circumstances he would also hear
confessions for 10, 12 and up to 18 hours a day.
He wrote as many as 250 letters in a day with surprising speed. “I have some work
in hand… I have acquired such speed that I don’t know if I could do it any faster.”
On occasions he would sit at the desk at two o’clock in the afternoon and remain
there until eight o’clock, only to resume later. “For several months now I have sat
at the desk at two in the afternoon and got up at half past eight to go to dinner.”
The “mortal fatigue” his daily worries brought him leaked out from his letters in
sudden outbursts, and we are moved by them: “Work makes me crazy”; “I find
myself so tired that I can’t take it any more”; “I am very tired.”
And it was true. It can be said that he knew no other rest than the grave. Bishop
Cagliero testified at the Process, “I do not remember him ever taking a day off in
his life for pleasure or to rest, and whenever he found us tired and fatigued from
work he would say ‘Courage, courage, let us work, let us always work because
we will have eternal rest later above.’”
He died broken by overwork, a martyr – and not just metaphorically speaking – of
toil that knew no rest. His “exaggerated night work and material labours,” we read
in the brief but interesting biography of the doctor who looked after him, “wore his
life down. After about 1880 [eight years before his death] it can be said that his
body was almost reduced to being a walking medical chest, but his ever-active
mind anxious to reach its glorious goal still shone brightly.”
“He is consumed by too much work,” confirmed Prof. Fissore of the University of
Turin. He is not dying of illness, but is like a little lamp that goes out for lack of oil.”
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His life a testimony
The hard work of this “elderly priest”, this “philanthropist of the 19th century”,
this “most intransigent Catholic” seemed, to the people of his time, to be both
incredible and legendary. At Don Bosco’s death, the newspapers of the day
described his hard work and effort as “prodigious” (L’Illustrazione popolare),
“huge” (La Patrie:), “enormous and of the highest degree” (_La Perseveranza),
“phenomenal” (Il Fanfulla). The same newspaper said that “Had Don Bosco been
Minister of Finance, Italy would economically be the leading nation in the world.”
The Promoter of the Faith at the Apostolic Proces did not hesitate to say that
he was one of the greatest apostles of the Church in the 19th century: “The
multiplicity and fruitfulness of his works is prodigious: his zeal for the salvation
of souls and for the spread of Christ’s Kingdom on earth was so intense and
continuous that history rightly proclaims him the greatest – “maximum” – apostle
of the 19th century.”
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Chapter 3 HIS PRAYER LIFE
In its document on The contemplative dimension of religious life (August 1980),
the Sacred Congregation for Religious and for Secular Institutes wrote that
“Prayer is the indispensable breath of every contemplative dimension” (no. 5).
Vatican II described it as the effort “by which they fix their minds and hearts on
Him” (Perfectae caritatis no. 5).
The contemplative dimension is expressed in liturgy, listening to the Word, prayer,
but also, according to the 1980 document, in the “the constant desire for God and
the search for his will in events and people; by the conscious participation in his
salvific mission; by self-giving to others for the coming of the Kingdom” (no. 1).
Its field is a vast as is Christian life.
Let us now consider Don Bosco’s prayerful contemplation, by which we mean
his “formal” prayer or his practice of prayer, which means breaking off from other
kinds of activity – praying like this is to do nothing else – and his attitude of prayer,
prayer spread throughout his activities. However, we cannot avoid a preliminary
question: could Don Bosco have prayed?
This is no mere rhetorical question. It derives directly from what we have just said
about his multifaceted and pretty much constant activity which seemed to keep
him from the explicit kind of prayer found in the lives of all the saints. He caused a
scandal at a time when there were not a few who considered work as time taken
away from prayer.
His cause for beatification did in fact come up against the difficulty of there
not being much prayer evident in his life. Explicit prayer is an essential part of
Christian life, and a demanding one. If we consider prayer, on a subjective and
psychological level, as “being lifted up to God”, as “listening to”, “dialogue or
conversation” with God. Or if we consider it on an objective level as spiritual
“adherence” to the salvific plan and to the Kingdom of God already present
on earth, then practical prayer demands suspension from all external activity. It
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means concentration, recollection, a suitable place and time; all things that in a
life dominated and devoured by action like Don Bosco’s, seemed impossible.
Don Bosco had prayed, certainly, but, the objection was, not enough. We must
recognise that it was not easy to judge Don Bosco by the traditional yardstick.
In the way he acted he really was very different from the other saints. “It is
well known,” we read in one testimony at the Process, “that the Servant of God
continually asked on all sides for the means to develop his works. I believe that the
Servant of God proved to be quite different from the actions of other saints in this
matter, in that others would have worked miracles to ensure they did not receive
legcies: St Philip Neri, for example. But Don Bosco would have worked miracles
so he could have legacies so he could provide for the needs of the Oratory.”
We must also remember that those were years when Dom Chautard, in his
book The Soul of The Apostolate, vigorously denounced the delirium of action.
This author’s assertion that “prayer is the soul of the apostolate” lent itself to
underestimating the importance of action. Chautard looks at works with a certain
distrust and seems far from assuming that it is equally true that apostolic activity,
under the right conditions, is itself the soul of union with God. Lumen Gentium says
that “by the sacraments, especially holy Eucharist, that charity toward God and
man which is the soul of the apostolate is communicated and nourished” (no. 33).
In practice, the following accusations were levelled at Don Bosco: “To achieve
his aims,” the Censors objected, “Don Bosco counted a great deal on his own
shrewdness, initiative and activity and made use of all human means far and wide.
Rather than relying on divine help he sought human support with inexplicable
diligence day and night, to the limits of his strength (“usque ad extremam
fatigationem”), to the point that he was no longer able to attend to the duties of
piety.”
According to another censor, prayer would have had almost no relevance in Don
Bosco’s life: “On the subject of prayer properly so called, which all the founders
of new congregations have made the most of, I find, it can be said, nothing: Nihil
vel fere nihil reperio.” And he concluded: “How can someone who has been so
deficient in the practice of vocal prayer be called heroic? Poteritne heroicus in
pietate dici qui adeo deficiens in oratione vocali apparet?”
The situation was aggravated by the fact that Don Bosco, not only because of a
persistent eye complaint from which he had been suffering since 1843, but also in
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view of his extreme business, had obtained a dispensation from the recitation of
the breviary from Pius IX: first viva voce, then by regular rescript from the Sacred
Penitentiary (19.11.1864).
Nothing of a similar kind had ever happened in the history of the Apostolic
Processes: “numquam de aliis sanctis viris auditum est!”
We must agree that the ideal of holiness that has imposed itself on the Christian
conscience is something so pure and lofty that even a mild accusation is enough
to lower its halo. Following the Council of Trent and under the influence of the
French school, the idea that one had of the priest was predominantly the man of
worship and prayer. Don Bosco deviated, unwisely, from the traditional model of
other saints even considering just those from Turin, such as Cafasso his teacher
and Murialdo, who took up to four hours in preparing for the Holy Mass, celebrating
it and giving thanks.
It is a fact that we would look in vain for manifestations of outward prayer in Don
Bosco of the kind found in saints of his own era like the Curé d' Ars, St Anthony
Maria Claret, a great apostle. Fr Ceria wrote that Don Bosco “did not dedicate a
lot of time, like other saints, did, to meditation.”
But having one’s own way of praying is not the same as not praying or praying too
little. It was not, in fact, difficult to overcome this difficulty either by better verifying
the depositions of the texts cited or by judging his prayer as a whole. A decisive
contribution to Don Bosco’s cause came from Fr Philip Rinaldi. On 29 September
1926, writing to the Cardinal Prefect of Rites, he attested among other things:
And here, Your Eminence, allow me to add that it is my
profound conviction that the Venerable was indeed a man of
God, continually united with God in prayer. In his final years,
after the mornings spent in receiving people of every class and
social condition who flocked to him from all parts for advice
and to receive his blessing, he used to retire to his room every
day from 2 to 3 p.m. and the Superiors did not allow him to be
disturbed at that time. But since, from 1883 until the death of the
Servant of God, I was in charge of a house for the formation of
aspirants to the priesthood, and since he had told me to come
and see him whenever I needed to, perhaps indiscreetly, but
certainly so that I could approach him more comfortably, I broke
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Don Bosco a “man of prayer”
that rule several times, not just at the Oratory, but also at Lanzo,
San Benigno where he went often enough, and also at Mathi
and at the House of St John the Evangelist in Turin. I went
there precisely during those hours to see him. And at that hour,
everywhere and always, I caught him every time, recollected, with
folded hands, meditating.
Don Bosco a “man of prayer”
As different in amount and quality as it was from that of other saints, however,
Don Bosco’s prayer was no less true and profound when tested by the facts. The
testimonies at the Processes gradually revealed an unsuspected and exhilarating
activity of prayer in Don Bosco. There was a lack of external shows, of grand
gestures, but prayer burst forth everywhere.
“You could say,” Fr Barberis said, “that he was always praying; I saw him, I could
say, hundreds of times climbing up and down the stairs always praying. Even on
the road he prayed. On journeys, when he was not proofreading, I would always
see him in prayer.” He used to tell us “Never be idle on the train, but say the
breviary, the Rosary, or read some good book.”
Whenever he was asked for spiritual advice, he had it ready “as if he were in
conversation with God at that moment.”
Even though dispensed from saying the Breviary, he actually said it almost always
and with great devotion. Prevented from doing so by force majeure, he made up
for it, as is clear from this formal and heroic promise of his, “by not doing anything
or uttering any word that was not aimed at the glory of God”.
Unimpeachable testimonies say that when he prayed he “had the look of an
angel”. “He prayed on his knees with his head slightly bowed, he had a smile on
his face. Those around him could not help but pray well too. Brother Peter Enria
said, “I lived with him for 35 years and I always saw him praying like this.”
He saw prayer as God’s voluntary sharing of his omnipotence with human
weakness and gave it absolute priority: “Prayer, that’s the first thing.” “One does
not begin well,” he said, “except by starting from heaven.”
For him, prayer was “the work of works,” because prayer “obtains everything and
triumphs over everything.” It is what “water is to the fish, air to the bird, a spring to
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Don Bosco a “man of prayer”
the deer, heat to the body,” “the sword to the soldier”. "Prayer breaks into God’s
heart.”
Fr Ceria was able to write with absolute truth: “The spirit of prayer in Don Bosco
was what the martial spirit is in the good captain, or the spirit of observation in
the good artist or scientist: a habitual disposition of the soul, practised with ease,
constancy and great delight.”
Even night time was to be an occasion for prayer. “When the hour of rest has
come, lie down with hands follded on your breast. Pray until we have fallen asleep,
and, if we wake up during the night, pray again; say brief prayers, kiss the habit,
or the crucifix, or the medal you wear. Have some holy water in your cell. Make
the sign of the Holy Cross with faith.”
One could say that these are pious gestures outdated by time; yet they are simply
acts rooted in Christian piety, alive in the life and practice of simple souls even
today. Why not allow the Spirit the freedom to breathe as he wills and where he
wills?
His institution was founded on prayer: “I gave the name Oratory to this house, to
clearly indicate how prayer is the only power we can rely on.”
Prayer and the spirit of prayer were in the very air people breathed at Valdocco.
It could be read on the faces of its inhabitants, many of whom would form the first
Salesian generation: Fr Ceria wrote that
We got to know them: men so different in intelligence and
culture, so different in their habits: in all of them, however, certain
common traits stood out, which were almost a list of their features
of origin. Serene calmness in saying and doing; paternal manners
and expressions, but especially a piety that they understood to
be their ubi consistam, the core of Salesian life.
They prayed a lot and they prayed very devoutly. They were so
concerned that we prayed and prayed well.
It seemed that they could not utter four words in public or in
pricate without prayer entering somehow. And yet… those men
did not show that they possessed extraordinary graces of prayer:
in fact we saw them do nothing more than the practices required
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Don Bosco a “man of prayer”
by the Rule or as a result of our customs, and they did it in all
simplicity.
Don Bosco’s prayer, which was the prayer of an apostle and educator, had its
own characteristics and originality in every way; authentic and complete in its
substance, direct and very simple in its forms, popular in its content, cheerful
and festive in its expressions, it was truly a prayer within the reach of everyone,
children and ordinary folk in particular.
Above all it was the prayer of the faithful of active life, the prayer of apostles
intrinsically ordered to action and bound to it. A prayer, therefore, that was
never disengagement and escape from the world, but prayer to be transformed
according to God’s plan, or by people to be won over to Christ. Don Bosco’s
expression, Da mihi animas coetera tolle, “O Lord, give me souls and take away
the rest”, was always his most ardent prayer long before it became his motto. It
was prayer of an apostolic nature because every kind of prayer is marked by a
particular vocation and mission.
As is the case for every genuine apostle, explicit prayer preceded, accompanied
– in appropriate forms – and followed Don Bosco’s actions as an indispensable
and necessary factor.
It preceded them because Don Bosco thought of his activity prayerfully in God
and according to God, and finalised it to his will and glory. It accompanied his
activity in brief meditative pauses, or as a request for grace, imploring help in
times of weariness and trial: “Let us not lose heart in dangers and difficulties. Let
us pray with confidence and God will give us his help.” And it followed activity as
thanksgiving: “How good is the Lord!”; "“God does his works with magnificence.”
Don Bosco’s prayer did not live in the limbo of good intentions: it took shape in
what he called the “practices of piety”. “Don Bosco did not establish any special
form of practice or prayer or devotion such as the Salve Regina, the Rosary, the
Retreat, the Way of the Cross and so on. He was indifferent to formulas and, in
a certain sense, even to forms; he was a realist and a simplifier and looked to
substance” (A. Caviglia).
Even as a founder, he felt no need to impose any other community practices on
his disciples than those of the “good Christian” and the “good priest” if they were
priests.
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Don Bosco a “man of prayer”
He demanded, essentially, what was practised in the boarding school from the
priest: devout celebration of the Holy Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, meditation,
spiritual reading, but not separate from the “practices” and “devotions” of the good
Christian. What these “practices of the good Christian” were is not difficult to say.
These were the prayers and acts of piety – but also things that are not prayers,
such as, for example, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy, the
ten commandments, etc. – as found in the catechism of the diocese, which
remained unchanged in Don Bosco’s time, or contained in the “regulations of life”
proposed by spiritual authors. To this were added the other daily, weekly, monthly,
annual practices common to Christian custom such as: frequent confession
and communion, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the monthly Happy Death
recollection, the annual Retreat, revived in Turin at the beginning of the century. In
these devotional practices that flourished in the 19th century alongside liturgical
action and often within the liturgy itself – think of the way people participated in
Holy Mass – Don Bosco saw the concrete and we can also say ideal outline of
the life of prayer. It was in fact the path of prayer proposed by the Church, and
the Church never proposes inadequate means of holiness.
By focusing on the “general duties of the good Christian” Don Bosco was therefore
aiming high. In terms of quantity, because he left an overwhelming number of
“practices” or “exercises” to personal initiative. One only has to glance through
The Companion of Youth, which was the prayer manual Don Bosco proposed for
the young, to realise this. And in terms of quality, because Don Bosco knew how
to give his youngsters the “taste” for prayer and the “spirit of noble precision”which
Pius XI spoke of.
“Let genuflections and signs of the cross be done well,” he insisted, as an
incentive to prayer. If, in tune with the spirit of his century, Don Bosco emphasised
devotional practices, it must also be said that he did not tolerate exaggeration or
dangerous intimism. The criterion that guided him was practical and authentically
supernatural.
We cannot ignore the fact that his school of prayer has produced saintly and
heroic young people. Nor can we fault him for presenting the life of prayer as
being predominantly ascetic, as was the custom at the time. The “Laus Deo”,
the “mystical dimension of the liturgy” were still the pillars of Christian life, but
devotionalism reigned and it is not certain that it did not produce good fruits.
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“Brief prayers”
Devotional practices, Don Bosco used to say, “are the food, the support, the balm
of virtue”.
However, we can say with absolute certainty, so faithful to the dispositions of
the Church and the Pope as he was, that he would enthusiastically welcome the
directions and guidelines for liturgical renewal proposed today by Vatican II.
Let us not forget that, in his own way and in his own time, he appeared to be an
innovator in liturgy for young people. In fact, he wanted it to be rich in participation
and involvement, full of spontaneity and initiative, varied and festive, adherent to
life yet aimed at eternity.
“Brief prayers”
We read in the early draft of the Constitutions (1858-1859) that “The active life
to which our society is committed deprives its members of the opportunity of
engaging in many practices in common.”
Implicitly he was saying that many other forms of personal prayer are possible
and recommendable. Among these, following the teaching at the Convitto, Don
Bosco always gave great importance to brief prayerful utterances.
“Oratio iaculatoria” is the “pure” and “brief” prayer of monastic tradition that
prolongs prayer in choir throughout the day. The ancients considered it to be the
most beautiful fruit of Lectio divina and meditation. St Augustine spoke of it as
“rapid messages to God.”
Don Bosco thought the same. He saw these prayers as focusing the vocal and
mental prayer in the morning: “These brief prayers,” he he said, “summarise vocal
and mental prayer… they start from the heart and go to God. They are fiery darts
that send the affections of the heart to God and wound temptations and vices, the
enemies of the soul.”
For the saint, they could replace meditation when necessary. “Every day each one,
besides [offering] vocal prayers, shall devote no less than half-an-hour to mental
prayer, unless one is prevented [from doing so] by the calls of the sacred ministry.
In that case he shall make up [for such failure] by ejaculatory prayers, as frequent
as possible, and by offering to God with greater fervor and love those labours that
keep him from the prescribed exercises of piety.” He called this substitution the
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An attitude of prayer
meditation of the merchants: “I recommend mental prayer. For whoever cannot do
regular meditation because of travel or some engagement or business that does
not allow delay, let him at least do the meditation that I call the meditation pf the
merchants. These people think about buying goods, reselling them at profit, or of
the loss they might make and how to repair it, or of the gains they have made and
the greater ones they might make, and so on.”
This kind of prayer, an essential, secret, easy prayer, always within reach, served
him wonderfully to keep his thoughts on God. The fervour with which they burst
forth from his heart in old age shows how deeply rooted this prayer was in his life.
An attitude of prayer
The “Pratices of piety”, “short prayers” were not all of Don Bosco’s prayer. There
was another kind of prayer that was prevalent and pretty much constant for him,
a form of general prayer that we prefer to call the “prayer of life” today, “prayer
on the spot”, an attitude of prayer. It is conscious presence and attention to God
in the sequences of daily life.
This is true prayer – praise, adoration, offering, etc. – because it is walking with
Christ within the human situation and living in Him, With Him and for Him. True,
Leoncius of Grandmaison would say, because “it unites us to God, makes us
flexible, and docile to His inspirations, tunes us in with His will, and because,
although it supposes a certain number of positive acts, it perseveres afterwards,
for a long time, and informs our lives far beyond the few moments dedicated
to such acts.” It is the Christian lifestyle, the Liturgy of Life by which the faithful
“offer themselves in loving service to God and mankind by adhering to the action
of Christ” (Laudis Canticum). It is the only practical way to realise the Gospel
injunction: “Pray always.”
From Origen onwards, the Christian tradition applies these words to explicit
prayer, or the prayer of “good works” or “good life”. Someone who prays every
day and while being active, or who does nothing but good works in accordance
with God’s will, is praying always.
St Augustine said, “Non tantum lingua canta sed etiam assumpto bonorum
operum psalterio, sing to God not only with the tongue, but also by taking the
psalter of good works in hand.” Led by the Spirit, Don Bosco fitted perfectly into
this perspective.
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An attitude of prayer
It is very significant that in drafting the Constitutions for his Salesians, he puts
these two articles which refer more to “good works” than to prayer properly
speaking in the chapter on “Practices of piety”: “The active life to which our
society is committed deprives its members of the opportunity of engaging in many
practices in common. They shall [accordingly] endeavour to make up [for this lack]
by mutual good example and by the perfect fulfillment of the general duties of a
Christian.” “Personal composure [compostezza della persona], a clear, devout,
distinct pronunciation of the words of the divine offices, modesty in speech,
looks and gait both inside and outside the house, ought to be the distinctive
characteristics of our gathered-members [congregati].”
We are in line with St Paul’s teaching: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do
everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through
him” (Col 3:17). The Apostle is even clearer: “So, whether you eat or drink, or
whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God” (l Cor 10:31).
The language of prayer (giving glory to God) is used about the Christian way
of life. Whether one prays or works, a real relationship and indestructible union
with God is possible. So thought Don Bosco when he exhorted – “and he did so
thousands and thousands of times” (Cardinal Cagliero) – to work for the “glory of
God”, adhering deeply to his will.
He told the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians to make active and contemplative
life walk “hand in hand,” to portray “Martha and Mary, the life of the apostles and
that of the angels” in themselves. But contemplation and action were not two
opposing movements for the saint, but rather two ways of being, a single personal
attitude, aroused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit through the dynamics of faith,
hope and charity, which is the essence of Christian identity.
It is the love of charity, the synthesis of the theological life, that gives consistency
and unity to life. Action and contemplation, work and prayer are but two moments
of the same love. A perfect relationship of identity, then, exists between prayer
and work.
In this sense, but only in this sense, can it be said that work is prayer. And this,
according to Fr Ceria, was Don Bosco’s great secret, his most characteristic trait:
“The specific difference of Salesian piety is in knowing how to make work prayer.”
Pius XI gave solemn confirmation of this:
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An attitude of prayer
This, as a matter of fact, was one of his more beautiful features:
he was always present for everything; he was involved in
a multitude of works, always pressured by problems, always
engaged in checking on requests and in consultations, and yet
his spirit was always elsewhere: always on high, where the
weather was always clear, where calmness reigned supreme,
and he was always in control. This is the way by which in Don
Bosco’s work was indeed effective as prayer. This is the way Don
Bosco carried out the great principle of Christian life: qui laborat,
orat.
There are no saints without extraordinary prayer and such was Don Bosco’s
prayer. An intimate, heartfelt prayer without cracks, hidden beneath a serene face
and a spontaneous manner, which one had to know how to discover.
He was a formidable worker, but also a great man of prayer. He prayed a lot by
himself, silently, and almost furtively, because he hated to be noticed. He prayed
with his young people “always”, as long as his occupations allowed him to do so.
He prayed before preaching, before exercising his ministry, before approaching
important people, before dealing with delicate and difficult situations. He prayed
most intensely at the time of the most severe trials in his life.
As an educator, he did not tire of instilling love for prayer in the souls of young
people. He knew how to make it pleasing, made to the measure of the young.
Fr Albera, who understood his spirit profoundly, says: “He wanted the practices
of piety to be more spontaneous than prescribed.”
During the day, when he would see,a good number of young people
spontaneously going to church to pray, he would gasp with joy: “This is the
greatest of consolations for me.”
Given his delicate conscience he felt the need to leave the following in his Spiritual
Testament: “I must also apologise if some people observed that on several
occasions I made too brief a preparation for or too brief a thanksgiving after Holy
Mass. I was in a certain way obliged to do so because of the crowds of people
who surrounded me in the sacristy and prevented me from praying either before
or after Holy Mass.”
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This humble confession alone speaks volumes about the importance he attached
to prayer. It is not without reason that the Church proposes him, today as
yesterday, as a model of prayer to all the faithful who are tempted in their prayer
life by secularist materialism and the apparent silence of God in history.
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Chapter 4 THE ASCESIS OF
TEMPERANCE AND MORTIFICATION
The rejection of Christian asceticism in today’s hedonistic and permissive society
in the name of absolute freedom that rejects all obligations, opting instead for the
spontaneity of nature and ideologies that consider it an alienating neurosis, is a
consequence of the rejection of God. For if asceticism has meaning, justification,
fruitfulness, it can only be found in fidelity to the mystery of the death and
resurrection of Christ, within the horizon of sin and the divine judgement on it. In
other words, through participation in the Lord’s asceticism and the mystery of his
cross. Asceticism enters as an inescapable element in the plan of salvation and
follows the Christian just people are followed by their shadow.
However, its external manifestations, commensurate with the different socio-
cultural contexts, are not unique: they vary from one era to the next as history
teaches us. It is therefore not appropriate to discredit the forms of penance
practised in past centuries or the rough and Spartan style of life lived by Don
Bosco in the mid 19th century.
“What justifies one epoch of history over another,” Romano Guardini wrote, “does
not lie in the fact that it is better, but that it comes in its own time.”
Unchangeable in its substance, today’s asceticism must adapt, as in the past,
to the new cultural context. And this means that it must “take into account the
deeper concept of man, the discoveries acquired by the anthropological sciences
– especially psychology, the characteristics of our bodily reality, the profound
value of sexuality, the process of personalisation, the situation of pluralism, the
importance of the community dimension, the needs of socialisation” (E. Viganò).
Therefore, an asceticism that takes into account the harmonious integration of
soul and body that is not a gift of nature; that opens the person to self-giving
love, to availability to others; an asceticism capable of Christianly addressing
the alienations to which modern life forces us to live, such as: nervousness,
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Temperance
the monotony of the repetitiveness of work, the stresses of modern life, the
superficiality of relationships and living together; an asceticism of silence in the
“civilisation of noise” so as not to lose oneself, to understand better, not to speak
except what to say what means something; an asceticism that knows how to
discipline the use of the media, sleep, necessary entertainment, food, one’s
senses, etc.
Taking into account the cultural shift underway, the Church has mitigated certain
penances of the past such as fasting, but has not silenced the rigour of traditional
asceticism, made more urgent by the increased demands of charity. Because,
as P. Plé well expresses it, “the fruitfulness of mortifications is not measured by
the suffering of the renunciation or the intensity of the effort, but by its efficacy,
that is, from a gospel perspective, by the progress in charity it fosters, as much
through the ‘imitation of Christ’ as through the removal of whatever hinders growth
in charity.”
The reconsideration of Don Bosco’s ascetic experience undoubtedly presents
aspects that have been overtaken by time, modes of expression that are no longer
current. However, when we go to the root of things beyond the contingencires
of history, to the evangelical spirit that animated him, to certain lucid precursory
insights that make him our contemporary, we must agree that even today the
asceticism taught and lived by Don Bosco still has much to say to our Christian
sense. This is what we want to briefly note.
Temperance
Don Bosco’s asceticism was always expressed through the inseparable pair: work
and temperance. This is the legacy he left to his sons: “Work and temperance will
make the Salesian Congregation flourish”; “they are two weapons with which we
will succeed in overcoming everything and everyone”. They are the two diamonds
that give polish to his friendly and smiling face.
Work, as we have seen, was already in itself the continuous asceticism of Don
Bosco. But he always deliberately associated the broader and more specific
notion of temperance, mortification, austere sense of life to the asceticism of work.
In the life of a Christian, temperance is, of course, self-control, moderation of
inclinations and passions, concern for what is reasonable, a certain escape from
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Temperance
the world, but, more profoundly, it is an “underlying attitude”, an “existential
linchpin” that entails the presence of several other virtues. The Rector Major, Fr
Egidio Viganò, has provided the following list that one must bear in mind when
speaking about of Don Bosco’s temperance:
Temperance is the first and foremost among the moderating
virtues, revolving like satellites around it: continence against
the tendencies of lust, humility against the tendencies of pride,
meekness against the outbursts of anger, clemency against
the inclinations to vengeance, modesty against the vanity of
bodily display, sobriety and abstinence against the excesses of
drink and food, economy and simplicity against the excesses of
waste and luxury, austerity in the standard of living against the
temptations of comfort.
This temperance, that is, this set of virtues, was seen and lived by Don Bosco
above all in terms of pastoral and pedagogical charity, growth in love that is
not limited to loving, but, much more difficult still, “knowing how to make onself
loved”. Those who have practice in educating young people know from experience
what and how much self-mastery is needed, at all levels of the individual, so that
attitudes and behaviour marked by goodness, justice and uprightness will triumph.
Don Bosco’s example is paradigmatic. He was an educator who loved deeply and
knew how to “make himself loved” by practising temperance to an heroic degree.
Firm in his principles, he applied them with reasonableness and good sense. He
balanced the demands of authority with those of the freedom and spontaneity of
the young. He knew how to adapt to the demands of the fickleness of the young
without falling into permissiveness. He took everything into account, but he also
knew how to prudently and shrewdly conceal his emotions. He curbed the impetus
of passions in order to guard his heart, which he modelled and shaped on the
pastoral charity of Christ. Also the result of his inner temperance were his constant
attitude of conversion, self-mastery, and the meekness and gentleness that won
him hearts.
Christian temperance, then, is the defence of the great theological values of faith,
hope and charity in which it is founded. And Don Bosco reminded his sons of this:
“The devil tempts the untempered by preference.” He wanted temperance and
moderation in everything, even in the apostolic work that was immensely close
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Moderation and continence
to his heart: “Work, work hard,” he would say “but also make sure that you can
work for a long time.”
He recommended to missionaries: “Look after your health. Work, but only as much
as your strength allows.”
In the thinking of Don Bosco and the Salesian tradition, temperance is not, first
and foremost, the sum of renunciations (mortification), but “growth in the practice
of pastoral and pedagogical charity”. This is authoritatively affirmed by Fr Egidio
Viganò, Don Bosco’s seventh successor:
Before and beyond mortification, temperance is a methodological
discipline of education to self-giving in love. It teaches us to
train ourselves to love and be loved, not primarily to chastise
ourselves. This is not the time for pruning, although the time will
come to do that. It is the time for the development of love: if I
give myself to God, I must try to make the capacity for self-giving
grow in me, knowing how to curb everything that may be a hidden
taking back of my gift of self.
In other words, for Don Bosco temperance is first and always in function of the
mysticism of the Da mihi animas: Lord, make me save youth through the gift of
temperance. That is why he never tired of repeating: “The Congregation will last
as long as the members love work and temperance.”
Moderation and continence
These two satellite virtues of temperance, understood as a basic existential
attitude, shine a special light on Don Bosco. His moderation in the use of food
and drink was proverbial.
Like all the priests who came out of the Convitto he strictly observed the
abstinences prescribed by the Church. He fasted one day a week, first on
Saturday, then on Friday, but nothing exceptional was noticeable in him.
All the testimonies during the Processes agreed in saying that extraordinary
penances and fasts were never noticed in him: but they all stressed his uncommon
moderation and habitual temperance. In the early days of the Oratory, the table
was very frugal, no different from that of the lowly peasants and workers. Bread
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and soup, a main course of legumes, though not always, some watered-down
wine: that was all. “He was a rare example of temperance” Bishop Bertagna
attested. “He never looked for comforts in his house; and in fact ir seems he could
have allowed himself and others some improvement.”.
Later the food improved because not everyone who decided to “stay” with him
could adapt to his table. His natural good sense suggested that the earlier rigour
had to be tempered, but in his heart there always remained a secret yearning for
the old practice.
He said more than once that '“I thought everyone in my house would be content
with just soup and bread, and most a legume dish. I see, however, that I was
wrong [ … Many reasons pushed me little by little to follow the example of all the
other religious orders. Yet even now it seems to me that one could live as I lived
in the early days of the Oratory.”
While adapting to the necessary improvements, he nevetheless remained faithful
to his former ideal. As long as his health allowed him to he always kept to the
common repast; he never ate outside of meals, and ate everything before him;
nobody knew what his favourite tastes were.
In order to obtain donations, he had to accept lunches in his honour offered to him
by benefactors: he took part in them in all simplicity but, it would be said, hardly
noticed the food offered to him, intent as he was on keeping the diners' attention
with his light-hearted jokes and edifying words.
Following his illness at Varazze (1871-1872) that brought him to the brink of death,
doctor’s orders meant he had to take a little unwatered wine that the Duchess of
Montmorency sent him each month. He drank it so sparingly that a bottle lasted
him an entire week, while the remainder accumulated in the cellar and served long
after his death. He gladly offered it to friends and benefactors when he invited
them to his table: “Let us be merry,” he said, “let us drink the ducal wine!”
He wanted his sons to be, like him, models of moderation and temperance. "Flee
idleness, quarrels; great moderation in food, drink and rest.” “I do not say to you
that you must fast; but one thing I recommend to you: temperance.” “When the
desire for ease and comfort grows up amongst us, our pious Society will have
run its course.”
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Moderation and continence
With ascetics of all times, he too emphasised the indissoluble link between bodily
mortification and prayer: “He who does not mortify his body is not even capable
of good prayer.”
Moderation and temperance play a big role in his pedagogy. “Give me,” he would
often say, “a young man who is temperate in eating, drinking and sleeping, and
you will see him virtuous, assiduous in his duties, always ready when it comes to
doing good, and a lover of all virtues. On the contrary, if a young man is gluttonous,
a lover of wine, a sleeper, little by little he will have all the vices.”
Purity and continence against the tendencies of the flesh also shine a special light
on Don Bosco’s life. St Therese of Lisieux regretted that she had no temptations
against chastity, as if something had been missing from the fullness of her love.
But God’s gifts are not a brake on virtue and this was not on the saint’s mind. Don
Bosco did not have this privilege, which is also very rare in the lives of saints;
he knew temptation, was not exempt from the molestations of the flesh and its
instincts: he spoke of this with his closest friends.
Fr Rua testified that “With regard to temptations against this virtue [chastity] I
believe he did feel them, revealing it through some words he was heard to say
when recommending that we be temperate in drinking.” This testimony agrees
with the testimony of Fr Lemoyne: “That he had temptations against purity he
once confided to members of the chapter, among whom I myself was present,
explaining why he preferred legumes to meat.”
So Don Bosco was a man exposed to the wind of temptation, no different from us.
But what emerges instead was the victorious struggle he kept up on this front, his
complete docility to the Spirit’s suggestions, and his heroic practice of chastity.
At first glance, this heroism might seem more more taken for granted than
demonstrated, so secret and personal is the virtue of chastity. However when
it is practised and lived in an extraordinary manner it ends up imposing itself
even externally through a range of signs and messages that Christian sense
recognises. That Don Bosco led an unblemished life from childhood, and always
from then on, is unanimously affirmed by the texts examined at the canonical
processes.
They say that Don Bosco had erected an edifice of rock-solid chastity in defence
of his acute sensitivity and his emotional capacity to “make himself loved”.
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They attribute much of the irresistible charm he exercised among the young to
the splendour of this virtue. In his presence, disturbing thoughts and fantasies
dissipated like mist in the the sun. “It seems to me,” Fr Cerruti testified, “that the
secret of his Christian greatness lies in the great purity of mind, heart and body
that he observed with a delicacy more unique than rare. His demeanour, his gaze,
his very gait, his words, his features never had even a shadow of something that
could be called contrary to beautiful virtue, as he called it.”
His manner with the young people was very delicate, always respectful of their
little personalities. He would gladly let them kiss his hand, sometimes placing it
fleetingly on their head and taking the opportunity to whisper one of those magic
“words” of his in their ear, that went straight to their heart. It also happened that
he would give a young man a touch or a light caress with two fingers of his hand,
but how supernatural that paternal gesture was! Fr Reviglio said that “there was
something pure, chaste and paternal in these touches, which infused the spirit of
his chastity.” Attitudes of antipathy or sensitive preferences were never noticed in
him. Never did the malicious insinuations of the press so often opposed to him
dare attack him on this point.
It was all too evident that Don Bosco lived at a higher level and that the confidence
he granted his young people was solely for the purpose of doing good.
“In the spirit of Don Bosco,” Fr Viganò says, “there is a strong message of purity;
Salesian tradition and the testimony of the origins confirm this abundantly. It is
a special message that we can call ‘sympathy for purity’. This sympathy is a
constant in his life, a characteristic trait of his spirit. He stated it repeatedly: ‘What
must distinguish our Congregation is chastity, just as poverty distinguishes the
sons of St Francis of Assisi and obedience distinguishes the sons of St Ignatius.’”
Mortification
Christian mortification, both internal and external, covers a very wide field.
According to the Bible in various places it indicates “detachment” from external
goods (Lk 5:11), the “denial” of self (Lk 9:23), the “stripping away” of the old man
with his lusts (Col 3:9), the “crucifixion” of the flesh (Gal 5:24), “struggle” (2 Tim
4:7), a kind of “death” and burial with Christ (Col 3:3).
These and similar expressions indicate how for the Christian, a fallen and
wounded being, there is no possibility of salvation without participation in the
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mystery of Christ’s death and cross. Not out of a kind of sorrow or suffering desired
as an end in itself, but rather out of an irrepressible need for love and fidelity
to Christ our salvation. In this too Don Bosco reveals himself to be an excellent
model and guide.
We have said of him that he was a cheerful and likeable saint, capable of loving
and “being loved”, always active, always in the midst of youth, the springtime and
joy of the world. That he was a saint who seemed to lead an enviable life which
nevertheless did not lack the stinging thorns of mortification. The life of Don Bosco
and of those who walk in his footsteps is clearly foreshadowed in the dream of
the “pergola of roses”.
Let us recall its essential content. The “Blessed Virgin herself” as he recounts,
urged him to walk through a long arbour filled with beautiful roses hanging from
above, from the sides, rising from below: “This is the path you must take.” A
delightful and inviting road in appearance, but one that concealed sharp thorns.
“All those, and there were many of them,” we read in the dream, “those who were
watching me walk under that bower—and they were a crowd—passed comments,
such as, ‘How lucky Don Bosco is! His path is forever strewn with roses! He hasn’t
a worry in the world. No troubles at all!’. But they couldn’t see the thorns that were
piercing my poor legs. I called on many priests, clerics, and laymen to follow me,
and they did so joyfully, enthralled by the beauty of the flowers. When, however,
they discovered that they had to walk over sharp thorns and that there was no way
to avoid them, they loudly began complaining, ‘We have been fooled!’ I answered:
‘"If you are out for a nice time, you had better go back. If not, follow me.’
Eventually Don Bosco had the dream explained to him by Our Lady. “The Blessed
Virgin, who had been my guide all along, now asked me: ‘Do you grasp the
meaning of what you now see and of what you saw before?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Please
explain it to me.‘ She replied: ‘The path strewn with roses and thorns is an image
of your mission among boys. You must wear shoes, a symbol of mortification.
The thorns on the ground stand for sensible affections, human likes and dislikes
which distract the educator from his true goal, weaken and halt him in his mission,
and hinder his progress and heavenly harvest The roses symbolize the burning
charity which must be your distinguishing trait and that of your fellow workers.
The other thorns stand for the obstacles, sufferings and disappointments you will
experience. But you must not lose heart. Charity and
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Mortification
mortification will enable you to overcome all difficulties and lead you to roses
without thorns.’”
Like temperance, mortification, which Don Bosco called “the ABC of perfection”,
is also considered primarily from a pedagogical and pastoral perspective. The
mystery of the cross plays an important part at the centre of the “pedagogy of
joy”, at the centre of the attractive spirit of Salesian life. Those who looked at
Don Bosco from afar, those who considered the unstoppable expansion of his
work, his successes, could also believe that the path he travelled was an easy
one. Yet his path, as Fr Ceria indicates in his beautiful pages on Don Bosco
with God, was sown with the thorns of mortification. Thorns in the family: the
poverty and opposition that first barred him from, then made the path to the
priesthood a tough one, obliging him to take up hard and humiliating labours.
Thorns in the founding of the Oratory: he was shouted down on all sides by private
individuals, parish priests, municipal, school and political authorities. Thorns and
worse because of his Catholic Readings. Thorns from lack of means: having so
many young people and so much work on his shoulders and not having secure
means of subsistence. Thorns from his own men: the sacrifices needed to train
them, as well as painful desertions. Tribulations and thorns from the diocesan
authority: misunderstandings, opposition, endless disagreements. The founding
of the Salesian Society was a Calvary.
There were thorns of a different kind, but no less prickly, due to illness and
health disorders. Don Bosco was of a healthy constitution and uncommon physical
vigour. He descended from sturdy peasant stock and long-living ancestors. One
could not otherwise explain his resistance to work and how he was able to survive
three fatal illnesses. Yet the list of infirmities that plagued him throughout his life is
incredibly long: spitting blood, persistent pain in his eyes and the loss, ultimately,
of the right one; swelling in his legs and feet – his “daily cross” as he called it,
persistent headaches, poor digestion, intermittent fevers with skin rashes, and
towards the end of his life weakening of the back with difficulty breathing, and
more. Pius XI described his life as “a true and great martyrdom… A true and
continuous martyrdom in the hardness of a mortified, fragile life that seemed to
be the result of continuous fasting.”
It was a martyrdom accepted out of love of the crucified Christ and souls. “If I
knew,” he was heard to say, “that a single prayer was enough to make me well,
I would not say it”. It was a martyrdom disguised by imperturbable peace and
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Mortification
joy that seemed to become more radiant, according to reliable testimonies, the
heavier were the crosses that afflicted him.
Only a soul deeply rooted in God could have come this far.
Don Bosco’s life was truly characterised by enormous and uninterrupted ascetic
efforts. But his asceticism was not the spectacular classical asceticism of other
saints. It was the asceticism of the everyday, of the little things, of the no less hard
and continuous mortifications imposed by the fulfilment of one’s duty, one’s work,
of concrete situations, of human coexistence. “There is no lack of means to copy
in oneself the sufferings of Our Lord” he said: “heat, cold, illness, things, people,
events… There are ways to live mortified!”
We read in his Spiritual Testament, “I do not recommend any special penances or
mortifications to you; you will gain great merit and give glory to the Congregation
if you are able to bear the sufferings and annoyances of life with Christian
resignation.”
“Let your mortifications,” he advised the Rectors, “be in the diligence of your
duties and in putting up with others…” He did not underestimate the importance
of voluntary mortification, but preferred ones imposed by obedience. “Instead of
doing works of penance do those of obedience,” he said. "Look, a good breakfast
made out of obedience is worth more than any mortification made of your own
whim.”
For Don Bosco too, the fundamental motivation for mortification was, of course,
the need to follow Christ, the victim of our sins, and to share, in faithful awareness,
in the mystery of his death and cross: “The Lord invites us to deny ourselves, to
carry our cross”; “Whoever does not want to suffer with Jesus Christ on earth, will
not be able to enjoy Jesus Christ in heaven.”
He used to say: “There are bitternesses to be suffered everywhere, which are
called mortification of the senses; and from these we will emerge victorious by
taking a look at Jesus Crucified.”
The devotion to Jesus Crucified was dear to him. When Mamma Margaret, contrite
and tired, had decided to return to the Becchi, Don Bosco said nothing, but pointed
to the Crucifix hanging on the wall.
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Mortification
When one of his small volumes of the Catholic Readings was to be put on the
Index, he suffered terribly. Looking at the Crucifix he was heard to exclaim: “O my
Jesus! You know that I wrote this book for a good purpose… Thy will be done.”
He knew that the charity that saves souls is crucified charity; charity that starts
from the cross: “O Lord, give us crosses, thorns and persecutions of every kind,
so long as we can save souls and, among others, save our own.”
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Chapter 5 WORKING AS A PAIR
Don Bosco, a saint filled with God was, at the same time a saint filled with Mary.
After God and in dependence on God, his whole life in fact revolved around her.
Mary was already a living presence in his life before his dream at nine years of
age, thanks to his holy earthly mother: “John… when you came into the world I
consecrated you to the Blessed Virgin.” And jesus told him, “I am the Son of She
whom your mother taught you to greet three times a day.”
But Our Lady did not just pass through Mamma Margaret’s mediation. She burst
directly into the life of the little shepherd boy of the Becchi, as a light from above,
first in that dream at nin years of age and then in the other Marian dreams.
Don Bosco saw Mary with his own eyes. “But now that we are all together alone,
I am going to tell you not just another dream, but something that Our Ladyherself
graciously showed me. I am doing this that each of us may be convinced that it
is Our Lady Herself who wants our Congregation” he told his boys in the famous
dream of the Pergola of Roses which he had in 1847 but only told in 1864. “She
wants us to place all our trust in Her.” We read sentences in the dream like: “The
Blessed Virgin said to me”; “She replied”; “as soon as the Mother of God finished
speaking”.
Witnesses said that devotion to Our Lady was at the forefront of his thinking. It
seemed that he lived only for Her.
“How good Our Lady is,” he said, “how much she loves us.” Don Bosco perceived
God’s initiative in his life as a founder with increasing clarity, but he also had the
certainty of being led and guided in everything by the hand of Mary. “Mary most
holy is the foundress and will be the sustainer of our work.” And again, “Mary is
the mother and sustainer of the Congregation.”
At the Trofarello Retreat (1868) he said that of all religious congregations Mary
“can be said to be the foundress and the Mother, from the Upper Room to the
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present day”. But he also added that “Of all the Congregations and Religious
Orders, perhaps ours was the one that most had the word of God.”
Nothing was to be done at the Oratory except in the name of Mary “the holiest,
most lovable of creatures, the great Mother of God, always pure and immaculate”.
Mary was “the omnipotence supplex ever present in his life.” She was Teacher,
Guide, Shepherdess, The Lady and Queen of his dreams; she was his Beggar,
his Miracle worker and many other things besides but she would always be for
him, above all the Mother of the Sviour and the Church. She was the Immaculate,
pure and full of grace, the powerful Helper of Christians.
Mother, Immaculate, Help of Christians was this Madonna whom Don Bosco
placed at the top of his pedagogy, his priestly, apostolic and missionary activity.
Don Bosco’s devotion to the Mother of God can be seen from different angles:
here we would like to emphasise the importance that the presence of Mary Help
of Christians had in his life, of whom he was unquestionably the greatest apostle.
We know that he passed through different Marian experiences: he was a devotee
of Our Lady of the Castle (Castelnuovo), Our Lady of Sorrows (Cascina Moglia),
Our Lady of La Scala, the Holy Rosary, the Immaculate Conception (Chieri), and
the Consolata (Turin). For reasons that, on the one hand, were linked to the
beginning of the Work of the Oratories (8 December 1841) and, on the other, to
the Marian movement in honour of the Immaculate Conception that would lead
to the dogmatic definition of 1854, his preferences soon turned to devotion to the
Immaculate Conception.
The feast of 8 December remained central to his pastoral and pedagogical
methodology. “For everything,” he reminded his disciples, “we are indebted to
Mary: all our greatest works began on the day of the Immaculate Conception.”
However, it was only around 1862, when he was close to fifty, that he came to
devotion to and preference for Mary Help of Christians, for a number of reasons
that we will not go into here. Let us only mention reasons of a practical order, as we
can see from what he confided to Paul Albera when he was a cleric: “There were
a lot of confessions tonight but truthfully I hardly know what I said or did, because
all the time I had something on my mind which totally absorbed me. I kept thinking:
Our church is too small. We have to pack in our boys like sardines. We must build a
larger, more imposing one under the title of Mary, Help of Christians.” And reasons
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The Help of Christians a living presence
of a pastoral or apologetic order, as we learn from this testimony by Cagliero:
“Our Lady wants us to honour her under the title of Mary Help of Christians:
times are so sad that we really need the Blessed Virgin to help us preserve and
defend the Christian faith.” The apparitions of Mary Help of Christians that took
place near Spoleto (March 1862), and other historical contingencies and heavenly
illustrations were not unrelated.
The Help of Christians a living presence
There is certainly no lack of evidence of the presence of Mary Help of Christians
in Don Bosco’s life even earlier, but the decisive preference for devotion to her
has a precise point of reference: 1861-1863.
“And this,” writes Fr Viganò “would remain the definitive Marian choice: the point
of arrival of a ceaseless vocational growth and the centre of expansion of his
charism as a founder. In the Help of Christians Don Bosco finally saw the face
of the Lady who initiated his vocation and was and always would be his Inspirer
and Teacher.”
But this point of arrival was also a point of departure. We are in the last 25
years of Don Bosco’s life; the years of his full human and spiritual maturity, which
coincide with the affirmation and definitive establishment of the Congregation and
its worldwide and missionary expansion. These are above all the years in which
Don Bosco feels increasingly involved in and part of the current, often dramatic,
situation of the Church and the new Italian situation, as an educator priest and as
an apostle. This great period in Don Bosco’s history is marked by a more lively,
more impending presence of Mary, the “most loving Mother” and the “powerful
Immaculate”, as he never tired of saying, but this time venerated and felt, in an
almost total manner, in her function of Help of Christians, both of individuals and
of the entire community of Christian faith: Maria Auxilium Christianorum. And this,
beyond what was implicit and explicit that had led him to the preferential choice
of this title, for two basic reasons above all.
First: because of his theological and historical awareness of the relevance of the
cult of Mary Help of Christians in the Church of his time.
Second: because of the incalculable importance in Salesian history of the
construction and existence of the Church of Mary Help of Christians at Valdocco.
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Relevance of devotion to Mary Help of Christians
Relevance of devotion to Mary Help of Christians
Regarding the first point, our information comes from the introduction that Don
Bosco gave, taken from A. Nicolas, to his booklet: Maraviglie della Madre di Dio
invocata sotto il titolo di Maria Ausiliatrice. We read that “The title of Auxilium
Christianorum attributed to the august Mother of the Saviour is not something new
in the Church of Jesus Christ.”
In the sacred books of the old testament Mary is called Queen,
standing at the right hand of her divine Son clothed in gold… In
this sense Mary was hailed as the help of Christians from the
earliest times of Christianity.
Recourse to Mary Help of Christians became necessary because
of the extraordinary difficulties in which the Church finds itself.
“A very special reason why the Church in recent times wants
to signal the title of ‘Auxilium Christianorum’ is the one given
by Bishop Parisis in the following words: ‘Almost always when
humankind has found itself amid extraordinary crises, to escape
from them it was always found a worthy fact to recognise and
bless some new perfection in this admirable creature, Mary
most Holy who is the most magnificent reflection here below
of the Creator’s perfections.’ Today’s universally felt need to
invoke Mary is not particular, but general; there are no longer
just lukewarm people to be inflamed, sinners to be converted,
innocents to be preserved. These things are always useful in
every place, with every person. But it is the Catholic Church
itself that is assailed. It is assailed in its functions, in its sacred
institutions, in its Head, in its doctrine, in its discipline; it is
assailed as the Catholic Church, as the centre of truth, as the
teacher of all the faithful. And it is precisely in order to merit
special protection from Heaven that recourse is made to Mary, as
the common Mother, the special Helper of Kings and of Catholic
peoples, Catholics throughout the world.”
Further on in the booklet Don Bosco did not hesitate to write: “The experience of
eighteen centuries makes us see in a most luminous way that Mary continued her
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Relevance of devotion to Mary Help of Christians
mission as Mother of the Church and Help of Christians that she had begun on
earth, from heaven, and with the greatest success.”
Hence, “Don Bosco perceived, with painful attention, the special and growing
difficulties that had arisen for the Church: the serious problems of the relationship
between faith and politics, the fall (after more than a millennium) of the papal
states, the delicate situation of the Pope and the bishoprics, the urgent need for a
new type of pastoral care and new relationships between hierarchy and laity, the
incipient mass ideologies, etc.” (E. Viganò).
This harsh reality engaged his zeal for the cause of faith and the Church and
revived his recourse to Mary Help of Christians.
We read in the Biographical Memoirs that “In publicizing Our Lady’s wonders, he
not only gave vent to his boundless love for the Mother of God, but aimed at doing
good to others. He wished to spark the whole world with unlimited confidence in
Her who, amid the anxieties, tribulations, errors and perils of this, our poor mortal
life, was and would always be a loving, ever ready, powerful helper.”
Strengthened by this confidence in Mary Help of Christians, in his famous dream
about the future of the Church and Europe (2 February 1872) Don Bosco did not
hesitate to write to the Supreme Pontiff Pius IX, in the name of heaven: “The great
Queen will be your help and as in past times so for the future she will always be
magnum et singulare in Ecclesia praesidium.”
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Mary built this house
And yet all this would not have made him the great apostle of Mary Help of
Christians, if he had not gone through the supernatural experience of building the
Mary’s church in Valdocco, and if this church had not become the heart and centre
of the Congregation, the “Mother Church”.
It is almost impossible to say what the church at Valdocco represented in Don
Bosco’s intimate life or what it represented and still represents in the history of the
Congregation and – through the members of the Salesian Family – in the Marian
piety of the universal Church.
Unlike what we read in the history of other famous sanctuaries, most of which
originated from sensational apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary – think of
Lourdes, Fatima, La Salette, etc. – Valdocco’s was born out of a wise pastoral
pedagogical calculation, concrete needs, even if there was no lack of supernatural
intervention.
What surprised Don Bosco first, and then the world, however, was the fact that
Mary practically built her “house” against all human expectations: Aedificavit sibi
domum Maria.
This is the miracle that Fr Margotti did not feel like denying: “They say that Don
Bosco performs miracles and I don’t believe it, but there is one here that I cannot
deny and it is this sumptuous church that cost millions – today we would be in
the order of billions – and it was built in three years with only the spontaneous
offerings of the faithful.”
Don Bosco was guided from above, but he walked with his feet firmly planted on
earth and being the practical man that he was, he had done his calculations well
before starting the work. He had secured the financial support of influential and
wealthy people; but when it came down to it he was left alone. The truth is this:
“When it came to starting the work I had not a penny to spend on it.” And here
follows one of those arguments that only saints know how to make: “On the one
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hand there was certainty that that building was to the greater glory of God, on the
other hand it contrasted with the absolute lack of means.”
It would have been called a dilemma without solution, but Don Bosco measured
things by higher standards. What was his conclusion? Here it is: “Then it became
clear that the Queen of heaven did not want moral bodies (the support of the city
authorities, etc.), but real bodies, that is, Mary’s true devotees… and she herself
wanted to put her hand in and make it known that, being her own work, she herself
wanted to construct it: Aedificavit sibi domum Maria.”
Work began from scratch. Don Bosco did not spare himself: but someone in the
shadows worked with him and for him. This someone was Mary Help of Christians.
This is how their “working as a pair” between Don Bosco and Mary Help of
Christians, their “doing things together”, their “mysterious cooperation” had now
become stronger and irresistible since its origins going back to the first dream.
The material construction of the church was enriched each day by portentous
events that left Don Bosco himself surprised and almost dismayed, so much so
that he felt the need to consult with Bishop Bertagna, who in a valubale testimony
at the Ordinary Process made the following statement:
I believe it is true that Don Bosco had the supernatural gift of
healing the sick. I heard this from him himself when we were
both at the Retreat at the Sanctuary of San Ignazio sopra Lanzo.
He told me this in order to have advice regarding continuing to
bless the sick with the images of Mary Help of Christians and the
Saviour, because, he said, there was such a stir regarding many
healings that happened and that looked miraculous, following
blessings he had given. And I believe that Don Bosco was telling
the truth. For better or for worse, I believed I advised Don Bosco
to continue his blessings.
Don Bosco went back more serenely continuing to do as before. He imparted the
blessing of Mary Help of Christians, exhorted devotees to honour her with their
holiness of life, some donations for her church, and Mary listened to him: the sick
were healed, knotty problems were solved, spiritual healings multiplied. It was
evident that Mary Help of Christians was giving credit to her faithful servant.
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The painting created by Don Bosco
“If I wanted to expound the multitude of deeds [extraordinary and miraculous
ones he is talking about] I would have to make not just a small booklet, but large
volumes.”
Don Bosco is truthful when he concludes, “We have gone about constructing
this majestic building of ours with an astonishing amount of effort without anyone
ever organising a collection of any kind. Who could believe it? One sixth of the
expenditure was covered by donations from devout people; the rest were all
donations made for graces received.”
The popular conscience was not long in discovering this wonderful understanding
between Mary Help of Christians and Don Bosco, the inseparable link that united
them: Don Bosco was truly the “Saint of Mary Help of Christians”, and Mary Help
of Christians was truly the “Don Bosco’s Madonna"”. This term which has come
from the believers' intuition of faith is now entrusted to history.
In his humility, Don Bosco never ceased to say that he had nothing to do with
it: it was Mary Help of Christians who did everything: “I am not the author of the
great things that you see; it is the Lord, it is Mary Most Holy who deigned to use
a poor priest to carry out such works. Of my own I put nothing into it. Aedificavit
sibi domum Maria. Every stone, every ornament signals a grace.” “Mary raised
it up by dint of miracles!”
The painting created by Don Bosco
“Don Bosco’s Madonna” has its classical expression in Lorenzoni’s painting above
the high altar. This is the Madonna that well expresses Don Bosco’s intimate
feeling and the state of mind of struggling Catholics in need of security, as well as
the position of “Mary Queen and Mother of the Church”.
In his mind, Don Bosco was yearning for something more splendid and grandiose.
When he spoke of it to the painter as something he had long contemplated, he
astounded everyone with the boldness of his aim.
He expressed his thoughts as follows: “Above, the Most Holy Mary among the
choirs of Angels; around Her, closer, the Apostles, then the choirs of Prophets,
Virgins and Confessors. Below, the emblems of Mary’s great victories and the
peoples of the various parts of the world in the act of raising their hands to Her
asking for help.”
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Oh! Mother! Mother!
His concept of salvation history led him to place the Church at the heart of the
world, and at the heart of the Church he contemplated Mary Help of Christians –
the blossoming of the Church before the Church began – the almighty Mother, the
victor over evil. The picture was reduced to sensible proportions, but the inspiring
idea remained.
Oh! Mother! Mother!
He wanted to propagate devotion to Mary Help of Christians in every possible way:
he wrote six popular books in her honour, dedicated the Institute of the Daughters
of Mary Help of Christians to her, founded the Archconfraternity of her devotees
[ADMA], spread the Blessing of Mary Help of Christians, her Novena, her image,
her medals; he never tired of saying, “Trust in Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament
and in Mary Help of Christians in everything, and you will see what miracles are.”
Don Bosco teaches us that Our Lady must have a special place in our heart: if
she did not have it, it would mean that there is something profoundly wrong in
us. He teaches us that devotion to Mary must start from within, from what is most
essential and profound, namely the intimate relationship with the living person of
Mary, felt, loved, served as Mother of God, Mother of the Church, Mother and
Help of all.
In his personal piety, Don Bosco respected and celebrated all the prerogatives
and titles with which the Church honours the Mother of God. But we know that his
favourite titles were the Immaculate and Help of Christians.
All this was but the mediation through which he nourished his existential, personal,
intimate relationship with Mary. The deepest core of his Marian devotion always
began from there. The whole of his life proves this, and it is still confirmed by the
moving invocations that appeared on his lips in his final hour, essential and without
further qualification: “Jesus… Jesus… Mary… Mary… Oh! Mother, Mother. Open
the gates of paradise to me.”
The Marian revival advocated by the Holy Father must focus on the essential,
without ever dissociating the Mother from the Son and the Spirit that leads us to
the adulthood of Christ, and thus into intimacy with the Father.
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Chapter 6 WORKING “WITH FAITH,
HOPE AND CHARITY”
Baptism radically changes our way of being and living: it makes us partakers of the
divine nature, it incorporates us into Christ and the Church, it makes us children
of God, it makes us new creatures. And for this “newness of life” to be possible,
the Holy Spirit infuses in us, through his gifts, the powerful energy of faith, hope
and charity which imply an involvement of all reality in God.
The theological virtues, we know, constitute holiness in real and dynamic terms
and are the very essence of the inner life. It is not enough to call them “virtues” or
“habits” when they are instead the way Christian life is structured. They are the
total dimension of Christian life. It is the whole human being alive in Christ and
the Holy Spirit through them. For Abraham as for Mary, to believe meant giving
oneself, full of hope, to a person who is supremely loved.
Let us add that in the Bible, faith, hope and charity are always presented in “vital
unity” as “different aspects of a complex but unique spiritual attitude” (J. Duplacy).
Charity does not exist without faith and hope; faith and hope are only alive when
informed by charity.
It is important to make separate acts of the individual theological virtues but more
important still to live them “together”, jointly, summed up in charity.
Don Bosco did not theorise his experience of faith, hope and charity, but lived it
intensively in the midst of the most diverse activities.
Indicative in this regard may be the sermon he gave at Trofarello on 18 September
1869 and the first part of the so-called “dream of the ten diamonds”. We have a
handwritten outline of the sermon which he delivered at the end of the Retreat.
Don Bosco develops the theme: “Working with faith, hope and charity”.
Related to this theme is the dream of the “diamonds” or “virtues” that shine on the
mantle of the personage in which we can see the personification of Don Bosco.
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Let us work with faith
Five are placed on the breast and draw the face of the Salesian as he must appear
before the world; five are placed on the back and are destined to remain rather
hidden. The diamonds that sparkle on the breast are those of “faith, hope and
charity”. Charity is placed on the heart. On the right and left shoulder are the
diamonds of “work” and “temperance”, which make up the Salesian coat of arms:
they are systematically connected with the previous ones.
“Salesian life,” Fr Philip Rinaldi wrote, “considered in its activity is work and
temperance, enlivened by the charity of the heart in the ever brighter light of faith
and hope.”
In this very elaborate dream, Don Bosco finds no better way to define the face
of the Salesian than to refer to the theological triad, the synthesis and substance
of the Christian life.
That Don Bosco like every other saint preferred the theological virtues above
everything else is shown, for example, by the biographies of his little heroes. For
example, he praises “The liveliness of his faith, his
constant hope, his tireless zeal in doing good and helping others” of Dominic
Savio. Let us clarify the Saint’s thinking.
Let us work with faith
Don Bosco explained: not for human aims, not to be “applauded with a bravo!
good!”, but “to do something pleasing to the Lord”, to “aspire to the reward that
awaits us”. For the saint, faith was his charter from heaven, the global view from
above on his life, his plans, his actions, on all the things he was immerxsed in.
Faith infused him with an intimate awareness of his Christian identity; it led him to
see, judge, act according to the perspective of God, of Christ and His Spirit. Faith
was truly the reason for all his work: “Faith,” he said, “is what does everything”;
without “the fire of faith, man’s work is nothing”.
Faith led him to evaluate everyday realities with a critical eye and supernatural
discernment, to face them with “liveliness” and “greatness of faith”. “In the midst
of the hardest trials, one needs great faith in God” he asserted. He exhorted, with
St Paul, that in the hour of trial we should “take the shield of faith” (Eph 6:16).
Although he had more than reason to console himself for the good he had done,
he looked at what remained to be done and regretted that he had not had enough
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faith and had not done more. “Had I had a hundred times more faith I would have
done a hundred times more than what I did.” Yet he was a formidable believer: he
lived, worked and prayed “as though he saw him who is invisible” (Heb 11:27). In
audiences, when asked for advice, he did not answered immediately; he raised
his eyes to heaven as someone who seeks the necessary light from God, and
then he gave answers full of faith.
His whole life, wrote Fr Ceria, was an exercise in living faith: “Thoughts, affections,
endeavours, daring, pain, sacrifices, pious practices, and the spirit of prayer were
all flames released by faith.”
Although his trust in God was boundless, he often repeated, “If the work is yours,
Lord, you will sustain it; if the work is mine, I am happy for it to fall.”
The Vatican Council made this important affirmation: “Only by the light of faith
and by meditation on the word of God can one always and everywhere recognize
God in Whom ‘we live, and move, and have our being’, seek His will in every
event, see Christ in everyone whether he be a relative or a stranger, and make
correct judgments about the true meaning and value of temporal things both in
themselves and in their relation to man’s final goal.” (Apostolicam Actuositatem
no. 4). Don Bosco could not have known these words, but Christian sense guided
him to practise them fully, under the influence of the Spirit.
He seemed to be submerged in endless business and activities, but his faith was
the soul of everything. He knew how to grasp the invisible in the visible, how to
collaborate, as few do, with the divine Risen One in spreading the Kingdom, in
saving souls. Fr Viganò has said, “Don Bosco perceived almost spontaneously
the historical depth of the Christian faith. Even as a scholar and as a writer he was
enthusiastic about the concrete aspects of salvation history. In fact, more than a
thinker, he is a narrator of God; a narrator of bible history, a narrator of the lives
of the saints, of the history of the Church.”
He always strove for his sons to have a '“working” and “dynamic” faith as St James
wants (Jas 2:17). A faith that was “alive” and able to “move mountains”. He was
an extreme defender of the faith, for which he repeatedly put his life at risk; an
incomparable “educator of the faith” of generations of young people.
His exhortation to “work with faith” was not just a conviction rooted in his soul: it
was the expression of his experience, a synthesis of his existence.
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Work with hope
Don Bosco comments: “When we are tired, when we have tribulations, let us raise
our eyes to heaven; a great reward awaits us in life, in death, in eternity.” This was
his typical way of thinking and reasoning. His mind did not fixate on the past, it
did not close itself in the present moment, it reached out, as if by instinct, towards
the ultimate realities.
The man who seemed to be completely absorbed in earthly activities actually
gravitated towards the eternal. He said: “Walk with your feet on the ground,” which
was his realism - “but with your heart dwell in heaven.” This was his hope.
The intelligence of faith, which opened him up to the evil in the world to be healed
and prevented, and to the immense possibilities of good to be made to grow,
powerfully stimulated the energy of his hope and launched him into action.
He often said, “Courage, let’s work, let’s always work, because we will find our
eternal rest beyond.”
“Always work” could, in the abstract, mean many things; in concrete terms it meant
feeling involved in the plan of salvation and committed to God’s cause.
Hope was an ever present attitude in Don Bosco’s life, as much as faith and
charity. Hope was the expectation of future goods, the certainty of God “before
him”, unlimited confidence in the rescuing power of the Father, Jesus and
Mary. It was the Holy Spirit’s voice of courage that launched him into daring,
unprecedented and definitely not risk-free undertakings. Scripture teaches that
hope, even if winged, is not exempt from obscurity and temptation, it is not always
triumphant; it involves struggle, combat, trial: “For some weeks,” he wrote to
Marchioness M. Assunta Frassati, “I have been living in hope and affliction.” Even
from this point of view Don Bosco revealed himself to be a great man of hope,
because he was capable of “hoping against hope” and of attempting the humanly
impossible by trusting in God’s strength.
He often said, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13).
“There will be nothing of this in heaven.” “Courage! Hope sustains us when
patience would fail.” "What sustains patience must be the hope of the reward.”
And again, “Sometimes we find ourselves exhausted, overwhelmed by some
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inconvenience: but let us take courage: up there we will rest.” And, as he was wont
to do, he raised his right hand towards heaven, indicating his full trust in the Lord.
St Paul’s words, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth
comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18) were his recurring
motivation. Let us say again that his hope was firm and uns”hakable because it
was anchored in the “already' of the Lord’s Easter, Pentecost, the reality of the
Church, the sacraments, the first fruits of the Holy Spirit, which are given to us
as a seed. This elating “already” was also matched in him by the consciousness
of the “not yet”, of lack, negation, limitation, never separated from the positive
awareness of the need for development and growth of the good disseminated in
history and of the divine life cast in time.
The "“not yet” of hope is in fact inseparable from its “already”; it is included in it
like vitality in the seed. Now, whoever looks at Don Bosco’s life perceives that his
hope was lived as the practical and daily planning of a tireless work of personal
sanctification and his efforts at saving everyone. “Salve, salvando, salvati” was a
common greeting of his. A hope nourished by the “already” and the “not yet”.
Among the most beautiful fruits of hope in Don Bosco’s life were the overwhelming
“joy” inherent in the certainty of the “already” of faith; the unalterable “patience” in
trials, linked to the demands of the “not yet”; his “pedagogical sensitivity”, in which
daring, magnanimity, shrewdness and holy cunning played a large part, virtues
typical of those who believe and firmly hope that their future “does not disappoint”.
When he exhorted his disciples to “work with hope”, Don Bosco was inviting them
to look to the paradise for which we were made; to trust in the almighty help of the
heavenly Father, and Mary; to commit themselves deeply to fighting the seeds
of evil that infest the world, and to develop, optimistically, the seeds of good to
build a better future for the Church and the world. For him, this meant “working
with hope”.
Work with charity
This was Don Bosco’s most insistent recommendation. Charity is an attitude of
love towards people who are either God himself or his image, human beings. It
is the fullness of Christian life, the form of all the virtues. The Gospel command
says to love God above all things and our neighbour as ourselves. God always
comes first: his love alone is the cause and source of our love for our neighbour.
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If one does not love God one cannot divinely love others: “First of all God gives
us the capacity to love Him; and it is onto this gift that love of neighbour is
grafted” (Catechism for Adults). In his brief notes on his sermon on “Working with
faith, hope and charity”, Don Bosco dwelt at length on the exercise of charity
towards our neighbour, but gave absolute precedence to the love of God. His
short note, as concise as it is profound, begins precisely with these words: “Work
with charity towards God. He alone is worthy to be loved and served, the true
rewarder of every little thing we do for Him. He loves us as a most loving Father.
Charitate perpetua dilexi te … (Jer 31:3)".
Don Bosco’s view of God was never separate from the certainty that God loves
us with infinite tenderness – like a father – and from the idea of the reward
he reserves for his chosen ones. God, he said, is “infinitely rich and of infinite
generosity. As a rich man he can give us ample reward for everything we do out
of love for him; as a Father of infinite generosity he pays with abundant measure
every smallest thing we do out of love.”
“Do things out of love”, “work for love” was his whole life, his great
recommendation. Everything in our being must vibrate for God: “The eyes must
see for God, the feet walk for God, the hands work for God, the heart beat for
God, our whole body serve for God.”
These recommendations were a reflection of his life in which the love of God
reigned supreme. This is proven by this testimony of Cardinal Cagliero, chosen
from among many others: “Divine love shone from his face, from his whole person,
from all the words that flowed from his heart when he spoke of God in the pulpit, in
the confessional, in private and public conferences and in family conversations.
This love was the only longing, the only sigh, the most ardent desire of his entire
life.”
Don Bosco was certainly someone who loved God immensely, even if he was
able to cleverly conceal it. But no less strong was his love for his neighbour in
whom he grasped the permanent manifestation of the Lord.
The energy of his charity towards his neighbour, especially towards the most
abandoned young people, drove him, as we have recalled, to manifestations
of maternal delicacy, attitudes of brotherliness, goodness, understanding and
sacrifice that are higher than any praise. His charity, however, essentially had
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its own face: it was “pastoral” and “pedagogical” charity. Pastoral charity was his
intimate participation in the salvific concern of Christ the Good Shepherd, apostle
of the Father, consumed by the zeal of his home. “It is a priestly love,” Fr Viganò
writes, “enlightened by faith and that deeply enlivens the dynamic of hope, to
fight against evil, to help one’s neighbour, especially the young, in the work of
salvation.”
Pastoral charity explains the mysticism of the Da mihi animas, the immense effort
sustained for the spread of the Kingdom of God. “The Lord,” he said, “has put us
in the world for others.” “Let each one endeavour to arm his heart with that charity
that gives his life to save souls.”
Work with pastoral charity and pedagogical charity at the same time: the two forms
are similar, but pedagogical charity is inspired by the Preventive System, by its
methodology based on reason, religion, loving-kindness, of which supernatural
charity is the most complete expression. The practice of this system “is all based”,
writes Don Bosco in his little treatise on the Preventive System, on the words of
St. Paul: Charitas benigna est, patiens est, … omnia suffert, omnia sperat, omnia
sustinet. Love is kind, and patient; it puts up with all things, but hopes all things and
endures any disturbance. (l Cor 13:4,7).” The charity of the Preventive System is
unmistakeable, “kindness erected as a system”, and has something of the tender
and strong love that Jesus showed to the little ones and the least. “The Preventive
System,” Don Bosco said, “is charity, the holy fear of God infused into hearts”. The
education of the young “is a matter of the heart”, and “charity is the bond that binds
hearts”. Those who wish to work fruitfully among the young “must keep charity
in their hearts and practise patience with their work.” And since Salesian work is
mainly resolved in a prolonged educational relationship, he wanted it to be closely
united with other virtues such as humility and integrity of heart: “Charity, chastity,
humility are three queens that always go together: one cannot exist without the
others.”
As a practical model of life to propose to his sons he found no better than the
gentle kindness of St Francis de Sales, the gentleness of his mild and patient
charity. It did not matter to Don Bosco, the son of humble peasants, that Francis
was a saint from his homeland – Savoy-Piedmont – and an aristocrat, the son of
princes. What mattered to him was his meekness, his gentleness that made him a
living image of the Saviour. He wrote to his procurator: “Dear Fr Dalmazzo, work,
but always with the gentleness of St Francis de Sales and the patience of Job.”
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Our culture exalts work to the point of making a myth out of it. But it is, for the most
part, a one-dimensional work, aimed at the welfare society, lived with an activist
and horizontalist perspective, an end in itself. Don Bosco also exalted the dignity
of work, but he did not make it an absolute, he did not put it before the dignity of
the person; he made it a living expression of charity, at the service of humankind.
He conceived of it and lived it in a Christian manner, as a practical exercise of
the triad of faith, hope and charity: a decidedly supernatural, sanctifying work.
The enthusiasm he showed for work is rooted the depths of the theological life,
in union with God.
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Chapter 7 ACTION AS THE
SPIRITUAL “PLACE OF
ENCOUNTER” WITH GOD
Don Bosco’s life – we have noted – is traversed by prayer like the river bed by
its waters. But prayer was not the only mediation by which the Saint lived in
intimacy with God. Alongside the union of prayer he came to know and practise,
to an equally heroic degree, what, with Libermann, we can also call “practical” or
“active” union with God, which takes place in and through action. We have this
description of practical action: “it is an intimate union with the Spirit in the heart
of the active life, thanks to a permanent state of availability and attention to God
that should lead us to think, love, will, act only under the exclusive influence of
the One who has become like the soul of our soul.”
“Practical union” is, essentially, participation, in different degrees, in God’s
creative and salvific action. We can distinguish three levels: apostolic, charitable,
secular, which Don Bosco used as mediations to go to God and make his
multifaceted activity the habitual place of his encounter with the Lord. Let us look
at it briefly.
Union through apostolic activities
Don Bosco’s apostolate activities, understood in the strict sense, are distinguished
from any other form of charitable activity because they were the continuation
and extension of Christ’s own redemptive activity, spreading his message of
salvation and communicating divine life. In this type of activity, Don Bosco worked
“in persona Christi”. He was his “instrument” by virtue of his priestly ordination.
This means that not only were his intentions spiritual, but spiritual was the very
structure of his actions, insofar as they were a direct extension of the salvific and
actual action of Christ the Saviour.
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Apostolic activity thus greatly facilitates union with God. “It is enough for the
apostle, so to speak, to adhere seriously to his apostolic activity so that he
penetrates the supernatural order and participates in the outpouring of grace” (Ch.
Bemard). All that is needed is to come out of oneself ( = ecstasy) and intensely
unite oneself to the action by which the risen Christ continues to accomplish
the salvation of the world, in order to become attuned to Him and progressively
conform to Him.
This is what the Council recommends to priests. For them to attain holiness “in
their own way” it is sufficient that they exercise their proper functions “in the Spirit
of Christ… sincerely and indefatigably” (Presbyterorum Ordinis no. 13).
That the intense exercise of his apostolate – evangelisation, sacraments, prayer,
etc. – was one of the great means by which Don Bosco lived intensely his union
with God is beyond doubt. We have already mentioned how his priesthood was
the unifying principle of his entire life. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an apostle
more identified with his mission, more present to his Lord in the exercise of his
ministry.
The “friend of the young” and of the “working class”, the “forerunner of the
new times” was always, first and foremost, a minister of the Lord, a conscious
instrument united with divinity, a prophet of God who worked and acted in his
name. Others marvelled at his works, his daring undertakings; more modestly, he
considered himself to be no more than a humble instrument in the hands of the
divine craftsman: “It is up to the craftsman and not the instrument to provide the
means to continue them and bring them to a good end; it is up to me only to show
myself docile and pliable in his hands.”
In the faithful fulfilment of his priestly duties Don Bosco lived in deep recollection
with God. Everyone could see this; for example, from the way he celebrated
Holy Mass and administered the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or from his way of
praying.
Charitable activities
We have just mentioned the ease with which Don Bosco, a man of active life, could
be united with God through apostolic action; let us add that another privileged
way to live in communion with God was charitable activities. They fill the twenty
volumes of the Biographical Memoirs. It is not our task to review them. Nor do
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we intend to repeat the discourse on the dynamic charity that gave sense and
substance to his efforts. We only want to mention, fleetingly, how the practice of
fraternal charity was, in turn, a privileged mediation of his continuous union with
God.
The fact that in the exercise of his pastoral and pedagogical charity, Don Bosco
was no longer the direct extension of Christ’s saving activity as in the apostolate,
takes nothing away from the depth of his charity and his capacity for intimacy with
God. For two essential reasons above all.
The first is to be found in the fact that every positive action towards one’s
neighbour, every relationship of true fraternity, is always sanctifying because it is
a participation in the very action of God, who is infinite charity.
The second, because every exercise of charity is the fulfilment of Jesus' new
commandment: “Love one another” (Jn 13:34).
The essence of perfection lies in charity that does not separate one’s neighbour
from God, the supreme source of all love.
The Christian tradition, from St Augustine to St Gregory, to St Bernard, to the
modern saints, has never separated the Christian life from the commitment to
charity. When faced with a choice between prayer and a certain duty of charity
everyone says that the duty of charity is more urgent, because it responds to
a clearer will of God (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Don Bosco always moved within this
perspective. He loved God in his neighbour and his neighbour in God. He used
to say: “Whoever wants to work fruitfully must have charity in his heart”; “It is the
bonds of charity that hold us everywhere in the Lord”. He was convinced that
young people are the “delight and pupil of the divine eye” and he favoured them
with boundless love: “It is precisely my life to be with you”. For them he gave his
“substance and life”. But what moved him to love them was not just an innate
tendency – which he had to a great extent – but the pastoral love of Christ that
drove him to see in them the privileged place of divine love. And the closer the
young people were to the Saviour through their poverty and abandonment, the
more they stimulated his industrious charity. One would have said that he had the
almost physical impression of seeing and touching the face of the Lord in them.
Don Bosco literally gave himself for his neighbour, but we also need to say that his
neighbour – especially the young – were the sacrament in which he met the Lord
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daily. It was a mutual giving and receiving that filled him with profound satisfaction:
“Oh! what consolation one feels when one arrives at evening tired and exhausted
of strength, having spent the whole day for the glory of God and the salvation of
souls!”
Union through “secular activities”
Don Bosco made a place for his encounter with God, the way to Him even
with predominantly secular activities in which his life abounded – normal and
professional work, school, press, culture, etc.
First and foremost, because every activity of even a creaturely kind, as long
as it is upright, is always a participation in God’s action, in his benevolent will
written in things and regulating events. Christian tradition has always seen God
present through his first revelation in the universe. Even professional, social,
technical endeavour, being cooperation with God’s creative intention, is in itself
good and can be transfigured and recapitulated in the mystery of incarnation and
redemption.
We know that Don Bosco sanctified secular activities by intentionally directing
them to God. The right intention was of great importance in his spirituality, in
sanctified work. “It is enough sanctify work with a right intention, with acts of union
with the Lord and Our Lady and by doing it as well as you can” he would say.
Everything in his life, as we have already seen, was motivated and aimed at the
glory of God and the salvation of souls. This is clear, as Fr Braido points out,
“from the diagnosis and judgement he formulated of his times and their needs.
It is not the judgement of the peqagogue, the sociologist or the politician, but of
the priest who sees everything sub specie aeternitatis, the glory of God and the
salvation of souls.” Don Bosco did not contradict himself: even where his work
seemed marked by the profane, his motivations were elevated. The interests of
the Kingdom and of souls dominated everything. “Let the men of the world say
that the time of the religious is past,” he confided to his Salesians, “that convents
are in ruins everywhere; we want to cooperate with the Lord at any cost for the
salvation of souls.” And he complained that in Paris, as in St Petersburg, London,
Florence, only “armies, wars, conquests, finances” were discussed and debated.
The loftiness of his intentions gave new substance to things.
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The divinisation of work through the value of intention, says Teilhard de Chardin,
"“infuses all our actions with a precious soul”. The right intention, the will to serve
God alone, “is truly the golden key that opens our inner world to the presence of
God. It energetically expresses the substantial value of the divine will.”
Intention is a very positive value of life in the Spirit; we will be judged by the
intentions of our actions. There is therefore no justification for criticism of intention,
unless it is confused with a vague and unrealistic aspiration to God based on a
vacuum. In his healthy realism Don Bosco did not dissociate good intentions from
good works. He preferred not-so-perfect work to the good intentions which hell is
paved with. He demanded that “things be done”, and added: “the best possible”
but he was also content with what was only possible.
Right intention was not, however, the only means by which Don Bosco sanctified
secular activities. In fact he systematically took them on and experienced them
as a “duty of state”, an unquestionable requirement of a clear divine disposition.
Today there is a tendency to silence everything that smacks of imposition and
duty. The “spirituality of duty” was very much in vogue at the time of Don Bosco.
Beyond possible false interpretations, let us remember that this is a value that
has lost neither its bite nor its relevance.
Indeed, it is rightly assumed that the present situation, even the profane, contains
the will of God. D. Caussade writes: “God’s order is the fullness of all our moments;
it expresses itself under a thousand different appearances that necessarily
become our present duty, and form, make the new man grow in us to the fullness
that divine Wisdom has established for us.”
The more the gaze of faith, hope and love discerns God’s presence in things, the
easier it will be to surrender to his will in the present moment. Don Bosco lived in
and from this perspective. In fact he considered duty well done as the surest and
easiest mediation to achieve practical union with God.
Hence his proverbial and almost continuous insistence to disciples and young
people that “God sees you”, his insistence on the need to live and work “in”
the presence of God: “This thought of God’s presence [here and now] must
accompany us at all times, in every place, in every action.” “Let each one perform
the duties of his office in the presence of God.”
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Union through “secular activities”
Don Bosco’s spirituality was definitely, if not exclusively, a spirituality of duty. This
is authoritatively affirmed by Fr Caviglia: “Precision in duty is, for Don Bosco, the
first article of all holiness, the first postulate of spirituality… Those who know the
holy Educator more closely know that this concept was at the basis of all his
educational work, as much in the setting of ordinary life as in the spiritual. He did
not believe in displays of piety unless they were confirmed by the diligent and
conscientious observance of their respective duties.”
At this point we can go a step further and ask the question: did Don Bosco, who
gave so much importance to work and activity in general, give them an internal
value, regardless of the upright intention and the will to perform a specific duty? In
other words, did he perceive that even profane activities can orient themselves to
God from within – as long as they are upright ones – because of their consistency
and relative autonomy? These are modern perspectives that traditional spirituality
did not pose. But insofar as it is true that those who are guided only by “good
intentions” hardly avoid a certain dichotomy or separation between spiritual life
on the one hand and active life on the other, we should find some trace of this
division in Don Bosco.
Saints such as Augustine, Gregory the Great and many others, including Cafasso
himself, always felt, at the height of their activity, a strong nostalgia for time
devoted to prayer. Nothing similar can be found in Don Bosco’s life. When at night,
with Mamma Margaret, he mended the rips in the clothes that the youngsters had
made during the day, he did not regret other more priestly work, he did not appear
torn between prayer and action, he did not feel a longing to be elsewhere. He
accepted the profane and transfigures it, with what Fr Viganò happily calls “the
grace of unity”, which is a single movement of charity towards God and towards
neighbour.
“In this grace of unity,” explains this authoritative interpreter of the saint’s
thought, “we find the strategic element of the Salesian interior life. Unity between
what? Unity between his gaze on God – adoration, listening, prayer – and the
commitment to salvation that he launches among the young, in such a way,
however, that this commitment is not a distraction from that gaze, and that the
gaze is not an evasion from the commitment, but that the one nourishes the other;
the one is the support, the moment of search and reference for the other. It is
easier said than practised, we are all convinced of that; but Don Bosco lived it
this way.”
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The “grace of unity” can be said to be the core of his spirituality. A spirituality that
does not sacrifice prayer to action and action to prayer. However, between an
apostolic, charitable and humanising urgency and prolonged prayer, Don Bosco’s
charism led him to choose action, in which he saw a precise divine will. But it
must also be said that he was so united to God in action that he did not regret
prayer; and he was so united to God in prayer that he did not regret action. Action
and prayer were truly lived as converging moments of an intense theological life
of which pastoral charity was the synthesis. Don Bosco showed that he was at
ease in the city of God and in the city of man because he lived his immersion in
God in both.
Let us repeat: it is not the quantity of prayer that decides holiness, just as it is
not the quantity of action, but the degree of intensity of faith, hope and charity,
a degree subordinated to God’s will, the supreme rule of our praying and acting.
When God’s will calls to prayer we must pray, when it calls to action we must act.
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Chapter 8 SUPERIOR GIFTS
To speak of Don Bosco’s mystical life is an extremely demanding undertaking
that exceeds the limits of this work. We limit ourselves to a few brief tentative
suggestions that we hope will not be in vain, even if, in some respects, they are
debatable.
Ecstasy of action
In his Treatise on the Love of God, St Francis de Sales takes up the classical
distinction of the three ecstasies: “as to sacred ecstasies, they are of three kinds;
the one of them belongs to the understanding, another to the affection, and the
third to action. The one is in splendour, the other in fervour, the third in works: the
one is made by admiration, the other by devotion, and the third by operation”. The
first two do not have the solidity of the third because they can be falsified and end
up turning us in the wrong direction.
“When therefore we see a soul that has raptures in prayer, by which she goes out
from and mounts above herself in God, and yet has no ecstasy in her life, that is,
leads not a life elevated and united to God… it is a true mark that such raptures
and ecstasies are but operations and deceits of the evil spirit.”
Unfortunately, the saint does not go into the explanation of the “ecstasy of action”
but clearly expresses his thoughts in this description that is considered classic.
Let us read it while keeping our eye fixed on Don Bosco.
Not to steal, not to lie, not to commit impurity, to pray to God,
not to swear in vain, to love and honour one’s father, not to kill,
—is to live according to man’s natural reason: but to forsake all
our goods, to love poverty, to call her and to consider her a most
delightful mistress, to repute reproaches, contempts, abjections,
persecutions, martyrdoms, as felicities and beatitudes, to contain
oneself within the terms of a most absolute chastity, and in fine
to live, amidst the world and in this mortal life, contrary to all
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the opinions and maxims of the world, and against the current of
the river of this life, by habitual resignations, renunciations, and
abnegatioris of ourselves;—this is not to live in ourselves, but out
of and above ourselves; and because no one is able to go out of
himself in this manner above himself unless the eternal Father
draw him, hence it is that this kind of life is a perpetual rapture,
and a continual ecstasy of action and operation. “You are dead,”
said the great Apostle to the Colossians, “and your life is hid with
Christ in God.”
As we can see, “the ecstasy of action” or “of life” is nothing less than Christian
existence perfectly in accordance with the law of the Gospel, charity lived in its
fullness; supreme detachment from self and full absorption in God; life that, by
divine virtue, is elevated above itself and lived to the highest possible perfection,
far beyond what the ordinary Christian does.
The term “ecstasy of action” is not found in Don Bosco’s vocabulary. It is doubtful
that he encountered it; and if he did, it left no trace in his mind. St Francis' name
does not appear in the list of authors he read in the seminary. Whether or how
much he read about him in the Convitto is unknown. Yet the Bishop of Geneva’s
description of the “ecstasy of action” finds full adherence in his life. It is remarkable
that two of his successors, Fr Philip Rinaldi and Fr Egidio Viganò, saw a typical
expression of the “spirituality of Don Bosco” in this doctrine of St Francis de Sales.
And this both because the pastoral charity which animated him, led him continually
to “come out of himself” and identify with the Redeemer’s saving love, and
because his whole life was truly the faithful expression of what St Francis de Sales
has to say about the ecstasy of action. What in fact was that heroic self-denial,
continuous dominion of his passions, radical adhesion to and the following of the
chaste, humble, poor Christ, that slow consuming of himself in his work to save
souls and constant search for God’s will and glory, if not the “superhuman” and
“ecstatic” life to which the Father raises the souls he prefers, because they live
“all absorbed and as if absorbed in God?” This “ecstasy of life”, per se, does
not involve ecstatic manifestations of which Don Bosco’s life was, however, not
entirely exempt.
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Ecstatic phenomena
Ecstatic phenomena
These phenomena are characterised by a strong absorption in God and by lngthy,
intense suspension of the external senses that seem to be powerless to deal with
the irruption of the divine. Don Bosco’s strong character led him to dominate the
fire of love burning inside him and not to let his feelings seep out.
But in his later years, as reliable testimony shows, he also experienced ecstatic
phenomena that usually accompany the highest degrees of prayer. They could be
glimpsed in moments of deepest recollection. Fr Cerruti testified at the information
process that
when his head ached and his distraught chest and half-dull eyes
no longer allowed him to keep himself busy, it was a painful and
comforting sight to see him spend long hours sitting on his poor
sofa, in a sometimes semi-dark place because his eyes did not
suffer light, yet he was always calm and smiling, rosary in hand,
prayer on his lips and his hands raised from time to time in a
silent language that manifested his union and entire conformity
to the will of God. He was too tired to express it in words. I am
intimately convinced that his life, in his last years especially, was
one continuous prayer to God.
Moments of true ecstasy seized Don Bosco when he celebrated Holy Mass or
while he was alone in the quiet of his room. In the winter of 1878 the two young
men who were serving Mass in the chapel near his room at the elevation “noticed”,
we read in the Biographical Memoirs,
Don Bosco was in ecstasy, his face suffused with a heavenly
expression which seemed to flood the whole chapel withlight.
By degrees Don Bosco’s feet left the altar platform, so that he
remained suspended in air for some ten minutes. The two altar
boys could not reach up to his chasuble. In utter bewilderment
Garrone dashed out to call Father Berto but could not find him.
On coming back he saw that Don Bosco was just descending, so
that his feet once more touched the floor, but a heavenly aura still
seemed to hover about the altar.
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A mystic of action
Sometimes his body was transfigured and became luminous, as we read of many
saints. For three late evenings, Fr Lemoyne saw Don Bosco’s face gradually
light up until it took on a luminous transparency: the whole face had a strong,
transparent radiance.
As we said, these paramystical phenomena usually accompany the mystical state,
infused contemplation. Don Bosco had this gift, but was it “the feeling of entering,
not by virtue of an effort, but of an appeal, into immediate contact, without image,
without speech, but not without light, with an infinite Goodness?” (Leoncius of
Grandmaison)
It is not easy to answer with a hasty yes or no given the almost total absence of
any description by Don Bosco of his inner states. Fr Ceria believes it and tries to
prove it in the chapter of his Don Bosco with God entitled “The Gift of prayer”. Fr
Stella, although more nuanced and reticent, comes to the same conclusion when
he writes
Although Don Bosco does not entrust us with his personal
experiences of recollection and a unitive state of prayer, and
although he does not offer us a theory on unitive prayer and
contemplation, nevertheless he shows himself willing to explain
certain states of spiritual life found in people with whom he lived
as union and loving presence.
We can think, for example, of St Dominic Savio endowed with "“graces” that Don
Bosco did not hesitate to define as “special”, and of “extraordinary” facts that have
“full resemblance to facts recorded in the Bible and in the lives of the saints”. Don
Bosco associates them with mystical graces when he says, “The innocence of his
life, his love of God and great desire for the things of God so developed Dominic’s
mind that he came to be habitually united with
God.” What is said here of the disciple applies, with more reason, to the master
A mystic of action
Was Don Bosco a mystic in his multifaceted activity in the strong sense of the
word? Mysticism has a long history and does not always have unambiguous
definitions. Objectively it designates the hidden reality of the Christian mystery;
subjectively it indicates the totally gratuitous and infused experience of the divine
life within us.
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A mystic of action
Traditionally, the mystical life culminates in the grace of infused prayer, or
contemplation in the narrow sense. However, it is recognised that the typology of
mystical life is more extensive. In fact, one can also speak of “apostolic mysticism”,
which is “less well known because the ‘apostolic’ mystics did not make a theology
of their inner life. It tends towards action and the perception of God’s presence in
the historical world” (Ch. Bemard).
In this precise and formal sense we say that Don Bosco is a mystic, because his
life was spent under the habitual regime of the gifts of the Holy Spirit: he is a mystic
of apostolic action, because the gifts of the Holy Spirit that take the upper hand in
him are those ordered to action – the gift of counsel, fortitude, piety and the fear
of God. The prevalence of these gifts over the others, which are not excluded,
only means that grace adapts to nature, respects its temperament and vocations.
Unlike contemplative, intellectual or affective mystics who lose themselves in
God found in the depths of their soul and experience divine action, Don Bosco,
an active mystic, grasped and experienced God not only in certain moments
of explicit prayer, but in the very exercise of apostolic, charitable, humanising
action; he touched and felt him while he participated and collaborated in the
implementation of his saving plan.
Don Bosco knew that redemption is an ongoing event: God is at work, at every
moment, in the heart of human beings and history: humanity lives in God’s today.
This reality was not only what he believed, but what he intensely experienced and
lived. What the mystics call the divine “touches” the “visits” of the Word who comes
and goes, were Don Bosco’s great perspectives, the sudden flashes of inspiration
that enlightened him regarding the coming of the Kingdom and committed him to
ever greater and humanly impossible undertakings.
Because it was mystical – that is, the result of the prevalence of divine action – Don
Bosco’s actions transcended the strengths and capacities of his person. His works
astounded the world and confounded the wise because there was no apparent
relationship between cause and effect; Don Bosco, moved and possessed by
God, went beyond the human.
There was the boldness and daring of the saint in him who surpasses himself
through strength from the power of God. Just as Jesus rejoiced in the prayer of
jubilation, so Don Bosco thrilled with mystical consolation when he contemplated
God at work in the hearts of the young and the world.
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A mystic of action
We have seen how humbly he experienced the knowledge that he was but
the passive/active instrument in the hands of God and his Mother: “God does
everything; Our Lady does everything.” What “"could poor Don Bosco do if some
special help did not come from heaven at every moment?”
These and similar expressions are like a cross-section of his great soul: they say
much more than they let one glimpse in their good-natured simplicity.
The mysticism of action passes, naturally, through pain; it lives from crucified
charity and knows the “nights of the senses and the spirit.”
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CONCLUSION
What is not surprising in Don Bosco is that the interpenetration of the divine took
place in a life marked more by action than by explicit prayer.
An action, however, that does not get lost in the alienation of efficiency and
horizontalism, because it has God as its beginning, content and end, and in Don
Bosco’s hands it becomes a scala paradisi, a mystical ladder for ascending to
the divine.
Christians of our time happily recognise themselves in Don Bosco, just as they
happily recognise themselves in St Francis of Assisi, St Ignatius and the other
giants of holiness.
As reported by Walter Nigg, Michael Baumgarten wrote: “There are times when
speeches and writings are no longer sufficient to make the necessary truth
generally comprehensible. In such times, the actions and sufferings of the saints
must create a new alphabet to reveal the secret of truth anew. The present is
such a time.”
The alphabet created by Don Bosco, we are convinced, is undoubtedly a valid
signal and message for human beings today.
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