 |
INTRODUCTION |
The Memoirs of the Oratory (= MO), one of Don Bosco’s most personal and vivid texts, has had huge importance in Salesian history. And not just because some of the details it contains, such as the dream at nine years of age and the description of the encounter with Bartholomew Garelli, have become symbolic events in the saint’s life and for the Salesian mission, and the subject of spiritual and pedagogical reflection. This document has educated us to an understanding of events involving Don Bosco and his preferred institution, the Oratory, in terms that are both epic and providential. It has fleshed out our imagination regarding the decisive role of Mamma Margaret and Fr Calosso, the figure of Fr Borel, the Marchioness Barolo and the Vicar of the City, Michael Cavour. It has introduced a touch of adventure into Don Bosco’s life with the tale of the race with the acrobat, the evocation of obscure attacks and the appearance of the mysterious dog “Grigio”.
And above all, the MO has contributed decisively to constructing and affirming an image of Don Bosco that continues to circulate. The stylisations that have been widespread in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century and in the first part of the twentieth century (founder of charitable institutions and Catholic societies, father of orphans, great educator of the nineteenth century, miracle worker and visionary, brilliant organiser of pastoral and educational initiatives according to the needs of the times1) today have lost some or all of their charm. Even the most careful reconstruction that adheres to historical reality, on which serious and documented scholars have been working for fifty years, is struggling to find acceptance in common opinion. On the other hand, there is a sympathetic representation of the peasant, the lively leader of young country farming kids and students, the dreamer, the friend close to youthful yearnings, the affectionate father who reveals significant horizons to young people and opens up paths of formation, enhancing instances that are most agreeable and pertinent in their regard.
These, in fact, are the dominant features of Don Bosco’s identity which emerges in the evocative story of the MO, and which have been more tenaciously rooted in the collective imagination, inside and beyond the ambits of the Salesian Family. It is a representation drawn up and promoted by Don Bosco himself, first in the restricted setting of the community at Valdocco, through narratives and picturesque representations, then in the wider circle of friends and cooperators.
|
|
1 1. History and fate of the text |
▲back to top |
The text of the Memoirs was written by Don Bosco between 1873 and 1875. Copied handsomely by his secretary Gioachino Berto, it was revised, corrected and supplemented by the author on several occasions, until 1879.2 Initially reserved for his “beloved Salesian sons” forbidding “that these things be made public during my lifetime or after my death”,3 the document was partially disclosed, by decision of the Saint himself, in a Storia dell'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales compiled by Giovanni Bonetti, published in a series in the “Bollettino Salesiano” between1879 and 1886.4 Giovanni Battista Lemoyne takes it up in its entirety in the first volumes of his Memorie biografiche, as a basic outline of the history of Don Bosco, and enriches it by padding it with items taken from documents, testimonies and re-enactments he has heard from the protagonist himself or from direct and indirect witnesses. This work, undertaken with a concern for a precise chronology and stylistic care in order to exalt the prodigious and supernatural aspect of the saint's experience, without adequate critical historical apparatus, would have a twofold consequence. On the one hand a recalling of facts from the past – which were selected in the MO according to a clear interpretation on Don Bosco's part – dealt with as if it were a contemporary and detailed account of events, then integrated with other anecdotes and materials, produces a narrative amplification effect and builds a character whose identity is located on the boundary between history and edifying literature. On the other hand, albeit involuntarily, a kind of distortion of the originality of Don Bosco’s text takes place, causing it to lose the effectiveness and significance envisaged by his compositional strategy. Lemoyne’s reading of events through this reworking of the MO was offered to the broader public especially through his Vita del venerabile servo di Dio Giovanni Bosco, published between 1911 and 1913,5 reprinted and translated several times.6
The interpretation and, one could say, manipulation of the MO by Lemoyne, would then influence all biographical and hagiographical outlines to follow, up until the appearance, in the second half of the twentieth century, of the first historico-critical and pedagogical studies.7 Nevertheless, despite these latter, the suggestion of the image consolidated by hagiographic legend would continue to be a source of fascination, as can be seen in biographical reconstructions of a journalistic nature, in musical texts and in film and theatre representations.8
The first complete edition of the Memoirs of the Oratory appeared in 1946.9 The decision to place the document in its entirety into the public domain despite the author’s explicit prohibition, had been taken in consideration of the universal dimension assumed by the figure of the saint, as Eugenio Ceria wrote in the presentation of the volume.10 Nevertheless, this publication needs to be seen within the particular historical context in which it came into being. The leadership of the Congregation, under the impetus of pressing educational needs and challenges represented by the new European and world scenarios, had long felt encouraged to advocate a return to Don Bosco's original intuitions and experiences.
Pietro Ricaldone, Rector Major between 1932 and 1951, had already grasped the importance of this recovery as a means of regenerating Salesian identity and the incisiveness of the works in the face of the new social and pastoral demands in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of world conflict. As the generation formed by Don Bosco came to an end, in a profoundly changed cultural context there was the perception of an urgent need to focus on the core of the religious and educational mission of the festive Oratory, its characteristic identity and the distinctiveness of its methodological elements. The result was a series of initiatives aimed at involving Salesians across the board and aimed above all at initiating an effort of reflection and organisation in the area of catechesis, pastoral care and pedagogy. In 1936 Fr Ricaldone issued a programmatic letter entitled Fidelity to Don Bosco the Saint; in 1938 he launched a “catechetical crusade; the following year he wrote a lengthy circular on the festive Oratory, catechism, religious formation,11 to promote celebrations for the centenary of the Salesian Oratory (1841-1941); in the final months of his life he would publish a book entitled Don Bosco educatore.12
Meanwhile he promoted institutions, encouraged studies and publications. He had not only supported Alberto Caviglia in his work of publishing Don Bosco’s written work, but had also committed himself from 1939 to founding the Central Salesian Catechetical Office, to reorganising the Congregation’s study centres and to establishing, with the help of Fr Carlos Leôncio da Silva, a chair of Pedagogy as the basis of a new Faculty.13 He also thought of starting a “Rivista di Pedagogia” (A pedagogical journal), but the war prevented him from doing so. The edition of the complete text of the MO, entrusted to Ceria, was a concrete act of this effort to return to the charismatic origins and revitalise Salesian work.
Initially, the work did not seem to sufficiently attract the attention of Salesians After four years, it was deemed necessary to point out its importance and recommend its reading by reproducing the publisher’s introduction, with slight variations, in the Salesian Athenaeum’s journal.14 People became convinced of the “precious biographical and psychological documentation” offered in the document “about a personality of the first order” like Don Bosco’s and realised that the book, in its freshness, “contains a [...] teaching that can be considered as the core of the whole story” of the saint.15 Thus in 1951 a first French translation by Augustin Auffray appeared,16 followed in 1955 by one in Spanish by Rodolfo Fierro Torres.17 However, reference continued to be made in Salesian publications to Lemoyne’s reconstruction. Even the two volumes of Don Bosco educatore by Fr Ricaldone quoted texts from the Memorie biografiche and adopted its approach to interpretation, making only three references to Don Bosco’s original text.
But things were heading in a different direction in academic circles. At first, interest in the Memoirs of the Oratory was concerned about some inconsistencies in the dating and research work was carried out to rectify the chronology.18 Later, the document aroused interest especially for the originality and significance of its contents and its very nature. In the early 1960s, Francis Desramaut, while approaching the MO marginally, as a source used by G.B. Lemoyne, emphasised the pedagogical significance of the account as dominant, calling it “a little treatise on pedagogy in action.”19 It is precisely in this sense, of it being of exemplary nature, that the writing would receive increasing attention. The first critical remarks on the nature of the MO and its true importance, were made by Pietro Braido in 1965: “The date of composition [...] and the author’s aims oblige us to consider and read them not as purely historical documents. They seek to be first of all and especially an edifying story left by a founder to members of the Society of apostles and educators whose task it was to perpetuate the work and its style, following his directives, guidelines and lessons […]. The events described and things narrated are lived reality; but in all probability not with the fullness of meaning and overall perspective that gives them the awareness of the author at the time, given that his plans and achievements had come to maturity.”20
In his study, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica, Pietro Stella makes use of the biographical data offered by the MO, but considers it above all as a document of the history of mentalities.21
Meanwhile, between the late 1970s and the 1980s, a growing appreciation for the text emerged in the Salesian world, documented by a series of translations.22 A new version of the Memoirs of the Oratory edited by Basilio Bustillo had excellent success.23 There was a growing awareness of the need to study the Founder’s experience, recovering its sources, with a view to a more acute reflection on their identity as educators and pastors. More or less developed courses in history, pedagogy and Salesian spirituality multiplied over those years, and anthologies of Don Bosco’s written material were printed.
Between 1976 and 1977, Don Bosco’s Opere edite were published in their original format.24 It was an initiative of great importance, together with the microfilming of the oldest collections in the Central Salesian Archives. A vast and very important range of material was thus made available to scholars, but also to Salesians in formation, and this encouraged the flourishing of research, studies and theses. The foundation, in 1981, of the Salesian Historical Institute, with its journal the “Ricerche Storiche Salesiane”, gave a further important contribution to this interest, substantiating it with the patient work of critical editions and essays. Thus, in a short space of years, historical sensitivity was being refined among Salesians and attention to the historical figure of Don Bosco was becoming more keenly felt.When the long-awaited critical edition of the MO edited by Antonio da Silva Ferreira, was made available in 1991,25 this work of Don Bosco’s gained general recognition.
|
|
2 2. “A narrative of narrative pedagogy and spirituality” |
▲back to top |
In his essays on the pedagogical scope of Don Bosco's experience, Pietro Braido immediately identified the relevance of the MO as being inspired “by the primary concern to define the meaning of a comprehensive educational experience [...] and the formulation of a ‘program of action’ [...]. Before being a history book of the past (enriched with all the experience accumulated in almost thirty-five years of priestly educational commitment), the Memoirs are the result of a coherent reflection which leads to a spirituality and a pedagogy: the ‘preventive system’ is expressed in the most widespread and complete form.”26 Thus it is “a history of the oratory” that is more “theological” and pedagogical than real, perhaps the “theoretical” document of animation that Don Bosco meditated on longest and which he most desired;27 an “exceptional document of experiential pedagogy.”28
Pietro Stella also noted, from an historiographical criticism point of view, the particular way events represented in the MO were interpreted: “However the events occurred, in his presentation of them Don Bosco tends to highlight what he considers to be the aims and purposes intended by God.”29 Some of the silences in the text, the variations of writing across different editorial phases, the elastic use of language and also a series of errors and anomalies, contribute to highlighting a characteristic intention of the writing: “an ‘enjoyable’ narrative that is, pleasant, attractive and engaging in its simplicity, suitable for conveying somewhat explicit messages of a religious and pedagogical nature.” If “the Lives of Dominic Savio, Magone and Besucco can be considered as the construction of models of youthful holiness on the basis of biographical data”, the MO should be considered “as a sort of religious and pedagogical poem built on the framework and idealisation of autobiographical anecdotes.”30 In short, Don Bosco, through this written work, seems to have wished to instil in his readers the conviction that his entire life was “a fabric of events predisposed, prefigured, made into reality by divine wisdom.” He therefore implemented a reinterpretation and reconfiguration of the past more from a theological and pedagogical perspective than from an “historico-scholarly” one.31Reviewing the critical edition of the MO, Pietro Braido took the opportunity to resume and develop previously formulated observations.32 In many respects the document appears as a good-natured and “pleasant discussion” of a father with his sons which, in the slant given to the re-evocation of things, reveals a providential interpretation of his own experience in the general sense and in individual events. On the other hand, we find “the concern to describe, albeit ‘poetically’ the origin, development and constituting of a typical spiritual and pedagogical experience, which is presented under the ‘Oratorian’ formula as the most functional and productive approach to the young people of new times.”
Don Bosco’s pages are most of all “Memoirs” of the future: a paradoxical expression coined by P. Braido to express the substance of his thesis. In fact, this appears to be “the point of view adopted in an absolutely preeminent way by Don Bosco, who intends to transmit this lived experience as a program of life and action to those who would continue it. In doing so, he would anticipate in a more flexible and colourful, vividly ‘narrative’ way the bare formulations of the pages of the Preventive System in the education of youth from 1877.”33 Therefore, in the MO, “the parable and message” come first, and “above history”, to illustrate God’s action in human affairs, and thus, rejoicing and recreating, to “comfort and confirm” his disciples. At the same time, it presents itself as an effective “narrative prelude to the preventive system”, “perhaps the richest book of contents and ‘preventive’ guidelines” that Don Bosco has written: “a manual of ‘narrated’ pedagogy and spirituality, from a clear ‘Oratorian’ perspective.”34
|
|
3 3. A narrative recalling of the identity of the Oratory |
▲back to top |
In order to understand the nature and original scope of the MO, and to venture into an interpretation that respects the author’s intentions, it is worth bearing in mind what has been said, more generally, about the concerns that moved Don Bosco to become a writer.35
|
|
3.1 3.1. Don Bosco’s concerns as a writer and the special features of the MO |
▲back to top |
It is known that he did not set himself scientific or historiographical goals, but mainly educational and formative ones, functional to the immediate needs of his addressees and his work. In his compilations of an historical and popular kind, such as the Storia ecclesiastica ad uso delle scuole (1845), the Storia sacra (1847) and the Storia d'Italia raccontata alla gioventù (1855),there is a clear tendency to narrate in order to instruct and moralise, emphasising the religious sense of a story seen as the scenario in which God’s providential and salvific action unfolds. The biographical profiles of Louis Comollo, Dominic Savio, Michael Magone and Francis Besucco, which can be described as edifying stylisations of models of virtuous behaviour accessible to adolescents and young people from a popular nineteenth-century environment, are framed in a similar perspective: “they are in reality primarily selective messages with precise and clear educational purposes.”36
In these Lives we can read oft-repeated expressions dear to Don Bosco: that it is necessary to give oneself to God in a timely fashion; that holiness consists in being cheerful, avoiding sin that robs us of peace of heart; and fulfilling exactly the duties of one’s state; that trust in one’s confessor or with a faithful friend of the soul is one of the secrets of the moral and spiritual success of the young; that bad companions must be avoided like the plague; that the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist are the pillars of the spiritual life; that the spirit of prayer strengthens and transfigures the interior life of a young person. In addition there is a recurring series of convictions of an educational and pastoral nature expressed in didactic passages or embodied in narrated characters and attitudes: to love young people, to treat them lovingly and gently, to approach them, to assist them in preventing evil or by correcting them, to help them establish themselves on the right path...
All this can also be seen in the MO, indeed from a broader perspective. In this work Don Bosco shows more confidence and fluency than in others, but also more depth and complexity. In fact, while he carries out a reinterpretation of his own journey of formation in terms of a vocation and mission involving the Oratory, he brings out the variety of facets that connote his mental frameworks, the spiritual traits most in keeping with his inner world, the educative and pastoral attitudes that best describe his model of the religious educator, the style and the most original and determining activities of his Oratory. We can say that we are faced with one of his most personal, lively and intense writings.
|
|
3.2 3.2. The times and pressures that occasioned the composition of the MO |
▲back to top |
Why did Don Bosco dive into this venture during such a busy and troubled period of his life, between 1873 and 1875?
The motivation expressed in the introduction to the MO, that he could “not readily say no to the authority of the one who advised me to do this”,37 must certainly be taken into consideration, but accompanied by at least two other main motivations. The first is the conviction, which became stronger as the years went by, that the Oratory was an institution willed by God as an instrument for the salvation of youth in these new times, and that the time had come to shed light on its genesis, purpose and method. It was a conviction that Don Bosco shared with his co-workers, but also with ever wider circles of admirers and supporters and those who recognised themselves in the demands of Catholic action. The second incentive came from the context in which his institution found itself in those years: a “critical” contingency for external and internal reasons. In fact, while the conclusion of the process of legal recognition of the Salesian Society was looming with the approval of the Constitutions, Don Bosco was struggling to obtain full freedom of action with regard to the bishops because of the lack of the faculties and privileges usually granted to other religious families. The situation was aggravated by mutual misunderstandings with Archbishop Lorenzo Gastaldi, archbishop of Turin.
All of this certainly posed problems for Don Bosco in terms of discernment, of “historical” foundation, with a return to the origins of his commitment among the boys, of justification and information on his choices, which had already prompted him in 1854 to draw up a planned Piano di Regolamento, a Cenno storico, and in 1862 a Cenni storici intorno all’Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales38, two documents of great “historical and conceptual” relevance.39
It was an habitual attitude for him, a storyteller by vocation, to recall the genesis and subsequent development of the Oratory whenever he set out to urge the support of the authorities, or gain the sympathy of public opinion and economic cooperation.40 However, it was a method used preferably and almost instinctively in the educational setting with the boys, in evening conversations (good nights) or sermons, and in the close-knit encounters with his Salesians.
It is significant to note how Don Bosco also instilled this tendency towards “historical” narrative in his collaborators. In 1870, for example, the Biografia del giovane Mazzarello Giuseppe, the first book by G.B. Lemoyne, in which we read an evocative chapter of events at the Oratory from 1841 to 1868 which seems to be drawn from the living voice of Don Bosco rather than from written documents.41 The Cronache, written in the 1860s by Giovanni Bonetti and Domenico Ruffino, and the Cronichetta by the first novice dircetor, Fr Giulio Barberis between 1875-1879, document this use of evocative narrative as a way of forming the identity of Don Bosco’s disciples, and at the same time to fulfil the wishes of these disciples to learn about the “olden days at the Oratory”, triggering recollections regarding Don Bosco.42
Starting in 1863, for the approval of the Salesian Society and its Constitutions, and later to obtain the privileges necessary for full juridical independence, Don Bosco undertook to produce informative documents on the history and identity of his institution. The most substantial and significant is the Cenno istorico,43 drawn up in August 1873 and printed in February 1874. There we see the clear intention to emphasise the indissoluble link between the work of the oratories and the Salesian Society. “The non-chronological but rather ideal and apologetic nature” of these “historical” documents is quite clear.44
The years of the composition and fine-tuning of the MO are therefore years that see Don Bosco’s greatest commitment to an “informative” kind of history both for the external reasons indicated – which would drive him once more in 1879 to produce an Exposition to the Holy See, a document symptomatic of his way of reworking “history”45 – and above all for reasons that were internal to his institutions. Many reasons pushed him to revisit his experience in consideration of the formation of disciples and the focus on the specific identity of his work. In that precise period of time (between 1873 and 1875) he was forced to rethink the idea of the “extern Salesians”, rejected by the Holy See, and to transform it into the new project of the Association or Union of Salesian Cooperators. On the other hand, the expansion of his Congregation outside the confines of Piedmont, riding on the wave of successful boarding schools, required him to focus on the aspects of identity and method that had to characterise it in relation to similar institutions, retracing the genesis and the events that had given life to the Oratory, which was felt and proclaimed to be the underlying source of every other achievement. Thus began a fruitful time of reflections and clarifications that would produce documents of great importance for Salesian identity besides the MO, such as Il sistema preventivo nella educazione della gioventù.46
|
|
4 4. "History" of the Oratory and the “autobiographical” nature of the MO |
▲back to top |
The document’s title is an unequivocal reminder of Don Bosco’s intention to narrate the Memoirs of his first educational institution on behalf of the young and their welfare.
|
|
4.1 4.1. The Oratory as a focal point |
▲back to top |
He was not motivated by the thought of handing on the story of his own life to posterity,47 but mainly by the concern to outline the story and identity of the Oratory in its inspiration, its beneficiaries, the conditions that favoured or delayed its gradual realisation and the elements that distinguish its mission, method and characteristic connotations: “Therefore I am now putting into writing those confidential details that may somehow serve as a light or be of use to the work which Divine Providence has entrusted to the Society of Saint Francis de Sales.”48
The biographers of the past have underestimated this central objective and have mainly focused on the evocative narration of the saint’s journey of formation and the first years of his ministry, making a reading of the events detached from the overall design that had prompted the author to select and order them in his narrative plot.
Don Bosco's commitment to storytelling as a function of the Oratory, as mentioned, has a long history. However, the earlier narrative summaries differ decisively from the MO. Not only the letter to the City Vicar of 1846 and other similar communications, but also the Cenno and the Cenni storici of 1854 and 1862 focus on the motivations and events connected immediately with the “Catechism lesson” that began at the Church of St Francis of Assisi, then moved to the Refuge belonging to the Marchioness Barolo, and her little hospital of St Philomena, and then migrated to the chapel of St Martin of the Mills, on to the cemetery at St Peter in Chains, then the Filippi brothers’ field, and finally, after arriving at the Pinardi house, becoming the fully-fledged “Oratory” with its own rooms and playground so that it could develop and prosper. In those documents, fundamentally, Don Bosco summarised events in a narrative summary, and gave information on the aims, articulation, activities, operators and results of an educational and religious work.
The addressees are authorities and the public to be informed and sensitised, supporters and benefactors to be mobilised. The “narrator” expresses himself as the initiator and main person responsible for an educational and pastoral activity for the benefit of poor and abandoned youngsters, which refers to religious and civil motives, but avoids any connection with his own inner story.
|
|
4.2 4.2. Target audience and purpose |
▲back to top |
But in the MO, at the narrative level, the history of the Oratory is linked to the inner history of the narrator and that of his disciples who would continue the work, and stretches from the past towards the future, offering guidelines for that future. These are the things that substantially differentiate this from Don Bosco’s other texts, both those that are simply informative and those that are more properly “historical and conceptual”.
Firstly, the explicitly stated stakeholders in the discourse are his “beloved Salesian sons” prohibiting “that these things he made public during my lifetime or after my death.”49 This choice reveals, first of all, that the overriding objective is the practical (and “ideological”) one of passing on a close-knit family heritage shared by author and readers, spiritually united in the total adhesion of their life to a vocational ideal. Thus the enterprise of narrating is aimed at formation and animation, in function of a mission, an identity and a method. The exclusion of extraneous readers frees the author from all formal and stylistic preoccupations, from cautions and reservations appropriate to those who address a heterogeneous public. The request for confidentiality, which is traditional in books of a family nature, aims to defend the values perceived as foundational, the most intimate and familiar feelings, from critical gaze: he is a father who “delights in speaking of his exploits to his dear children. It is always to be hoped that the sons will draw from these adventures, small and great, some spiritual and temporal advantage.”50
Don Bosco, then, draws his “beloved sons” into the adventure of these Memoirs and has them take an active part in them as interested disciples and “accomplices” who share his perspective on values and the real situation in which the narrative task of gaining an identity is set, and who are at the same time the stakeholders whom he asks to accept his own vision of the facts, which is both historical and personal, and enter a world that is both real and poetic. He shows himself to be aware of the difficulty that may arise in the reader and tries to anticipate his reactions in order to be able to guide him. Here and there we see very clearly how the presence of the readers conditions Don Bosco’s narrative strategy. It sometimes emerges directly as a kind of dialogue: “Many times you have asked me at what age I began to take an interest in children [...].”;51 “From the programme of one holiday in particular you can get an idea of our general routine”;52 “At that point you would have seen, just as I am telling you, the preacher transformed into a professional acrobat.”53
Dialogue is also found in the indirect form, when the narrative refers to a possible further exploration by the audience: “the life of this precious friend has been told elsewhere, and those who want can read it there”;54 “In the first place, I drew up a set of regulations [...]. Since this has been printed elsewhere, anyone can read it as he wishes [...]. The Regulations [for the St Aloysius sodality] were drawn up in a style that I believed suitable for young people. I sent them to the archbishop [...]. These Regulations can be read elsewhere”;55 “Many newspapers reported this celebration; see L’Armonia and Patria from those days..”56
On several occasions, the author seems to anticipate readers’ objections and questions, preparing the ground for a just interpretation and functioning as a metanarrative: “At this point you might ask me: Going to fairs and markets, watching magicians, getting props for my shows - all these took money; where did I get it? [...]. Now you might ask me, Did my mother mind my wasting my time playing magician? I assure you that my mother loved me dearly”;57 “But how could I study? How could I manage the translations? Take note. […]”;58 “Here it is good to recall that in those days religion was a basic part of the educational system”;59 «You might be asking how I could afford to give so much time to these dissipations without neglecting my studies. I will not hide the fact that I could have studied harder. But remember that by paying attention at school I was able to learn as much as was necessary”;60 «Perhaps you will say that with so much time given to extraneous reading I must not have been studying the treatises. This was not the case.”61
Secondly, after having selected who he is writing for, Don Bosco specifies and details why he is writing: “Now, what purpose can this chronicle serve? It will be a record to help people overcome problems that may come in the future by learning from the past. It will serve to make known how God himself has always been our guide. It will give my sons some entertainment to be able to read: about their father's adventures. Doubtless they will be read much more avidly when I have been called by God to render my account, when I am no longer amongst them.”62
Before focusing on the aim and influence of these objectives in Don Bosco’s writing, it is worth noting that the definition of motivations is a primary function typical of any writing belonging to the autobiographical genre, understood as writing about oneself, and not simply as historical documentation or a chronicle of facts. Scholars of the genre note that “the motivation to write is all the more necessary and, so to speak, internal to the text, its dynamics and structure, the less the text is, or is intended to be, ‘literary’.” In the past as well as in the present, every author who is about to speak about himself tends to address a selected audience and clarify his intentions with “forewords, prefaces, hints, recreating that ‘out-of-text’ space on which the genre has always been based, out of some quirk or secret attraction.”63
From this perspective, five motivational categories are identified in autobiographical writings: 1) the request of an authority or friend, children or disciples (this is the case of Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola); 2) a defensive or apologetic reaction (J.J. Rousseau with his Confessions reacting to Voltaire’s attack; J.H. Newman in his Apologia pro vita sua responds to Kingsley; F. Nietzsche tries to prevent future distortions of his thinking on the part of posterity with his Ecce homo); 3) the affirmation of one’s identity in opposition to others or to overcome a crisis or as a maturing process that induces a retrospective look (this is still the case in Rousseau’s Confessions, but also in F.-R. de Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d'outre-tombe or in the Autobiography of Malcom X); 4) passing on a testimony, a teaching, values and experiences, which emanates from the perception of the exemplary nature of one’s experience (J.S. Mill conveys the atypical educational system of which he considers himself to be the fruit in his Autobiography; Florentine merchant writers between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance wrote to pass on an example to their descendants; all religious autobiographical literature is permeated with a didactic spirit, but so is much of Italian autobiography of the Risorgimento); 5) time lost and rediscovered, the approach of old age and death, which induces a succinct recovery of one’s experience, past actions and people, handing them down to posterity (this is the case for the Memorie di famiglia by F. Guicciardini, the Memorie of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, B. Franklin’s Autobiography and M. D’Azeglio’s I miei ricordi).64
The introductory pages of the MO – and the development of the text – show us how these five motivations or impulses for autobiographical writing are found there, with varying relevance and accentuation, in particular the testimony/teaching and the seeking for and construction of the identity of the Oratory (the latter not explicitly stated, although pursued throughout the text). The aims indicated by Don Bosco lead him to orientate the writing of the MO according to a very complex and articulated evocative construction which goes far beyond the description of the Oratory as a work with its own aims and method. These are a hint that he is preparing to look back over the past from a theological and ideological perspective – a past that is well defined by the chronological limits expressed in the title – which intends to reconnect the genesis of the Oratory as an institution and its specific nature to an inner and “spiritual” trajectory with vocational and missionary overtones.
|
|
4.3 4.3. The beginning and non-conclusion of the narrative architecture |
▲back to top |
For this reason the Memoirs do not begin, like the Cenno storico, with an account of the precise situations that led Don Bosco to start the Catechism lesson-cum-Oratory from 1841, but begin with the very beginning of the Author’s existence. The opening of the narration, which anticipates the date of his birth by one day to coincide with a Marian feast65 – at first glance a secondary indication, yet one that sheds light on the chosen perspective, reinforced by a host of other much more explicit ones, starting with the one enunciated in the introduction (“to make known how God himself has always been our guide”)66 – helps to project the Memoirs immediately into a context of providential history and to charge the personal story with a meaning and significance that transcends its uniqueness, as a heritage to be shared and passed on.
The actual beginning, one might say, is “out-of-text”, emphasising that beyond the script there is a divine Subject, the “merciful God” who is master of events and hearts, who continues to govern individual and social history from a salvific and redemptive perspective, giving rise to vocations and inspiring paths; but there is also a human, narrating Subject who is at the origin of the text itself, presented as an authentic version of a story that is both personal and “of the Oratory”.
After a few pages, however, the document reserves a surprise for us that further highlights the complexity and problematic nature of the interweaving established between personal history and the history of the Oratory. It is a detailed and dramatised account of a dream he had when he had “reached [his] ninth year”, presented as a significant event that casts its light on the entire MO: “The things that I have to say later will give some meaning to all this.”67 This event becomes part of the text’s strategy as the real beginning of the Oratory “memory”, determining its division into three decades. Indeed, the Ten years of childhood (1815-1824) are presented as a prelude – significant, but not properly “oratorian”. While the decade from 1825-1835, the First decade, begins with the description of the narrator, who depicts himself at the age of ten, intent on looking after children by doing “what was possible at my age and formed a kind of festive oratory.”68
In this way, the dream-beginning, evoked with literary devices borrowed from the novel form, takes on a special value: it becomes a prefiguration of an historical and literary text, of which it consciously anticipates the meanings, strategies and structures; in short, it becomes an identifiable trace of a rhetorical orchestration aimed at the author’s intentions. It is significant that it has been interpreted in the Salesian tradition in a precisely prophetic and prefigurative sense, together with the other symbolic event, the meeting with Bartholomew Garelli, located at the chronological and symbolic centre of the Second Decade (hence of the entire Memoirs). To these two events, placed respectively at the beginning and in the middle of the journey of realisation of the Oratory vocation and mission, we could link a third one, narrated in Chapter 7 of the Third decade: the dialogue with the orphan from Valle Sesia, “This was the first youngster at our hospice”,69 which ideally completes the architecture of the Oratorian memoir.
It almost seems as if here, in some way, Don Bosco feels the great narrative arc prefigured in the symbols of the dream when he was nine is now concluded, as suggested by the general title prefixed to chapter eight [Not in the English edition, where it is the title instead for Part III: Memoirs of the Oratory from 1846 to 1855]: Memorie storiche sull’Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales, dal 1846 al 1855. It would appear to be a simple repetition of those placed at the beginning of the three notebooks of the manuscript, but the inclusion of the adjective “historical”, absent in the previous ones, recalls the Cenni storici of 1854 and 1862, in which the disjunction between the history of the institution and the inner life of the author was evident.
The pages that follow, in fact – and the material and formal analysis of the manuscript could also confirm this70 – denote a break in the narrative, a variation of writing, a different colouring from the compositional unity that has been hitherto woven. They are predominantly informative in nature, a chronicling juxtaposition. Thus, the plot and intrigue – the confluence of personal vocation, mission, educational/pastoral model and work/institution – visibly shift from narrative to chronicle. The numbered chapters continue, reporting a series of events, chronologically ordered and laboriously assembled, that escape the solid narrative plot that had sustained the previous parts with a good degree of coherence. After the eighteenth chapter, the numbering stops, to give way to simple headings [though in the English translation this is not the case]. The narrative design seems to have completely dissolved. Don Bosco limits himself to recounting facts in much the same way as he used to do in his other informative memoirs. One no longer grasps the personal and intimate involvement that characterised the plot and intrigue of the text that comes before. Ingredients and activities that characterised oratory practice are described, its progress is documented, political events and disagreements between priests involved with the oratory, the purchase of land and buildings, construction and publishing ventures are referred to. Even the few narrative pictures now have little that is symbolic or that refer to the inner sense of the oratory vocation. It finally slips into the description of attacks and assaults, the result of an improbable “It looked as if some group of either Protestants or Freemasons had organised a conspiracy against me”,71 and ends with the colourful note of the Grey dog: a dull and all in all bizarre ending for such a significant and important piece of writing (even if a useful document to frame Don Bosco’s mental and cultural world, his taste for the marvellous and the supernatural, so archaic and close to the popular tastes of the time).
In this variation of writing in the final section, in this stumbling process of anecdotal juxtaposition and non-conclusion, we find a further characteristic that likens the MO to all literature of an autobiographical kind,72 where a lack of ending is rather common and where writing is resumed, supplemented or modified, the elaboration is often painful and tends to integrate heterogeneous material (referring to or copying documents, notes, texts written on other occasions or already published); the editing is almost always “uncertain, precarious, imperfect, stratified, duplicated; it is linked to the period in which it matures, and can never be isolated from the series of notes, sketches, jottings and annotations that precede, accompany and follow it: in short, it is part of a context that cannot be ignored.”73
|
|
4.4 4.4. Processes implemented by the author |
▲back to top |
The problems arising from the particular perspective in which the Don Bosco of the MO is placed, as he looks to the past, must be projected into the broader horizon of interpretative problems posed by life stories and writings of an autobiographical nature.74 The issues from an epistemological point of view are vast and complex. We will limit ourselves to mentioning a few useful aspects to introduce an informed reading of the document.
The volume of autobiographical works that have come down to us through the centuries is endless. These authors sought the root of their own identity or achievements in their own existence. Their books testify to spiritual and psychological journeys, mental and motivational frameworks, their way of approaching events and interpreting them, but first and foremost their effort to give unity and meaning, historicity to their own experience.
The reconstructive procedure implemented in the MO also belongs to this type of operation. Starting from the perspectives that guide him in the present, Don Bosco carries out a reconstruction of past events, attributing meaning to them. Moreover, by retracing his own formation, he reveals to himself and to us how much he was helped or hindered in the construction of his Oratorian vocation by family, people he met, institutions, society and historical events, and how much these relationships and experiences became part of his consciousness and “method”. Finally, implementing this “memoir-like” reflection transforms the revisited experience (of himself, of others, and of things) into a resource that enables him to build spiritual and pedagogical “know-how” for those whom he is addressing.
In the MO, Don Bosco enacts complex dynamics of memory, selection and interpretation of facts and of organisation of them into a plot, according to a superior unifying meaning. It is clear that he goes on to filter events, while reconstructing the whole of a part of life around the unifying kernel that is the Oratory perspective and vocation. The consciousness that he may have had at the moment he experienced the events he has recounted is succeeded by a “second level” of consciousness resulting from retracing his steps in order to recognise the links of meaning and harmonious outcome of the various elements. It is both a retrospective and a prospective movement. It is work of self-formation in which, perceiving past events in a different way and acting on them, i.e. reconnecting them to the “history” of the Oratory, around which he builds his discourse, organising them around this unifying significance, he ends up giving a new content to events that were experienced without this overall perception.75 Don Bosco shows that he is partly aware of what he is doing, as two concluding expressions in the account of his childhood dream reveal: “In good time you will understand everything” and “the things that I shall have to say later will give some meaning to all this.”76
The process of selection carried out in the MO is applied to both the facts and their meaning. He then organises the events according to the weight given to each in the reconstruction of the unified design that transcends them all. This design gives rise to the plot and interweaving that govern the narrative strategy of his story.
It is a type of storytelling that emphasises the end point of the story; that makes sense of all the episodes by organising them into an intelligible whole.77
At the conclusion of the narrative journey, the text of the MO appears to us to be a continuous search for and highlighting of prefigurations of the characteristic traits of the Oratory in the fabric of an existence that the Author feels is marked by a divine vocation. We see this in the narratives of situations that, in the Author’s view, are a prelude to and anticipation of the Oratory, such as the First entertainments for children at ten years of age ( it was “a kind of festive Oratory”78), his interest in young people during the holidays prior to his clerical clothing (“It was a kind of oratory, attended by about fifty children, who loved me and obeyed me as if I were their father”79) and the rules regulating meetings of the Society for a Good Time while he was attending the College in Chieri.80 But also in the description of the catechism lessons in the winter of 1841-1842, precociously referred to as “Oratory”:
All my efforts that winter were concentrated on getting the little Oratory established. [...]. Our Oratory programme ran along these lines. On every feast day, the boys were given a chance to receive the holy sacraments of confession and communion. But one Saturday and Sunday each month was set aside for fulfilling this religious duty. We came together in the evening at a fixed time, sang a hymn, had a catechism lesson followed by a story, and then the distribution of something, sometimes to all, sometimes by lot.81
We discover this especially when characters are brought into the picture who are representative, negatively or positively, of Oratorian style and method, such as – to name but a couple – the provost of Castelnuovo with his assistant parish priest in their detached attitude towards the boy protagonist (“If I were a priest, I would act differently; I would approach the children, say some kind words to them, and give them good advice”82) and his teacher of humanities, Fr Banaudi (“was a model teacher. Without having recourse to corporal punishment, he succeeded in making all his pupils respect and love him. He loved them all as if they were his own sons, and they loved him like an affectionate father.”83).
A careful reading of the document shows, in almost every chapter, that the final point – the articulate and lively reality of the Oratory of St Francis de Sales in the early 1850s, with its aims, its educational method, its formative proposals, its rhythms of life and its typical model of the pastor-educator – was in fact the filter through which Don Bosco carried out his autobiographical revision for the benefit of his disciples.
|
|
5 5. The Memoirs of the Oratory as a narrative text |
▲back to top |
Don Bosco as the one who wrote the MO is simple, essential, clear. But he is also effective in recreating the environment, characterising the characters and relationships, varying the scenarios, rendering moments of joy, concern or tension, and in some cases even feelings.
|
|
5.1 5.1. Don Bosco’s writing |
▲back to top |
Over thirty years of practice as a publicist concerned with being understood by the young and ordinary classes of people, his narrative style has been perfected; he demonstrates good craftsmanship as a storyteller. The corrective interventions on the first draft of the MO do not seem to be aimed at refining the style, but mainly at simplifying the text, to make it fluent and clear.
Don Bosco’s writing is more immediate and crisp when he engages in narratives and descriptions of facts that have often been narrated verbally or in presenting certain “dreams” reconstructed with an abundance of detail. The Dream when he was nine years old is presented like a film script, with essential indications of the characters’ appearance, the dialogue is tight and concise, the protagonist’s feelings are barely hinted at, while quarrelsome boys, ferocious animals and mild lambs vary the backdrop of the scene.
Above all, the writing of the dialogues is fluent, very fluid even in handwriting. On the pages of the original manuscript one can see that Don Bosco has no uncertainties, he writes quickly and does not go back to correct: one would say that the dialogue is in his mind, clear in his lines. One would say that the dialogue mode reveals a form of expression congenial to him, the expression of a mental structure. The MO contains abundant documentation.
At times, the dialogue aims to restore the educational and pastoral attitudes dearest to him, as in the encounter between the young John and the elderly Fr Calosso, in the highly symbolic scene of the conversation with Bartholomew Garelli, or in the dialogue exemplifying his way of inducing the most reticent boys to go to confession.84 At other times, the values brought into play are apologetic ones and the conversation takes the tone of demonstration or dispute, as in the case of Jonah’s crisis, his confrontation with his mother and in the discussion with the anonymous characters who try to dissuade him from the Letture Cattoliche:85 is a genre dear to Don Bosco, repeatedly used in booklets written from 1853 onwards.86
On the other hand, when it comes to recalling critical moments in which objections to his action risk compromising the realisation or identity of the Oratory, the dialogue becomes impassioned and concrete, thematising the values that inspire it. Thus the narrator, responding to the difficulties raised by two parish priests, illustrates his own pastoral outlook; resisting the injunctions of the Vicar of the City he demonstrates his convictions on the social effectiveness of Oratory education; in his confrontation with the Marchioness Barolo he emphasises the certainty of a divine mission that drives him to abandonment in God despite health concerns or the uncertainty of human resources.87
Whether it is moments of great spiritual value, such as the dialogue with Don Cafasso over the choice of an occupation after his time at the Convitto, or scenes of everyday life, in which the culture and style typical of Turin’s popular world shines through, such as the agreement to purchase the Pinardi house, an evident compositional skill emerges at all times, which has been honed over a long period of time.88
There is no lack of typological characterisation with hints of caricature, where the writing is very effective. In a few lines Don Bosco sketches the physical figure of Jonah’s mother and the chaplain’s housekeeper at St Peter in Chains,89 vividly illustrates funny scenes such as those involving him with the strict Professor Cima or in the defence of the timid Comollo, with the naive tailor Cumino and the prudent Canon Burzio, with the tipsy peasants at a country party or with the failed attempt at his internment in an asylum, with the misunderstanding between “oratory” and “laboratory” by stuttering Pancrazio Soave, with the archbishop banging his mitre into the ceiling of the Pinardi chapel or the fierce washerwomen of Porta Nuova.90
He also knows how to construct small but accomplished tales of adventure, such as the race with the acrobat, the fall from a horse on the road between Cinzano and Bersano, the attempted poisoning in the Golden Heart tavern and the hail of blows he received in the room of a person pretending to be sick.91
But this capacity for characterisation in the MO strategy, coupled with the variety of tones and nuances of Don Bosco’s writing, is placed at the service of a narrative programme of great symbolic and operational intensity, which make it a significant document of a typical nineteenth-century way of writing, minor compared to the great narrative, but by no means shoddy or secondary.
|
|
5.2 5.2. The text’s structure |
▲back to top |
As far as the order of the narrative is concerned, the MO presents the same problems as do writings of a narrative nature, with a few more complications.92 In fact, here the events are not imagined, as in works of fiction, and therefore connected by the narrative plot of fantasy, but have actually been experienced by the author, who in writing has to work through a variety of memories, events, emotions and sensations experienced at different times. By choosing the Oratory of St Francis de Sales as the central topic of the autobiographical account, Don Bosco mentally traces the connections between events in a story that developed over time.
But whoever analyses the text carefully, realises that beneath the subdivision into decades and chapters (which we call the “surface structure”), there is also a “deep structure” made up of Don Bosco’s value systems, his convictions and mental frameworks, which underlies the whole text like a watermark and emerges freely beyond the formal subdivision.
In the introduction Don Bosco states the criteria chosen for the organisation of work: “I have chosen to divide my account into ten-year periods, because each decade saw a notable development of our work.”93 This is the macro structure that runs through the text. At various points within each decade the individual chapters highlight the main character’s formation journey, the gradual appearance and configuration of the elements that will characterise the Oratory.
But the narrative also brings out a spatial structure. In fact, Don Bosco attributes particular value to the localities and environments in which his oratory vocation developed. They appear almost as points on a symbolic map. The rural native village, the house with the farmyard and field, the chapel at Morialdo, Castelnuovo village, Chieri with its houses, schools, the cafe Pianta, the Porta Torinese avenue and the cathedral, the seminary with its environments, the city of Turin with its streets, squares, churches, prisons, charitable institutions, the suburbs and suburban fields, the sanctuaries in the surrounding area, and finally the Valdocco Oratory with its shed become a chapel, school rooms and playground: all this variety and succession of places becomes in turn an important organising principle of the story, alongside the chronological and thematic ones.
Values, educational and spiritual experiences are linked to the spaces. The change of place takes on the significance of a pilgrimage towards the Oratory’s promised land, its mission and identity. The Oratory is “inspired” in the mysterious intimacy of the dream, it undergoes a long phase of preparation in the years of the narrator’s childhood, adolescence and youth, it begins its journey in the fertile environment of the Convitto ecclesiastico, it wanders from stage to stage through the geography of youth and working-class Turin, growing and acquiring all its determining features, until it reaches its “permanent home” in Valdocco, where “he had dreamed and seen written: Haec est domus mea, inde gloria mea.”94
Thus, the “surface structure” of the story is drawn at the intersection of the three coordinates of time, space and the thematic core.
The subdivision of the text of the MO is substantiated by events, characters, observations, comments and annotations that are the fruit of a deeper structure, one deriving from Don Bosco’s mentality, his culture and vision of the world, his civil and religious, educational and moral convictions, his spirituality and his “formative project”. Scholars of the semiotics of narrative texts would speak of an intentio operis (intention of the work) that is broader than the intentio auctoris (intention of the author) explicitly declared in the initial programme.95
To put it succinctly. At the heart of the work is the man Don Bosco, with his entire world that tends to emerge continuously on each page. It is thus possible for us to attempt a reading of the MO that allows us to penetrate an articulate message consisting not only of what the author intended to say, but also of what the text actually says in reference to its own contextual coherence and to the situation of the meaning-making systems to which it refers.
This profound element, so vivid in the MO, gives the document its high polysemic value and its enormous value, both for the historian attentive to cultural anthropology and for the disciple concerned with grasping the pedagogical and spiritual purpose of the message and for understanding the inner dynamics of the Oratory model, beyond mere operational connotations.
Surface structure and deep structure enrich the scenario with multiple perspectives and planes of perspective, with nuances and tones to interest a wide range of readers with different interests. The early and more recent fortunes of the Memoirs have shown us how much this “story” has fascinated Salesians and young people, uninitiated readers and scholars alike.
Aldo Giraudo,
Turin, 10 October 2002.
This text was prepared for the new Spanish translation of the Memoirs: San Juan Bosco, Memorias del Oratorio de san Francisco de Sales da 1815 a 1855. Introduccíon de Aldo Giraudo. Notas históricas y bibliográficas de José Manuel Prellezo, Madrid, Editorial CCS 2003, vii-xl. [Translator’s note: all references to the MO are to the 2010 Daniel Lyons translation (New Rochelle, New York)].
1 Cf. P. Stella, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica. III: La canonizzazione (1888-1934), Roma, LAS 1988, 13-59.
2 On the date of composition of the original manuscript, G. Berto’s copy and Don Bosco’s corrections, cf. E. Ceria’s introduction to the first printed edition of the document: G. (san) Bosco, Memorie dell'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales dal 1815 al 1855, Torino, SEI 1946, 6; F. Desramaut, Les Memorie I de Giovanni Battista Lemoyne. Étude d'un ouvrage fondamental sur la jeunesse de saint Jean Bosco, Lyon, Maison d'Études saint-Jean-Bosco 1962, 116-119; the introduction to the critical edition: G. Bosco, Memorie dell'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales dal 1815 al 1855. Introduzione, note e testo critico a cura di Antonio da Silva Ferreira, Roma, LAS 1991 (henceforth: MO), 18-19.
3 MO 30.
4 Giovanni Bonetti’s Storia dell'Oratorio, revised and completed, was subsequently published in a volume for the public entitled Cinque lustri di storia dell’Oratorio Salesiano fondato dal Sac. D. Giovanni Bosco. Torino, Tipografia Salesiana 1892. [Published in English as The History of Don Bosco’s Early Apostolate, but no longer in print.]
5 G.B. LEMOYNE, Vita del venerabile servo di Dio Giovanni Bosco fondatore della Pia Società Salesiana, dell’Istituto delle Figlie di Maria Ausiliatrice e dei Cooperatori Salesiani, Torino, Libreria Editrice Internazionale “Buona Stampa”, 2 vols, 1911-1913.
6 Starting with a retouched and expanded edition by Angelo Amadei (Torino SEI 1920), frequently reprinted in Italy (1935, 1941, 1953, 1975, 1977...), cf. Bibliografia generale di don Bosco. I: Bibliografia italiana (1844-1992) A cura di S. Gianotti, Roma, LAS 1995, n. 653.
7 P. Stella, Bilancio delle forme di conoscenza e degli studi su don Bosco, in M. Midali (Ed.), Don Bosco nella storia. Atti del 1° Congresso Internazionale di Studi su Don Bosco (Università Pontificia Salesiana - Roma, 16-20 gennaio 1989), Roma, LAS 1990, 21-36.
8 Cf. what P Stella says, Bilancio delle forme di conoscenza, 32.
9 Edited by Eugenio Ceria: G. (san) Bosco, Memorie dell'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales dal 1815 al 1855, Torino SEI 1946.
10 “Today Don Bosco has gone down in history, in great history, and has even entered the list of Saints”, ibid., 4.
11 P. RICALDONE, Oratorio festivo, Catechismo, Formazione Religiosa. Strenna del Rettor Maggiore 1940. Torino, SEI 1940 (19472).
12 P. RICALDONE, Don Bosco educatore, 2 vols., Colle Don Bosco (Asti), LDC 1951-1952.
13 J.M. Prellezo, Don Pietro Ricaldone e la formazione dei Salesiani: alle origini dell'Università Pontificia Salesiana, in S. Frigato (ed.), Don Pietro Ricaldone quarto successore di Don Bosco 1932-1951 A cinquant'anni dalla morte 25 novembre 1951. Torino, SGS 2001, 31-73.
14 E. Ceria, Una pubblicazione postuma di S. Giovanni Bosco, in “Salesianum” 12 (1950) 432-440.
15 Ibid., 439-440.
16 J. (Saint) Bosco, Quarante années d'épreuves (1815-1855), Lyon, Vitte 1951.
17 Included in an anthology work: Biografía y escritos de San Juan Bosco, Madrid, BAC 1955.
18 J. KLEIN - E. VALENTINI, Una rettificazione cronologica delle "Memorie di San Giovanni Bosco", in “Salesianum” 17 (1955) 581-610. The conclusions of this essay will be taken up, discussed and completed as part of a doctoral work on the composition of the first volume of the Memorie biografiche: F. Desramaut, Les Memorie I, 124-134.
19 F. Desramaut, Les Memorie I, 121.
20 G. (San) Bosco, Scritti sul sistema preventivo nell'educazione della gioventù. Introduzione. Presentazione e indici alfabetico e sistematico a cura di P. Braido. Brescia, La Scuola 1965, 3-4.
21 P. Stella, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica. I: Vita e opere, Züric, PAS Verlag 1968.
22 J. (Saint) Bosco, Souvenirs autobiographiques, Paris, Apostolat des Éditions 1978; J. (São) Bosco, Memórias del Oratório de São Francisco de Sales, S. Paulo, Editora Salesiana Dom Bosco 1982; Memoirs of the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales from 1815 to 1855. The autobiography of Saint John Bosco. Translated by Daniel Lyons, with notes and commentary by Eugenio Ceria, Lawrence Castelvecchi, and Michael Mendl, New Rochelle, Don Bosco Publications 1989. In Italy, a “current language” transcription was also printed, an operation that was criticised, but indicative of the widespread interest in the document: G. (S.) Bosco, Memorie. Trascrizione in lingua corrente, Leumann (Torino), Elledici 1985.
23 J (san) Bosco, Memorias del Oratorio de San Francisco de Sales. Traducción en español de Basilio Bustilo, Madrid, Editorial CCS 1987.
24 G. Bosco, Opere edite. Prima serie: Libri e opuscoli, 37 vol., Roma, LAS 1976-1977.
25 G. Bosco, Memorie dell'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales dal 1815 al 1855. Introduzione, note e testo critico a cura di A. da Silva Ferreira, Roma, LAS 1991. A more manageable edition of the text has also been done, without the critical apparatus: G. Bosco. Memorie... Introduzione e note a cura di Antonio da Silva Ferreira, Roma. LAS 1992.
26 P. Braido, recensione a G. (S.) Bosco, Memorie. Trascrizione in lingua corrente, Leumann (Torino), Elledici 1985, in “Ricerche Storiche Salesiane” 5 (1986) 169.
27 P. Braido, L'esperienza pedagogica di don Bosco nel suo «divenire», in “Orientamenti Pedagogici” 36 (1989) 27.
28 P. Braido, Prevenire non reprimere. Il sistema educativo di don Bosco, Roma, LAS 1999, 135.
29 P. Stella, Apologia della storia. Piccola guida critica alle "Memorie biografiche" di don Bosco (photocopied handouts), UPS, Roma, 1989-1990; updated revision, 1997-1998, 18.
30 Ivi, 22.
31 Opinions expressed in the context of a reflection on Don Bosco e l'organizzazione della propria immagine: P. Stella, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica. III: La canonizzazione, 16.
32 P. Braido, "Memorie" del futuro, in “Ricerche Storiche Salesiane” 11 (1992) 97-127.
33 Ibid., 97.
34 Cf. ibid., 113-114.
35 On Don Bosco the writer and editor ‘s motivations and his mental mechanisms, cf. P. Stella, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica, I: Vita e opere, Roma, LAS 19792, 229-248; Id., Don Bosco nella storia economica e sociale, Roma, LAS 1980, 327-368: Id., Don Bosco, Bologna, Il Mulino 2001, 23-37, 71-90.
36 P. Stella, Don Bosco, 113.
37 MO 30.
38 The two documents, never printed by Don Bosco, were published in a critical edition by Pietro Braido, in Id. (ed.), Don Bosco nella Chiesa a servizio dell'umanità. Studi e testimonianze, Roma, LAS 1987, 34-59; 60-81.
39 P. Braido, Don Bosco per la gioventù povera e abbandonata in due inediti del 1854 e del 1862, ivi, 26-31.
40 For example, the letter to the Vicar of the City (13 March 1846), the letter to the administrators of the “Opera della mendicità istruita” (20 February 1850), the circular for a lottery on behalf of the recently built church of St Francis de Sales (20 December 1851), in G. Bosco, Epistolario. Introduzione, testi critici e note a cura di Francesco Motto. I: (1835-1863), Roma, LAS 1991, 66-67, 96-97, 139-141.
41 G. B. Lemoyne, Biografia del giovane Mazzarello Giuseppe..., Torino 1870, pp. 78-91 (published in the “Letture Cattoliche” XVIII (1870) booklet no. 7). The chapter was rectified and rewritten by Don Bosco himself for the second edition of 1872. Interesting are the methodological observations sent by Don Bosco to Lemoyne during the composition of this booklet, on 3 November 1869, cf.. G. Bosco, Epistolario..., III: (1869-1872), Roma, LAS 1999, 150-151.
42 The notebooks of G. Barberis’ Cronichetta are kept in the Central Salesian archives (ASC) A002 (here we quote from exercise book 3, p. 46, 1 January 1876); the Cronache by G. Bonetti and D. Ruffino are kept in ASC A004 and A008.
43 Cenno istorico sulla congregazione di S. Francesco di Sales e relativi schiarimenti, Roma, Tipografia Poliglotta 1874 - OE XXV 231-250.
44 Cf. P. Braido, L'idea della Società Salesiana nel "Cenno istorico" di don Bosco del 1873/74. Introduzione e testo critico, in “Ricerche Storiche Salesiane” 6 (1987) 245-331. P. Braido also offers us the complete list of informative documents produced by Don Bosco between 1863 and 1874 (ibid., 255-256).
45 Esposizione alla S. Sede dello stato morale e materiale della pia società di S. Francesco di Sales nel marzo 1879, Sampierdarena, Tipografia Salesiana, 1879 - OE.......P. Stella writes about this special document: “The two pages of preamble under the title of Brevi notizie sulla Congregazione di S. Francesco di Sales dall'anno 1841 al 1879 (p. 5ff), one is tempted to say, are a marvellous collection of transcripts, general news, inaccurate data: partly perhaps through unintentional error, partly by conscious choice of words and concepts.” P. Stella, Apologia della storia, 9.
46 Critical edition in G. Bosco, Il sistema preventivo nella educazione della gioventù. Introduzione e testi critici a cura di P. Braido, Roma LAS 1985.
47 P. Braido insists a great deal on this distinction, in order to react against the prevailing tendency in the past to take the MO as a “historical” document, or chronicle of events in Don Bosco’s life as such; cf. P. Braido, “Memorie” del futuro, 102.
48 MO 30.
49 MO 30.
50 MO 30.
51 MO 38.
52 MO 39.
53 MO 39.
54 MO 58.
55 MO 149.
56 MO 175.
57 MO 40.
58 MO 45.
59 MO 55.
60 MO 71.
61 MO 93.
62 MO 30.
63 F. D’Intino, L'autobiografia moderna. Storia forme problemi, Roma, Bulzoni Editore 1998, 70-71.
64 Cf. F. D’Intino, L'autobiografia moderna, 71-85.
65 “I was born on the day dedicated to Mary Assumed into Heaven”, MO 31.
66 MO 30.
67 MO 36.
68 MO 38.
69 MO 153.
70 The third notebook of Don Bosco’s manuscript consists of three parts bound together: a 40-page notebook; a sheet folded to form two pages; a second notebook of 40 pages. The latter, which begins with the title Memorie storiche sull'Oratorio di S. F. d. S. dal 1846 al 1855 and contains the remaining part of the third decade, from ch. 8 onwards, appears to have had difficulties in its spelling and revision, full of erasures and additions; it would suggest that it was drafted some time after the previous parts (cf. ASC, A222, cartella Oratorio 3, pp. 141-180; microfilm FDB 59B11-60A2).
71 MO 184.
72 “The more the autobiography is aesthetically structured, the more the beginning and the ending become load-bearing elements of the narrative design and tend, reconnecting at a distance, to form a framework whose coordinates orient the whole text. [...] The less aesthetically structured the autobiography, on the other hand, the more it runs the risk of being interrupted - by chance - at a point not previously established and with an ending that is not very 'significant' from the point of view of the overall design”, F. D'Intino, L'autobiografia moderna, 229.
73 Ibid, 87.
74 Cf. G. Pineau - J.-L. Le Grand, Les histoires de vie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France 1993. Literature on autobiography is vast; by way of example, here are some general contributions: L'autobiografia: il vissuto e il narrato, “Quaderni di retorica e poetica” II (1986); Ph. Lejeune (cur.), Les récits de vie et l'institutions, “Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle” 8-9 (1986); R. Porter (cur.), Rewriting the self. Histories from the Renaissance to the present, London, Routledge 1997; M.F. Baslez - Ph. Hoffmann - L. Pernot (cur.), L'invention de l'autobiographie d'Hésiode à Saint Augustin. Actes du deuxième colloque de l'Équipe de recherche sur l'Hellénisme postclassique, Paris, Presses de l'École normale supérieure, 1993; N. Spadaccini - J. Talens (cur.), Autobiography in early modern Spain, Minneapolis, Prisma Institute 1988; La autobiografia en lengua española en el siglo veinte, Lausanne, Hispanica Helvetica 1991. See the extensive bibliography and review of theoretical and historical horizons by F. D'Intino, L'autobiografia moderna, 15-66; 291.358.
75 On these procedures typical of any autobiographical reconnaissance, see Laura Formenti’s preface to the Italian edition of M.S. Knowles, La formazione degli adulti come autobiografia, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore 1996, x-xvi.
76 MO 35-36.
77 On this “configuration” of lived experience that is effected through narration, see the interesting reflections of P. Ricoeur, Tempo e racconto, I, Milano, Jaca Book 1996, 108-117. [Also available in English as Time and Narrative, University of Chicago Press, 1984].
78 MO 38.
79 MO 74.
80. MO 54.
81 MO 105.
82 MO 48.
83 MO 61.
84 MO 41-44; 102-105; 136-137.
85 MO, 62-63; 63-65; 182.
86 Don Bosco proves particularly suited to writing dialogues with a catechetical and apologetic purpose, such as, Il cattolico istruito nella sua Religione. Trattenimenti di un padre di famiglia co’ suoi figliuoli (1853); Una disputa tra un avvocato e un ministro protestante (1853); Conversazioni tra un avvocato ed un curato di campagna sul sacramento della confessione (1855); Due conferenze tra due ministri protestanti ed un prete cattolico sopra il purgatorio e intorno ai suffragi dei defunti (1857).
87 MO 119-121; 124-126; 126-128.
88 MO 108; 167-168
89 MO 64; 117-118.
90 MO 58-59; 67; 67-68; 86; 130; 150; 154.
91 MO 69-71; 97-98; 184-185; 187.
92 On the structures, plots and patterns commonly used in narrative texts of an autobiographical nature, cf. F. D’Intino, L'autobiografia moderna, 159-206.
93 MO 30.
94 MO 110.
95 Cf. U. Eco, I limiti dell'interpretazione, Milano, Bompiani, p. 11. [The Limits of Interpretation. Published by: Indiana University Press, 1991].