GOD’S CALL

At the heart of the Old Testament there is a call from God to Moses, on the day of the burning bush. The Lord said: «I have seen the miserable state of my people in Egypt. I have heard their appeal to be free of their slave-drivers. Yes, I am well aware of their sufferings. I mean to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians and bring them up out of that land to a land rich and broad...» (Exodus 3,7-8).

«I have seen … I have heard … I am well aware… I mean to deliver them ». These are four words about perfect fatherliness. God does not abandon his children. Don Bosco was called to incarnate God’s fatherliness in our times.

A time of wounds

Don Bosco was living and working in a period of rapid and epoch-making change. This change was traumatic, especially in the social and ecclesiastical fields. In particular, the process begun with the Enlightenment was accelerated. This had put an end to the societas cristiana, through the triumph of agnostic and anti-Christian ideologies, with their declared incompatibility between reason-science and faith, the progressive disaffection of the middle and working classes with ecclesiastical institutions (more rapid in the cities, more gradual in the countryside). In Italy the Roman question opened a painful wound in the heart of believers. Under the pressure of the lay anticlerical intelligensia and of the bourgeois business class, which, through the press, fashioned public opinion and life styles, the new generations, being formed in a school which was progressively agnostic, became disoriented, an easy prey to ideas and behaviour far removed from Christian practice. At the same time, new forms of poverty were appearing, massive internal and external migration, cultures being uprooted, the exploitation of the work-force and moral brutalisation of the poorest groups in the population.

Saving the young

It was precisely this historical context, these social traumas and these tensions which were for Don Bosco the stimulus and the valuable occasion to discern the voice of God. While others argued, condemned, bewailed the sad state of affairs of their times, he was able to perceive God present and active in human history. Trained as he was to feel himself a pastor called to work for the salvation of the human race, especially for that of youth, he became immersed in his own times, critically, but lovingly and creatively, fully a part of the often deeply-felt events taking place around him, ready to give his life for the mission which he felt himself called to undertake, convinced that the grace of God is stronger than any human obstacle and effectively supports anyone who works to spread in peoples’ hearts Christ’s Kingdom.

The situation of the poor boys he met in Turin in the ’40s and ’50s, but also ecclesial, political-social events and the new laws, encouraged and shaped in practical ways his gift for education, his pastoral zeal, his natural talents, and they led him towards a discernment which was proactive and preventive.

In the decades which follow, the situations will change, new problems will arise, but his way of thinking and his spiritual approach will lead him to expand his horizons, to formulate activities and plans, to multiply his operations, co-involving ever growing hosts of disciples, supporters, benefactors and well-wishers. In this way the expression “poor and abandoned boys” will acquire an ever broader significance, not only in socio-economic terms, but also spiritual, cultural and moral.

«I can do all things in Him who gives me strength!»

His modernity consists in this: not only new ideas in tune with the requirements and the tastes of the times and of the young, but responses, prompt and really effective (since they were far-sighted and the result of a process of discernment and of a genuine love of God) to new problems, new challenges, new needs, new “satanic”attacks, starting from a solid faith, an unwavering hope, from an total gift of himself to God and to his brothers (and sisters), from an inner freedom, the result of purification and self-detachment. He wrote to a priest who was discouraged: «There is work to be done? I shall die on the field of work sicut bonus miles Christi. I’m good for little or nothing? Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat. There are thorns? With the thorns changed into flowers the Angels will make you a crown in heaven. Times are difficult? They always were, but God will never fail to come to your help: Christus heri et hodie» (25 October 1878, Ceria, Epistolario di S. Giovanni Bosco, III, 399).

For us it is a lesson of hope and of courage, an invitation to shake ourselves, and to renew our fidelity, our commitment, and our trust in God.