Saint John Bosco

The young priest ran out to stop him and sternly rebuked the sacristan:

“What are you doing? He is my friend!”

After Mass, he kept the boy back, gently sat him down, asked his name and learned that he was Bartolomeo Garelli, an orphan who had come from the countryside to scrape a living in the city. He could not read or write and did not even know how to make the Sign of the Cross. The young priest smiled warmly:

“Can you whistle?”

The boy smiled, bewildered. And that very morning, a first catechism lesson began with a Hail Mary and a warm hug.

That young priest was Don Bosco, Saint John Bosco, the man who gave his whole life to poor and abandoned young people. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was turning European society upside down, driving thousands of teenagers into exploited labor, crime and prison, he appeared as a father, a teacher and a friend.

When John was only two, a terrible drought followed by disease took his father’s life. His gentle mother, whom the whole Church would later lovingly call “Mamma Margherita”, had to support her elderly mother-in-law and three young children alone, in grinding poverty. Though the family was desperately poor, Mamma Margherita raised her children in a firm, devout way of life: honest, hardworking, and always opening the door to share a potato or a crust of bread with ragged beggars.

The Man then pointed him to a beautiful Lady. She showed him the unruly children suddenly turning into roaring wild beasts, and then, in the blink of an eye, into gentle little lambs frisking around him. The Lady told him:

“Make yourself humble, strong and steadfast; what you see happening to these animals is what you will have to do for my children!”

Young John paid for that dream with much sweat and many tears. His rough half-brother Antonio forbade John to go to school, saying that reading books was laziness. At twelve, to keep peace in the family, John had to leave his beloved home in tears and work as a hired cowherd for the Moglia family for two whole years.

He taught himself acrobatics, tightrope walking, juggling and magic tricks. Every Sunday afternoon he put on a show that drew the children and adults of the village; but the price of admission was to pray a Rosary with him and listen while he repeated the parish priest’s sermon from morning Mass.

With the help of Father Calosso, the parish priest, and his mother’s hard work, John continued his studies. He studied while working at every kind of trade to support himself: carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, blacksmith, waiter. All those skills later became wonderful tools when he opened workshops to teach trades to young people.

After his ordination, under the guidance of Saint Joseph Cafasso — a holy priest devoted to accompanying prisoners — Don Bosco began visiting the dark prisons of the city of Turin.

In those damp cells, he was deeply shaken at the sight of hundreds of boys between twelve and eighteen locked up together with hardened criminals. Their bodies were ragged and covered in sores, their souls hardened and full of hatred for society.

Mamma Margherita, then nearly seventy, sold her little plot of land back home and came with her son to Valdocco to be the “Mamma” of hundreds of street boys: she washed and patched every torn shirt, cooked great pots of soup and brought the warmth of family to lonely hearts.

At Valdocco, Don Bosco perfected his famous “Preventive System”, the Sistema Preventivo: unlike the repressive method, which waits for students to do wrong and then punishes them as a warning to others, the preventive method places the educator beside the young person as a friend and father, to guide, advise and create a healthy environment in which they can hardly go wrong. Its three pillars are:

• Reason — explaining clearly through dialogue, without high-handed imposition;
• Religion — the Eucharist and the sacrament of Reconciliation received with free and willing love;
• and Loving-kindness — loving young people with such a concrete love that they feel they are truly loved.

He taught his assistants:

“Make these young people love us, and then they will do everything we wish... In every young person, even the most troublesome, there is always a point of goodness; the educator’s duty is to find that point and make it shine!”

He opened schools and workshops for printing, carpentry, tailoring and blacksmithing right on the grounds of the Oratory. He was the first in Italy to sign legally binding “apprenticeship contracts” with workshop owners to protect the rights, working hours and wages of young workers.

In 1872, with Saint Maria Domenica Mazzarello, he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians for girls. In 1876, he founded the Salesian Cooperators for lay people in the world.

He built the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians at Valdocco entirely from donations that came in day by day as if by miracle. Near the end of his life, at the request of Pope Leo XIII, though exhausted, he still traveled to France to raise funds to complete the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Rome.

In 1988, for the 100th anniversary of his death, Pope John Paul II officially proclaimed Saint John Bosco “Father and Teacher of Youth”, Pater et Magister Iuventutis. The Church celebrates him on January 31 each year.

In Vietnam, the Salesian family of Don Bosco is widely present through technical schools, vocational schools, student hostels and parishes in many provinces, forming thousands of young people with skills and good character.