Saint John Bosco

Saint John Bosco, known throughout the world as Don Bosco, was a priest of Turin who gave his whole life to the education of poor and abandoned boys. He founded the Salesians and, together with Saint Maria Domenica Mazzarello, the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. The Church commemorates him on January 31, the day of his death.

He was born on August 16, 1815, in the hamlet of Becchi near Castelnuovo d’Asti in Piedmont, into a poor peasant family. He was not yet three years old when he lost his father, and he was raised by his mother, Margherita Occhiena. As he himself recalled, at about nine years of age he had a dream from which he understood that he was to win boys over not with blows but with gentleness and love. Already as a child he would gather his peers, entertain them with tricks he had picked up from jugglers, and repeat to them the sermons he had heard in church.

Because of poverty he worked as a farmhand, and he earned the money for his schooling himself, among other things as a tailor, a shoemaker, a carpenter, and a blacksmith. In 1835, on the advice of Saint Joseph Cafasso, he entered the seminary at Chieri. He was ordained a priest on June 5, 1841, in Turin. There, under the guidance of Father Cafasso, he visited the poor, the hospitals, and the prisons.

He met boys who had come to the city in search of work and lived without care or schooling. From 1841 he gathered them on Sundays and feast days for catechism, prayer, and play. This was the origin of the oratory, to which he gave Saint Francis de Sales as patron. For several years it moved from place to place, until in 1846 it settled at Valdocco, then on the outskirts of Turin. Don Bosco brought his mother there, and with her help he began to take homeless boys under his roof. In 1853 he opened the first workshop, for shoemakers, and others followed, so that his pupils could learn a trade on the spot.

He called his way of educating the preventive system. He based it on reason, religion, and loving-kindness: instead of punishing, he sought to prevent faults through gentleness and goodness. He wanted his boys to grow up to be honest citizens and good Christians. One of his pupils was Saint Dominic Savio.

So that the work would last, in 1859 he founded the Society of Saint Francis de Sales, the Salesians, whose constitutions were approved in 1874 by Pope Pius IX. In 1872 the congregation of sisters for the education of girls came into being, and in 1875 the first Salesian missionaries left for South America. Don Bosco built the Church of Mary Help of Christians in Turin and, at the request of Pope Leo XIII, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Rome.

Worn out by work beyond his strength, he fell ill at the end of 1887 and died in Turin at dawn on January 31, 1888. Pope Pius XI beatified him on June 2, 1929, and canonized him on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934. On the centenary of his death John Paul II devoted to him the letter Iuvenum patris, and in 1989 he declared him Father and Teacher of Youth.