St. John Bosco

St. John Bosco (1815 to 1888), known everywhere as Don Bosco, was a priest in Turin who spent his life on the poor and abandoned boys of an industrialising city. He built an oratory that grew into a network of schools, workshops and hostels, wrote apprenticeship contracts that protected boys from exploitation by their employers, and founded the Salesians of Don Bosco, now one of the largest religious institutes in the Catholic Church. His educational method, which he called the preventive system, rested on three words: reason, religion and loving-kindness.

Born 16 August 1815, Piedmont Died 31 January 1888, Turin Founder of the Salesians Canonised 1934 Feast: 31 January

Father and Teacher of Youth

Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco was born on 16 August 1815 at Becchi, a hamlet near Castelnuovo in Piedmont, into a family of tenant farmers. His father Francesco died when he was about two, and his mother, Margherita Occhiena, raised three boys through the famine years of the late 1810s. She was illiterate, formidable, and the decisive influence on him. She later moved to Turin to keep house for him and the boys he took in, and the boys called her Mamma Margherita. Her own cause for canonisation is open and she was declared Venerable in 2006.

Schooling was a struggle. An older half-brother objected to the expense and the time, and John had to leave home at twelve and work as a farmhand before he could resume. He was ordained at twenty-five, in 1841, after years of poverty in which he worked as a tailor, a carpenter, a waiter and a baker to pay his way, and every one of those trades reappeared later in the workshops he built.

The juggling and acrobatics were real and they were learned young. As a boy he watched travelling performers at country fairs, taught himself their tricks, and then gathered the neighbourhood children by performing for them, on the condition that they pray the rosary and listen to him repeat the morning's sermon afterwards. He was using the same technique forty years later.

The Dream at Nine

At about nine years old Bosco had a dream he described repeatedly for the rest of his life, and which he wrote down in old age at the pope's request. He was in a field among a crowd of boys who were fighting and swearing. He waded in with his fists to stop them. A man of noble bearing appeared and told him that he would win these companions with gentleness and charity rather than with blows. A lady of majestic appearance stood beside the man and told him to look. The boys had turned into wild animals, and then, as he watched, into lambs.

He said afterwards that he woke with his hands sore and understood nothing, and that the meaning came clear only over the following decades. The dream is the founding document of his method, and he treated it as the commission for his whole life's work.

Whatever a reader makes of the dream itself, its function in his biography is plain. He had a fixed idea from childhood of what he was for, and he never deviated from it: boys, gentleness, and no violence.

Turin in the 1840s

Turin when Bosco arrived was filling with migrants from the countryside. Boys of ten and twelve came into the city looking for work in construction and the new factories, lived in dosshouses or on the street, were paid badly by masters who owed them nothing, and drifted into theft. The prisons held large numbers of them.

His mentor in the city was St Joseph Cafasso, a priest who worked among prisoners and the condemned, and who took the young Don Bosco with him into the jails. What Bosco saw there set the direction of his work: he concluded that the boys were arriving in prison because nobody had reached them earlier, and that the entire problem was preventable.

The oratory began on 8 December 1841, in the sacristy of a Turin church, when a sacristan started beating a boy named Bartolomeo Garelli for being in the way. Bosco stopped him, called the boy back, asked him whether he could read, whether he knew his prayers, whether he had a mother. Then he taught him the Hail Mary and told him to come back the following Sunday and bring his friends. The Salesians date their foundation from that conversation.

Numbers grew fast and the oratory had nowhere to meet. For several years it was evicted from one site after another, and the sight of hundreds of boys arriving in a district each Sunday alarmed both landlords and the civil authorities, who suspected political organising. In 1846 he rented a shed from a man named Pinardi in the Valdocco quarter, and Valdocco became the permanent home of the work.

The Oratory and Salesians

The Oratory of St Francis de Sales was equal parts church, school and playground. Bosco named it for St Francis de Sales because he wanted the gentleness of that saint as the house character. Boys came for the games and the music, stayed for the classes, and many of them boarded there. By the 1860s Valdocco was housing hundreds of boys, with evening schools for those who worked during the day, a chapel, a printing press and workshops.

He founded the Society of St Francis de Sales in 1859 to carry the work past his own lifetime, drawing the first members from boys he had raised in the house. Rome approved the society in 1869 and its constitutions in 1874. In 1872, with St Mary Mazzarello at Mornese, he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Salesian Sisters, to do the same work for girls. In 1876 he organised the Salesian Cooperators, lay people who support the work and share its spirit, which was an unusual idea for the period.

The first Salesian missionaries left for Argentina in 1875, and the missions to South America became a defining part of the congregation's identity in his lifetime.

The Preventive System

Bosco set out his method in a short treatise in 1877, contrasting it with the repressive system of discipline then normal in schools and reformatories, which worked by rules, surveillance and punishment after the fact.

His system rests on three words. Reason: explain the rule, make it reasonable, and let the boy understand why. Religion: frequent confession and communion, and a faith presented as good news rather than as a threat. Loving-kindness, in Italian amorevolezza: constant, visible, affectionate presence, so that the educator is among the boys in the playground rather than watching from a window.

The practical consequence is that an adult is always present, and present as a friend. Bosco's line on it is exact: it is not enough to love the young; they must know that they are loved. He also insisted that corporal punishment be excluded entirely, which in the schools of 1877 was close to eccentric.

The system is still the working charter of Salesian schools worldwide, and it has been influential well beyond Catholic education. The Catechism's teaching on education begins from the same place, that parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children and that the home is where the virtues are learned (CCC 2223).

Apprenticeship Contracts and Trade Schools

The least known and most concrete part of Bosco's work is the paperwork. From the early 1850s he negotiated and signed written apprenticeship contracts with Turin employers on behalf of his boys. The contracts specified that the master would teach the trade rather than use the boy as unpaid labour, that he would not beat him, that the boy would have his feast days and his religious duties, and that the terms were enforceable. Copies survive. In the labour conditions of Piedmont in the 1850s this was a serious intervention, and it came four decades before Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum.

He then went further and built his own workshops at Valdocco so that the training did not depend on outside employers at all: shoemaking and tailoring from 1853, bookbinding, carpentry, printing, and ironwork over the following decade. The Salesian trade school, teaching a marketable skill alongside the catechism, comes directly from those rooms.

He was also a publisher. From 1853 he produced the Letture Cattoliche, cheap monthly booklets of Catholic reading for ordinary people, printed in large numbers, and he wrote a great many of them himself along with schoolbooks, lives of the saints and lives of his own pupils. The press at Valdocco was one of the largest Catholic publishing operations in Italy.

Prophetic Dreams

Don Bosco reported dreams throughout his life and told them to the boys, and about 150 of them were written down by his followers. The best known is the Dream of the Two Columns, which he recounted in 1862. He described a fleet of ships attacking a great flagship carrying the pope, on a stormy sea, and two columns rising from the water, one topped by a host with the words Salus credentium, the salvation of believers, and the other by a statue of Mary with Auxilium christianorum, help of Christians. The pope steers the ship between the columns and moors it to both, and the attacking fleet scatters.

He read it as a statement of strategy rather than as a prediction of dated events: the Church survives on the Eucharist and on devotion to Mary. The dream shaped the two devotions he pressed hardest on his boys, frequent communion and Mary Help of Christians, and it explains the two things he built the Valdocco basilica around.

A word of caution belongs here, because his dreams circulate online attached to claims he never made. Bosco set no dates and identified no individuals, and prophecies of that kind attributed to him should be treated with suspicion. The Church's own teaching is that no one knows the day or the hour (Mk 13:32). The site sets out how to think about material of this sort on its page for false prophets.

Mary Help of Christians

Bosco built the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians at Valdocco, consecrated in 1868, financed largely by small donations he solicited across Italy and beyond, often with nothing in hand when the builders needed paying. The title Mary Help of Christians, Maria Auxilium Christianorum, is old, and Bosco made it the central devotion of the Salesian family and one of the most widespread Marian titles in the world through their schools.

He also encouraged frequent communion at a period when many Catholics received rarely, decades before Pius X made frequent and early communion general practice. His pupil St Dominic Savio, who came to the oratory at twelve and died at fourteen, is the most famous product of that formation and was canonised in 1954.

Death, Canonisation and the Salesians Today

Don Bosco died at Valdocco on 31 January 1888, aged seventy-two, worn out. Turin closed for the funeral and the crowds in the streets were enormous. By the time he died there were Salesian houses across Italy, in France, Spain, England and South America.

He was beatified in 1929 and canonised by Pius XI on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1934. Pius XI had met him personally as a young priest, which is unusual for a canonising pope. John Paul II gave him the title Father and Teacher of Youth in 1988, on the centenary of his death.

The Salesians are today among the largest institutes of consecrated men in the Church, with the Salesian Sisters among the largest of women, working in well over a hundred countries, mostly in schools, technical colleges, youth centres and street-children programmes. His body rests in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin.

Feast Day and Patronage

His memorial is 31 January, the day of his death, a memorial in the general Roman calendar and a solemnity in the Salesian family. Salesian houses keep it with the whole school.

He is patron of young people, of apprentices, of editors and publishers, and of Catholic schoolchildren, and he is invoked by stage performers and illusionists in popular devotion because of the tricks he used. His mother Margherita, Dominic Savio and Mary Mazzarello are all honoured alongside him in the Salesian calendar.

Quotable Wisdom

"Run, jump, shout, but do not sin."

"Do not put off till tomorrow the good you can do today. You may not have a tomorrow."

"It is not enough to love the young; they must know that they are loved."

The three together are a fair summary of the man: physical energy treated as good, urgency about doing good now, and love that has to be visible to work.

What a Reader Can Take From Don Bosco

Be present where the young people actually are. His system puts the adult in the playground. Supervision from a distance was the thing he was arguing against.

Make love visible. Loving a child privately does no work. Bosco's whole point is that the child has to know it, in a form the child recognises.

Teach a trade as well as a catechism. He was clear that a boy with no skill has no future and that leaving him with only piety is a failure of charity.

Write the contract. His apprenticeship agreements did more measurable good than any sermon he preached, and they cost him tedious negotiation with employers he did not like.

Do the good today. His own line is that you may not have a tomorrow. That is doctrine as much as advice (Mk 13:32-33).

For the Church's teaching on holy men and women, see the saints; for the sacrament he pressed hardest on his boys, see the Eucharist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St John Bosco?

St John Bosco, called Don Bosco, was an Italian priest who lived from 1815 to 1888 and worked among the poor and abandoned boys of industrialising Turin. He founded the Oratory of St Francis de Sales at Valdocco, the Salesian Society in 1859 and the Salesian Sisters in 1872, ran trade schools and a large Catholic press, and developed the educational method known as the preventive system.

What is Don Bosco's preventive system?

The preventive system is Don Bosco's method of education, set out in a treatise of 1877, based on reason, religion and loving-kindness. It requires that rules be explained and reasonable, that the sacraments be at the centre, and that educators be constantly and affectionately present among the young rather than supervising from a distance. He excluded corporal punishment entirely.

What was Don Bosco's dream at nine years old?

He dreamed he was among a crowd of fighting, swearing boys and waded in with his fists. A man of noble bearing told him he would win them with gentleness and charity rather than with blows, and a lady of majestic appearance told him to look, at which the boys turned into wild animals and then into lambs. He described the dream throughout his life and treated it as the commission for his work.

What is the Dream of the Two Columns?

In 1862 Don Bosco described a dream of a fleet attacking a flagship carrying the pope on a stormy sea, and of two columns rising from the water, one bearing a host inscribed "salvation of believers" and the other a statue of Mary inscribed "help of Christians." The pope moors the ship to both columns and the attackers scatter. He read it as a statement that the Church survives on the Eucharist and on devotion to Mary, and he set no dates and named no individuals.

Why are the Salesians named after St Francis de Sales?

Don Bosco named his oratory and then his religious society after St Francis de Sales because he wanted that saint's gentleness as the character of the house. Francis de Sales taught that holiness belongs to every state of life and that kindness wins more than harshness, which is the whole basis of Bosco's approach to young people.

When is the feast day of St John Bosco?

His memorial is 31 January, the day he died in 1888. He was canonised by Pius XI on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1934, and is patron of young people, apprentices, editors and publishers, and Catholic schoolchildren.