Don Bosco had an intuitive understanding of the positive impact that active participation in the apostolate had on his young clerics. This is the way he chose to form his first collaborators – Rua, Cagliero and others. In the midst of their many studies they were involved in the life of the Oratory and in daily assistance and also entrusted with different responsibilities. We know how this was a bone of contention with Bishop Gastaldi who was horrified to see clerics mingling in such an undignified way with the young.
In writing his Memoirs of the Oratory Don Bosco talks of his own apostolic engagement as a boy and teenager with his companions as the key moments of his own vocational discernment and growth. But also, he himself experienced the formative dimension that active ministry can have on a young priest if one is accompanied and helped to reflect on the experience. There is no doubt that the three years that Don Bosco spent at the Convitto were crucial. As Don Ceria testifies in his book Don Bosco con Dio, the years ‘contributed powerfully to mould his spirit in a definitive manner’. After six years of speculative theology isolated from reality in a seminary, insertion into the active apostolate was not easy.
Fr Joseph Cafasso [1], exposed the young priests under his care to the challenging pastoral realities of a city fast becoming industrialized. Don Bosco was no exception, and in reading the Memoirs one can see the impact that Don Bosco’s visit to the prisons left on him: “It was Fr Cafasso who first took me into the prisons, where I soon learned how great was the malice and misery of mankind.”
This exposure often led the young priests to a crisis point as they were confronted by the harsh realities in which the masses had to live in. We know of Don Bosco’s own horror when he visited the prisons: “…seeing them [the youth] idle there, infested with lice, lacking food for body and soul, horrified me.” Yet in this situation something else was even more shocking for him: “What shocked me most was to see that many of them were released full of good resolutions to go straight, and yet in a short time they landed back in prison, within a few days of their release.” This was unacceptable!
The exposure led the pastoral ministers to a crisis “…because they were abandoned to their own resources.”
which in turn triggered in them a reflective process: How could this be? What could be done? In his own searching Don Bosco came to an important insight as to the cause of this situation:
Don Bosco then comes to a very important discernment that would change the course of his life: “‘Who knows?’ I thought to myself, ‘if these youngsters had a friend outside who would take care of them, help them, teach them religion on feast days. Who knows but they could be steered away from ruin?’
Fr Cafasso was there beside the young priests throughout the process; he accompanied them in their struggle to make meaning out of the chaos that they had encountered; he helped them in their theological reflection on their particular experience in a way that this becomes for them the crucial element in their discernment. Don Bosco himself affirms: “With Fr Cafasso’s encouragement and inspiration I began to work out in my mind how to put the idea into practice…” This was the seed that germinated into the Oratory and eventually into the Congregation and Salesian Family.
The chaos of the reality of the young people in an industrialized city led to a vocational crisis which in turn, through prayer and pastoral reflection, was transformed into a Kairos moment. His engagement in the harsh reality of the youth of an industrialized city, reflected upon in the light Gospel under the guidance of Don Cafasso, made him ready to seize the opportune moment when providence presented him with it when he met Bartholomew Garelli: “Shall we start now”.
Don Bosco was able to do this because he had an awareness that ultimately it is the Lord alone who is ever creative in his providence and that our ministry can never be a personal project: “…leaving to the Lord's grace what the outcome would be. Without God's grace, all human effort is vain.”
I have dwelt on Don Bosco’s particular experience at some length to illustrate how our very tradition is rooted in this process of engagement and reflection in the light of the scriptures and tradition. Indeed one could say that the whole of the Memoirs of the Oratory is a reflection on the part of Don Bosco and written at the Pope’s request. Throughout the book he is trying to answer a very simple question which the Pope had posed to him: is there anything in the life and story of the Oratory that shows that it was divinely inspired. At face value the Memoirs appear to be a series of stories and anecdotes. Yet there is a thread that goes through all of the stories and unifies them all into a whole; namely how God’s providence was guiding things right from the very beginning. [1] 2010 was the 150th anniversary of St Joseph’s Cafasso’s death; he died at just 49 years of age on 23 June 1860. That means he passed away just six months after the foundation of the Salesian Congregation. It was an undertaking which Don Bosco must surely have discussed at length with him, not only on the practicalities of the project, but more importantly on discerning God’s will in the foundation of a new Congregation. It was Joseph Cafasso who was initially instrumental in directing Don Bosco in working with youth in difficulty, who continued to direct him in his weekly confession, who advised him to take up lodgings with Don Borel at the Refuge, who worked closely with him in the foundation of the Oratory, giving him financial support and convincing others to fund his charitable foundation and, when necessary, to defend him from critics even from the clergy.
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