Returning to Don Bosco’s initial exposure to the youth reality…

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.”

Returning to Don Bosco’s initial exposure to the youth reality…

AFW Salesian Brothers on Pilgrimage

to the tomb of St Joseph Cafasso.

This year 2010 is 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. Here we see what a wise spiritual director Fr Cafasso was, and how his guidnace in the first few years of Don Bosco as a priest  proved to be crucial.

Fr Joseph Cafasso exposed the young priests who came to the Convitto 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.”