Saint John Bosco, Priest (January 31st)

Of the Saints and Feast Days commemorated this week:

January 26th - Saints Timothy and Titus, Bishops

January 27th - Saint Angela Merici, Virgin

January 28th - Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor of the Church

January 31st - Saint John Bosco, Priest

February 1st - 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)

I’ve decided to write about  Saint John Bosco, Priest

The future Saint John Bosco, patron saint to youth ministers, and inspired in good part by the work of St. Francis de Sales who lived a few centuries before but in the same region - just on the other side of the Alps - was born to a poor family of laborers (farm hands) on August 16, 1815 in a village called Becchi in the commune (municipality) then called Castelnuovo d'Asti but which has been since renamed Castelnuovo Don Bosco in the saint's honor, in the Piedmont region (capital Turin) of today's Italy.

The youngest son of Francesco Bosco and Margherita Occhiena, his father died when John was two leaving his mother to care for the family.  

Since the family was poor, it could well have been that the future Saint would have been prevented from getting the education that eventually allowed him to become a priest.  Yet he did impress a young priest named Joseph Cafasso so saw both his natural intelligence and his interest in learning, so this young priest was able to get him into a seminary, paying for the future Saint John Bosco’s education initially out of his own pocket, though John’s mother was able to contribute later on as well.

The future Saint John Bosco seemed to live at a time just as the provision of universal elementary education began to be seen as a value, and maybe 50 years before the future Saint John XXIII, who was again from the same general region, was able to profit from to benefit from the increased general educational opportunities that became available in Italy and much of Europe in the 19th Century.  If either the future Saint John Bosco or the future Saint John XXIII had been born a century earlier, while perhaps they could have been saintly people in any case, their impact would not have become known because their families, like most families at the time, were simply too poor to have an impact outside of (or even to leave) their immediate environs.

The challenges brought by the future Saint John Bosco’s poverty in his youth made him particularly interested in ministering to the young people of his time, a time of industrialization and urbanization, where legions of youth would otherwise be lost trouble-making and crime.  

St. John Bosco, ordained in 1841 lived also in a time when modern Italy was being unified into one country, which definitively took place in 1870, by a secular leadership inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution (it’s not an accident that the Italian flag is a tri-color modeled after the French one), which generally looked down upon the Catholic Church as a backward, oppressive and generally reactionary institution which would _necessarily_ stand in the way to Italy’s (and its people’s) development.

St. John Bosco became a defender of the Church and through his work as well as of the Congregation, the Salesians, that he founded, he was able to show that the Catholic Church can be helpful in the building up of a modern society where Catholics, especially the youth, could positively participate and contribute.

His example remains important in our day, as we too have similar questions of how the Church and people of faith in general can contribute positively to the community, society around us.

And yes, a key remains in the education and inspiration of our youth.

St. John Bosco, pray for us!