Who was St. John Bosco?
John Bosco was born on August 16, 1815, at the Becchi, a hamlet of Castelnuovo d'Asti in Piedmont, in what the Catholic Encyclopedia calls "a little cabin" of poor parents, and was baptized the next day as John Melchior. His father, Francis, died of pneumonia on May 11, 1817, leaving three sons to his wife, Margaret Occhiena, whom the Church today calls Venerable. The Salesians say simply that his mother left a deep impression on his soul.
When he was nine he had what the Salesians call a prophetic dream. He found himself among a crowd of children at play, some of them swearing, and jumped in with words and fists to silence them. A dignified man stopped him and said, in the Salesian telling, "You will have to win these friends of yours not by blows but by gentleness and love," and promised to give him a teacher, under whose guidance he could become wise. The man, the Salesians say, was Jesus, and the teacher was Mary.
He was ordained in Turin by Archbishop Luigi Fransoni in June 1841. Franciscan Media tells what happened next: he met a poor orphan, prepared him for Holy Communion, and soon had young apprentices gathering around him for catechism. The Catholic Encyclopedia counts them: twenty boys in February 1842, thirty a month later, four hundred by March 1846. After about five years of difficulties, the Salesians say, he settled in the spring of 1846 at Valdocco, on the outskirts of Turin, and opened his Oratory there. His mother, "Mama Margaret," gave, in the Encyclopedia's words, "the last ten years of her life in devoted service to the little inmates of this first Salesian home," selling her own belongings to support the boys. Patrons funded a shoemaker's and a tailor's workshop; by 1856, Franciscan Media reports, there were 150 boys and a printing press for religious pamphlets.
On December 18, 1859, he began the Society of St. Francis de Sales, the Salesians. The Salesians say he did it "with another eighteen of his boys"; Franciscan Media says seventeen men. Rome praised the new society in 1864, and Pope Pius IX gave final approval in 1874. On June 9, 1868, the church of Mary Help of Christians was consecrated at Valdocco. On August 5, 1872, with Mary Mazzarello, he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians to extend his work to girls; the Salesian Cooperators followed in 1876 and the Salesian Bulletin in 1877. The Salesians date their work in Buenos Aires to 1875 and in Patagonia, at Carmen de Patagones and Viedma, to 1879.
Don Bosco died on January 31, 1888, in his poor room at Valdocco, aged seventy-two. By then, the Catholic Encyclopedia says, there were 250 Salesian houses with 130,000 children, from which 18,000 finished apprentices went out every year, and over six thousand priests had come from his institutions. Pius XI beatified him on June 2, 1929, and canonized him on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934.
Why Catholics pray to St. John Bosco for their children
Because he was good at exactly the thing that frightens parents: a boy who will not listen. His method had a name, the preventive system, and he wrote it down in Turin in 1877. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he was "the first to adopt the preventive method," seeking to gain "love before inspiring fear." Franciscan Media describes it as a system "rejecting corporal punishment," keeping boys in surroundings where sin was unlikely, with frequent Confession and Communion and fatherly guidance. Pope John Paul II, in Iuvenum Patris, his 1988 letter for the centenary of Don Bosco's death, summed it up in the three words Don Bosco used, "ragione, religione, amorevolezza": reason, religion and loving-kindness, which the letter describes as a daily presence among the young.
Don Bosco said it to the boys themselves: "My dear boys, I love you with all my heart, and it is enough for you to be young for me to love you very much." He fed them, found them trades, taught them their catechism, and spoke to them plainly about death, judgment, heaven and hell, about prayer, about avoiding sin and about going often to the sacraments. Franciscan Media's reflection puts the whole of it in one line: "John Bosco educated the whole person—body and soul united."
Some of his titles rest on papal documents. John Paul II called him "father and teacher of the young" in 1988, and the next year, in the letter Centesimo exeunte anno, declared and proclaimed him "Father and Teacher of Youth." His patronage of students, teachers and editors is traditional: it grew from devotion, not from a decree.
So a parent prays to him for a teenager who has gone silent or hard, for a son or daughter who says the faith is not for them, for a house where the screens have won, and for herself, when she is simply tired. She is asking a priest who spent nearly fifty years among the poor boys of Turin, who was told in a dream to win them "not by blows but by gentleness and love," and who did.
How to pray to St. John Bosco
His memorial is January 31, and the Salesian Family Bulletin invites readers to pray a novena from January 22 to 30. Any week will do when the trouble is now. Say the prayer below once, then tell him about the child by name. If you can, go to Mass and to Confession; Don Bosco urged both, often, on his boys. Ask him for the gift he plainly had: a way of loving a hard child that the child could feel.
Then do the human things. Talk with the child, not at him. Talk to a teacher, a priest or a counselor. Don Bosco taught his boys trades as well as catechism; Franciscan Media says he valued job training and the self-worth that comes with skill. If a son or daughter is in real danger, from drugs, from self-harm, from someone online, prayer is not a substitute for a doctor, a crisis line or the police.