Today we celebrate the memorial of St. John Bosco,
a great educator of youth.
And a revolutionary, you might say, in his times in Milan where he ministered and founded
his oratory and eventually his religious community, founded on the spirituality of St. Francis
de Sales.
He educated boys.
And in Milan there were a lot of kids that were really street urchins.
They either were homeless or were so poor that they were...
had the opportunity very often to be wayward.
And so there was a large population of young people, especially boys, who were basically
running wild through Milan.
So St. John gathered them up and tried to educate them first in a...
without much in terms of infrastructure or means to do so, but it wasn't so much the
buildings or the facilities or the quality of the teachers.
It was the care with which he took care of the boys that made all the difference in the
world.
And eventually, of course, St. John Bosco and his Salesian order provided these young
people with an excellent education.
I went to a Salesian school and Salesian schools have a very high standard of education.
And you learn a trade while you're going to school and it's an excellent education.
And it was important that he should provide them with that excellent education so that
these kids could get off the street and provide for themselves and settle down and get married
and have a family and be able to support a family or, you know, in many cases enter religious
life with a priesthood.
So the education did a great deal for these young people, but it wasn't so much the quality
of the academic education that made the difference in the lives of these boys.
It was the method of the education and that was revolutionary in the time of St. John Bosco.
St. John allowed them a lot of freedom, not unsupervised freedom, but he did have them
doing a lot of exercise and he gave them time to run around and, you know, be boisterous
and all that.
And people were concerned about all these kids in one place when they were street urchins
and he got a lot of complaints.
And there were times when there was trouble, but for the most part they were well behaved.
But what frustrated people was that he used very little authority with them.
And he was able to do it because of the dedication of the Salesian fathers and brothers who spent,
you know, almost all their time with the young boys.
In fact, he was challenged on many occasions, both within the church and in the civil society,
on his method of education.
So he wrote a pamphlet, which is still available, called, I may get the name slightly off, but
it's basically the preventative method of education.
And so his philosophy was to keep the kids so well educated that they would be able to
go to school.
And he was so busy and well supervised that any large problems would be cut off in the
past, that there wouldn't be this problem of having to sort of run the schools like
they were, you know, for delinquents, reform schools.
He had three basic principles that guided the education that he provided with the boys.
The first principle was reason.
Okay.
He taught the boys how to think, and he taught them the reasons why we should do the right
thing.
And there was a piece of authority in there as well.
The brothers did exercise authority over the boys, but they tried to help them always to
understand the reasons why we believe what we believe as Catholics and why we do what
we do, and the reasons for respect and authority, and most of all, you know, helping them to
think as they educate them along the way.
A lot of times school can become indoctrination, and people can get out of school and learn
to read and write, but they don't know how to think.
This is why, for example, in regard to the moral issues, the major moral issues like
abortion and birth control and same sex marriage, people don't think, they feel, and they're
not always interested in intellectual arguments.
Okay.
So, St. John Bosco taught the boys how to think.
The second principle that he used was religion, and this got at the heart of things because
not only was it a matter of faith and devotion, but it was also a matter of motivation.
And it was supernatural motivation that he wanted to instill in the boys.
He wanted to give them the highest motives for doing the right thing.
And of course, when we have those motives, it's not just a psychological stimulus to
help us do what is right, but of course, we call upon the Lord and are hopefully in
the state of grace and are receiving the sacraments.
So there is the primary function of receiving the grace of God.
And so he was keeping them well catechized, and he was keeping them close to the sacraments.
St. John Bosco would spend hours and hours hearing their confessions and was a wise counselor
in that regard.
Okay.
And he was concerned that his boys always remained in the state of grace and gave them
every opportunity to do so through the sacramental life that he provided them in the oratory.
And finally, the third principle was kindness.
He told the brothers over and over that it should be kindness that should motivate their
actions rather than harshness or simply the exercise of authority to lord it over the
children.
Okay.
And he was concerned about the welfare of the boys, not just generically in terms of
his desire to get kids off the street, but he took an interest in each and every one
of them and would spend time with them and would help them and do what he could to believe
in their goodness and to presume the best about them and to give them a chance.
There were times when, you know, they had to send their children to the sacramental
school.
Okay.
Or send boys away, which sometimes is inevitable when someone refuses to cooperate.
But in general, the way that Salesians succeeded in their education of these wayward youth
was by means of kindness.
So reason, religion, and kindness was the method of St. John Bosco, and it wasn't just
something that he figured out on his own.
St. John Bosco was a great mystic, a great saint and a great mystic, a great man of prayer,
and his actions were the fruit of his union with God.
So we can think about that as well when we're trying to deal with people who are perhaps
difficult or uncooperative or who are in need of enlightenment.
Reason, religion, and kindness.
The three go together and can produce grace.
Okay.
Thank you.
And I'll say this, I also liked the great, great, good work he's done in Mesopotamia.
Amen.
To pray.
That of which I really do, destruction, why didn't you pray because either don't
pray for somebody else is bad.
How are you telling us how
to pray?
It's one unit of prayer!
Uh-huh.
Thank you for watching.