In the collect of today's holy sacrifice of the Mass, in honor of St. John Bosco, we
prayed, O God, who didst raise up St. John, thy confessor, to be father and teacher of
youth, and by him, with the help of the Virgin Mary, didst promote new families in thy church.
Grant we beseech thee that, inflamed by the same fire of love, we may win souls and serve
thee alone, through Christ our Lord, etc.
And so, today we pray.
We pray that we might be like St. John Bosco, and that we might win souls for Christ.
St. John is a tremendous example and intercessor on behalf of those who work for the Kingdom
of God.
He, of course, in a particular way, worked with youth, and brought them in their low
state, to the gate of Heaven, to the intercession of the Blessed Mother.
But as we read in today's Gospel, from St. Matthew, when the Apostles came to our Lord
and asked him who was the greatest in the Kingdom of God, he brought before them a little
child and said, unless you be converted and become like little children, you shall not
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
And so, there's a sense in which all of us...
We have to always remain students, you know, to be a disciple of Jesus means to be a student,
literally.
Jesus is teacher.
We are students.
He says to his Apostles, only one among you is a teacher.
The rest of you are all students, all disciples.
And so, as we pray that we might win souls for the Kingdom of Christ, as St. John did,
we have to begin by being learners ourselves.
Amen.
And coming to realize how it is that God wins souls for his Kingdom, how the saints
who lived in Christ won souls for God's Kingdom.
St. John Bosco was kind of an innovator in his times.
There's really nothing new under the sun, and when saints come around and bring reform
into the church, it's a new experience.
It's really not something entirely new, just that we sometimes lose our way.
St. Francis was a great reformer of the church in his own time, because many around him had
lost the way.
And when St. Francis came and chose a way of minorhood, a kind of way of spiritual childhood,
it was like it was something new.
The same thing was true in the time of St. Therese in France.
Spiritual childhood is really nothing new.
It's a new experience.
It's a new experience.
It's new, but it seemed to be new because we had lost our way.
Well, St. John came about in the 19th century and began to bring together young, vagrant
boys to educate them, and people were kind of worried because his approach to the education
of young people was different than what was typical in his time, and there were many that
didn't believe in it.
In fact, there were people in Turin that wanted to shut him down.
They were afraid that this big band of boys was going to be more than could be reasonably
handled and that they would cause a great deal of trouble, because they were vagrant
and they did cause trouble.
And St. John was trying to educate them and give them a life, give them hope, give them
a future in Christ so that that wouldn't be their lot in life, but there were many that
didn't believe.
So, St. John Bosco at one point wrote a very short little treatise, it's only a couple
pages long, called The Preventive Method of the Education of Youth, and it's a very interesting
little tract that he wrote, and he wrote it because he was being challenged in his methods
and people, as I said, didn't believe in what he was doing, so he tried to explain his philosophy,
and he contrasted.
He contrasted what he called his preventive method of education with what was called the
repressive, or what he called the repressive method of education.
He said the repressive method is when you lay out rules to the kids, and you supervise
them, and when they break the rules, you punish them.
And he didn't condemn this method entirely, you know, all education to some extent, whether
it's the education of the youth.
Whether it's the education of children, or the education of adults, continued education
is a matter of expectations and consequences.
We know what's expected, or we should know, you know, that's part of education, and if
we meet the expectations, we're rewarded, and if we don't, there's bad consequences.
That's just life.
That's the way all of life is, and if we don't teach children that at a young age, and people
that, in other words, if parents, people that love the children, don't teach them that
at a young age, people who don't love them will teach it later on in life, employers
and police officers and others, there are consequences to our actions.
But in St. John Bosco's day, people really believed that if you just punish a child,
that that's going to, you know, change their way of thinking and acting, you know, punishment
is sometimes necessary, punitive measures.
But St. John believed that there was something more important, and he actually, in a very
revolutionary way, you know, there's not many people that follow St. John's method, he,
his philosophy was to educate the children as much as possible without punishment.
And he did this in a, in a method that he called the preventative method, and, his philosophy,
his goal was to prevent...
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
there from being any reason to have to punish the children that seems a bit idealistic and
perhaps in some ways it is but he said that the most important thing that needs to be done in
order to educate young people is to make use of what he said reason religion and kindness
reason in order to help them to understand what it was that god expected of them what it was that
education expected of them religion to give them the motives because they needed not something
simply you know fear or or natural motives of wanting to succeed but they needed something
deeper something that resided within and that's god's grace and his love and his mercy and and
the movement of the holy spirit so he wanted them to have a sacramental life and and to um
uh to have access to all of the graces that god wanted them to have the final part of his
method was kindness and in a sense perhaps this was the most uh characteristic part
of saint john bosco's method because his um the key to the whole thing was that the the salesians
the priests and the brothers were supposed to be present to the children they are not
just at the beginning of the day or at the beginning of class or whatever to tell the
kids what the rules were or what was expected but they're also throughout the day to to live
and to eat and to recreate with the with the boys and and to be there at all at all times and
to offer suggestions and corrections and admonitions before things got out of hand
and saint john was very successful in this way but the whole key to the key to the whole thing
was the fact that saint john and the other salesians were there in the lives of these young
young boys and and young men and i guess that was something that was not altogether
typical in the lives of young people especially these young people who were
living in the streets before saint john gathered them gathered them up and took
them to his oratory and i think we can learn a lot about um apostolic work and about well life
in general family life uh life in the church we live in a fatherless society
sometimes even a motherless society just read about a couple
uh entertainers actors celebrities
just after having a child or two in their marriage,
decided they wanted to have another one and decided to use a surrogate.
So the mother and the father contributed the reproductive cells,
but a surrogate conceived the child and is bringing it to term.
And this is happening more and more.
It's been going on for a long time, of course, but this is fashionable.
And the horrible thing is that now even a mother is not present to her child
when the child is conceived and is being gestated.
And somehow this person is supposed to become a mother sometime after the birth of her child.
And our society doesn't see that that's a problem.
More and more, the presence of people in each other's lives is less and less important.
There's more important things in life.
And so we surrender the ground of the sanctuaries of our homes and our churches
to the secular world without realizing what we're giving up and what the cost is.
And as I said, St. John Bosco's little treatise on the education of youth
is not some tome written in a university by some egghead.
It is written by a very intelligent and well-educated man,
but somebody who had their feet on the ground and was down in the trenches
and was working for the conversion sanctification of souls.
And he was able to say everything, everything really, that needed to be said in two pages.
And most of it was, if you want kids to prosper and flourish,
you have to be present to them.
You have to spend time with them.
You have to...
be in their lives.
And you have to know what's going on.
And then you have to invest your time and your energy
and not crumble with impatience when they're problematic.
You've just got to stick with it and be kind.
And we can all learn this lesson and pray that our society can change
and that we realize that things can change.
And that we can change.
And that we can't possibly get better in family life or in society or in politics
unless we begin to realize that people are not dispensable.
That we can't just say, well, you know, this isn't working out.
I'm just going to check out and no longer going to be loyal.
You know, we need this loyalty more than anything else and the willingness to suffer.
St. John Bosco, part of his little method, you know,
just said,
there's little things in this two-page treatise.
He talks about how he wants the fathers and brothers to make sure that at the end of the day
that they at least go to the dormitories and talk to the boys.
They used to call it John Bosco's Buona Notte, his good night.
He used to go into the dormitories at night before they turned out the lights
and he'd spend two or three minutes there talking to them,
talking about the day, maybe offering a correction.
And in his case, he would tell them sometimes his dreams and his visions
because he had dreams and visions about the boys.
But he just spent that time every evening before they went to bed without fail.
And this is another thing that he said in his preventative method.
He said, make sure that those who are in charge don't have other assignments outside of the house.
Make sure that they're there with the boys.
So, you know, we live in a society that,
you know, is very busy and we get wrapped up in all kinds of things.
Sometimes fathers, because of the economic situation in which they find themselves,
you know, are not at home nearly as much as they would like to be.
But we have to do the best that we can and realize there really are no substitutes
to just very practical, ordinary institutions of family life like the family meal
and like a parent.
A parent knowing what their child is doing.
And a father making sure that he's involved in every aspect of his children's life,
even if it only comes down to a few minutes a day, that he makes an effort to do that.
We can all, you know, think about these things and extrapolate from them
ways in which all of us could work more zealously and generously for the kingdom of God
in our own religious communities.
In our families, in our workplace, in our churches,
where we just try to be more generous and dedicate our time to people
and look for people who are in need and make sure that we are present to them.
This is our religion.
Jesus is present to us.
Sometimes we're not even aware of it.
Sometimes we're not even grateful for it.
But he's always there.
He's always waiting for us.
He's always available to us.
And we need to imitate him.
And imitate his saints like St. John Bosco.
Misericordes oculos
Ad nos converse
Et es un benedicto
Fruitum vellum
Tristanu vivi
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