St. John Bosco tells how St. Dominic Savio found a dying man

LONDON, England, 1914 AD — In the chapter of his Life of Dominic Savio headed “Special Graces”, Saint John Bosco tells how his pupil, Saint Dominic Savio, came to his room one day and walked him through the streets of Turin to a door where a man lay dying. Afterwards the boy would not say how he had known. The Salesian Press in London has brought the book out in English this year. Ahead of its preface, the new edition prints a declaration made to comply with a decree of Pope Urban VIII: it claims “none but human authority” for anything supernatural in the book, “until the Holy See may have sanctioned it by its infallible authority.”

St. Dominic Savio came to board at the Oratory of St. Francis de Sales, at Valdocco on the edge of Turin, in the autumn of 1854 AD. He died at his family’s home in Mondonio on March 9, 1857 AD, not yet fifteen. St. John Bosco, the priest in whose house he lived for those years, wrote the Life soon after. It appeared in 1859 AD in his Catholic Readings, a series of booklets. The boy’s companions had asked him for it, and in the preface he set himself a rule: he would “narrate only what has been observed by you or by myself, and which I keep preserved in your own writing.”

St. John Bosco opens the “Special Graces” chapter with a warning: “I now wish to describe certain facts that are really out of the common, and which may perhaps some day be the subject of criticism.” He then says what he is reporting and what he leaves the reader to judge: “I am relating what occurred under my own notice, and the incidents are given with scrupulous care; the conclusions to be drawn must be left for the discreet reader.” He also held some things back, and says so at the chapter’s end: “There are many other facts of a somewhat similar nature, but which are out of place in a small life like this. I have left them on record, so that, when, in the opinion of others, their publication is demanded, they maybe given to the world.”

One day, St. John Bosco writes, St. Dominic Savio came to his room and said: “Come quickly. Father, come with me, there is a good work to be done.” St. John Bosco asked where he was to go. The boy only answered: “Make haste, make haste.” St. John Bosco hesitated, then went, because “past experience had shown me the importance of such invitations.”

St. Dominic Savio walked ahead and the priest followed, down one street, then another, then a third, neither of them speaking, and round one more corner. At a certain door the boy went up the stairs to the third floor and rang the bell hard. He turned to St. John Bosco, said “It is here that you are wanted,” and walked away.

A woman opened the door. St. John Bosco records her words: “Oh, make haste, quick, or it will be too late. My husband has abandoned his faith; now he is at the point of death and wishes to die a Catholic.” St. John Bosco went straight to the bedside and heard the man’s confession. He had just finished when the parish priest, who had been sent for, arrived. The parish priest had just enough time to anoint the man once before he died.

St. John Bosco writes of what followed: “Afterwards I asked Dominic how he knew that there was a man ill at that house; he did not answer, but looked at me with an air of sadness, and I noticed that tears were beginning to come. I did not question him further.”

In these same years at the Oratory, according to longstanding Catholic Tradition, St. Dominic Savio came to St. John Bosco and asked permission to go home to Mondonio, because his mother was seriously ill and Our Lady wanted to cure her. St. John Bosco asked him: “How did you get this news of your mother’s illness? Has anyone written to you?” St. Dominic Savio answered: “No one has written or said a word to me, Father, but I know just the same.” St. John Bosco did not press him, and let him go.

At home the boy found his mother, Brigid Savio, very ill. His father, Charles Savio, had gone to fetch the doctor. St. Dominic Savio went into her room, jumped up on the bed, put his arms round her and kissed her. Then he left as quickly as he had come and went straight back to Turin. When the doctor arrived, he found her completely recovered. Back at the Oratory, St. Dominic Savio went at once to St. John Bosco and told him what had happened, and how Our Lady had cured his mother.