One sentence would have cleared him. He never said it.

MONDONIO, Piedmont, 1853 AD — One sentence would have cleared him. St. Dominic Savio, eleven years old, never said it.

This year his schoolmaster stood him up in front of the whole class. He told him he had done something bad enough to have him put out of the school. St. Dominic Savio didn’t say a word back.

He hadn’t done it. Something bad really had happened at the school. The boys who had done it worked out a plan to pin it on him instead.

The boy who walked to school

St. Dominic Savio was born at Riva di Chieri on April 2, 1842 AD. His father, Charles Savio, was a blacksmith, and his mother was called Brigid. From his very first day at school he was top of his class.

He made his First Communion in 1849 AD, when he was seven. Back then children usually weren’t allowed it until they were eleven or twelve. On the first page of his prayer book he wrote down four resolutions. The fourth one was, “Death rather than sin.”

In June 1852 AD he started at the bigger school in Castelnuovo. He was ten, and he walked there and back. He wanted that place badly. He said at home: “If I were a bird I should like to fly every morning to Castelnuovo d’Asti so as to go on with my studies.”

During that school year he started getting ill. In November 1852 AD the family moved to Mondonio, a hamlet less than two miles east of Castelnuovo. His master at the village school there was Father Giuseppe Cugliero.

An angry master and a quiet boy

Some of his pupils had done something serious, he said. Whoever was found guilty was going to be expelled. The boys who had done it tried several ways of getting out of the punishment. In the end they settled on blaming St. Dominic Savio. Father Cugliero didn’t believe it at first, but the story they’d put together fitted so well that it sounded true.

The next morning he came into the school angry. He spoke to the whole class first. Then he turned to St. Dominic Savio and spoke to him harshly. The boy deserved to be expelled, he told him. He’d be let off this once, because it was a first offence. But if it happened again, he’d be sent away.

St. Dominic Savio could have shown in one sentence that he’d had nothing to do with it. He didn’t answer. He hung his head, like a boy who had been told off for something he really did. He never tried to clear his name.

The other boys watched him stand there silent with his head down, as if he was admitting it. When school ended they went home thinking he was guilty. He didn’t hold it against the boys who had blamed him. He got on with his work in the same good mood as before.

What he said the next day

The next day the boys who had really done it were found out. Father Cugliero was sorry now for how harsh he’d been. He sent for St. Dominic Savio and asked him: “Why did you not tell me that you had had nothing to do with it?”

St. Dominic Savio answered him: “I knew that the guilty boy was already under threat of expulsion for other things, but I hoped to be forgiven, since it was the first act of misconduct ever imputed to me at school. I also remembered that Our Lord had been unjustly accused.”

After that, the other boys thought better of him than they had before the telling-off. He hadn’t told on the pupil who had wronged him. His teachers put him down as a boy who would not bend.