Saint John Bosco

St. John Bosco was not yet two when his father, Francesco, died in May 1817 AD. His first memory was wanting to stay in the room with the body after everyone else had left. That year a drought ruined the crops, and the family had nothing else to live on.

When he was about nine, he dreamt of a courtyard full of swearing boys, and when he hit them a man told him to win them over with gentleness and charity instead. A woman then showed him wild animals that had turned into lambs. The next morning he told his mother, his brothers and his grandmother, and each of them gave the dream a different meaning.

At eleven St. John Bosco could juggle, somersault and dance on a rope like a fairground acrobat. He put on shows for the village boys in a meadow so that he could teach them the faith, and he ended them with prayer.

In April 1826 AD the old chaplain of Murialdo, Don Calosso, met him on the road home from a parish mission and began to teach him. Because his half-brother, Antonio, thought time spent on books was wasted, his mother sent him away in February 1828 AD, at twelve, to work as a farmhand at the Moglia farm. He later called his time there the most beautiful of his life.

In December 1829 AD his uncle, Michele Occhiena, found him at the farm and arranged for him to come home and study. Later, at school in Chieri, St. John Bosco paid his way as a tailor, waiter, stableman, carpenter, shoemaker and blacksmith. In 1834 AD the Franciscans accepted him, but days before he was due to enter their friary he dreamt of friars in worn habits running off in opposite directions.

Then the uncle of his friend Luigi Comollo, the parish priest of Cinzano, wrote that he should put off the friary, become a cleric and learn God's will while he studied. He entered the seminary of Chieri on October 30, 1835 AD. He was ordained a priest in the Archbishop's chapel in Turin on June 5, 1841 AD.

On December 8, 1841 AD, as Don Bosco vested for Mass in the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Turin, a sacristan beat a boy and drove him out. Don Bosco took the side of the boy, Bartolomeo Garelli, and made him his first catechism pupil. By February 2, 1842 AD, about twenty boys were coming to him, and he called the gathering an Oratory because every lesson began and ended with prayer.

In July 1845 AD the Marchioness Barolo, at whose house at Valdocco he was assistant chaplain, took back the rooms she had set aside for the Oratory, and the boys carried their benches to the church of San Martino. After more moves, the other tenants of Casa Moretta complained of the noise, and in March 1846 AD Don Bosco gave up its rooms and rented a meadow. On Easter Sunday, April 12, 1846 AD, the Oratory moved into a shed at Valdocco, which became its permanent home.

In July 1846 AD, worn out, Don Bosco fell seriously ill with an inflammation of the lungs and went home to the Becchi to recover. On November 3, 1846 AD, at his request, his mother, Margherita, walked with him from the Becchi to Valdocco to keep house for the boys. The boys called her Mamma Margherita (*Mother Margherita*).

In January 1854 AD two men called on Don Bosco to make him stop publishing his popular Catholic booklets, and he refused. That August a man with a long knife attacked him at the Oratory gate as his boys stood around him. The police arrested the man at half past nine that night.

In 1858 AD Don Bosco took his plan for a religious society to Pope Pius IX in Rome. Pope Pius IX told him a society bound by simple vows seemed necessary in such troubled times. By then a group of priests, clerics and laymen was already living together at Valdocco under the rules of the society he planned.

In 1872 AD he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians to educate girls. He took letters of support from twenty-four bishops to Rome, and in 1874 AD the Society's Rules were approved. On November 11, 1875 AD, his first missionaries sailed under Don Giovanni Cagliero, and they landed at Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 14.

In May 1887 AD Don Bosco said Mass in the Sacred Heart church he had built in Rome. He stopped at least fifteen times, overcome and weeping. Afterwards he told his secretary, Don Viglietti, that he had seen again, as if alive, his childhood dream and his mother and brothers arguing over what it meant.

Late in 1887 AD he fell gravely ill, and the illness lasted forty days. On January 15, 1888 AD, short of breath, he joked that he needed someone to mend his bellows. He died at Valdocco at a quarter to five on the morning of January 31, 1888 AD, aged seventy-two.

As news of the death spread, many of Turin's shops closed and the newspapers sold out. On February 2, 1888 AD, about six thousand people walked behind his coffin. More than a hundred thousand watched along the route.

Pope Pius XI beatified him in St. Peter's Basilica on June 2, 1929 AD. The same Pope canonized him there on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934 AD. Pope Pius XI called him *educator princeps* (*the first among educators*).