Saint John Bosco
Priest
- Feast Day
- January 31
- Life
- 1815–1888
- Canonized
- 1934
- Order
- Founder, Salesian Society of Saint John Bosco (Salesians of Don Bosco, SDB)
- Born
- Becchi, Piedmont, Kingdom of Sardinia
Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco was born August 16, 1815, in the hamlet of Becchi (Castelnuovo d'Asti, today Castelnuovo Don Bosco) in Piedmont. His father died when he was two; his mother Margherita Occhiena raised him and his brothers in poverty. From age nine, by his own account in his Memoirs of the Oratory, he received recurring dreams that pointed him to the apostolate of youth.
He was ordained priest at Turin on June 5, 1841. From the first week of his priesthood he gathered poor boys, many of them rural migrants in the industrializing city, for catechism, recreation, and trade apprenticeship. The Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales, established at Valdocco in Turin in 1846, became the model: a stable place where boys could find shelter, schooling, and trades, organized around what Don Bosco called the "preventive system," based on reason, religion, and loving-kindness rather than punishment.
In 1859 he gathered his closest collaborators into the Society of Saint Francis de Sales (Salesians), approved by Pope Pius IX in 1869 and given definitive constitutions in 1874. With Saint Mary Domenica Mazzarello he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (Salesian Sisters) in 1872 for the same work among girls. He also founded the Salesian Cooperators, lay associates committed to the same apostolate.
Don Bosco wrote and published constantly: the Letture Cattoliche, devotional books, schoolbooks, and the celebrated Memorie biographical writings. He was a confidant of Pope Pius IX and a mediator between the Holy See and the Italian government during the difficult years after Italian unification.
He died at Turin on January 31, 1888. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on June 2, 1929, and canonized by the same pope on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934. The Salesians today are among the largest religious institutes in the Catholic Church.
Don Bosco's preventive system, articulated in his short treatise of 1877, proposed an educational pedagogy founded on reason, religion, and loving-kindness, in conscious contrast to the repressive systems of nineteenth-century institutions. Pope Saint John Paul II, in the apostolic letter Iuvenum Patris (1988) on the centenary of Don Bosco's death, named him Father and Teacher of Youth and proposed his pedagogy to the universal Church.
Patronages
young people · apprentices · editors · schoolchildren · the Salesians
Catholic Churches Named After Saint John Bosco
20 parishes on Catholic Church Times share Saint John Bosco's name. Find their Mass times, confession schedules, and adoration hours:
- Saint John Bosco Parish — Murcia, NEGROS OCCIDENTAL
- St. John Bosco Parish — Dingras, ILOCOS NORTE
- St. John Bosco Parish — Quezon, ISABELA
- St. John Bosco Parish — Baguio City, CAR
- St John Bosco, Brooklyn Park — Brooklyn Park, SA
- Saint John Bosco Catholic Mission — Delta, UT
- Saint John Bosco's Church, Erskine — ERSKINE, SCT
- Saint John Bosco Catholic Church — Woodstock, VA
- St John Bosco's (Easterhouse) Catholic Church — Easterhouse, SCT
- St. John Bosco — Gift Lake, AB
- St John Bosco's Catholic Church — New Stevenston, SCT
- St. John Bosco Parish — Brockville, ON
- Our Lady of La Vang-Vietnamese Parish@ St.John Bosco Church — Birmingham, AL
- St. John Bosco Church — Maryland Heights, MO
- St. John Bosco — Churubusco, IN
- St. John Bosco — Battle Mountain, NV
- Saint John Bosco Church — Hammond, IN
- St. John Bosco — Miami, FL
- John Bosco Center (University of Mary Washington) — Fredericksburg, VA
- Saint John Bosco Parish Church — Makati City, Metro Manila
Sources