Fr. Javier shares his thoughts on Don Bosco and Mary…
You don’t have to know much about Don Bosco to know that his devotion to Mary played an enormous role in his life and work. He received from his mother the basic examples and instructions to awaken in his young heart this devotion. Divine Providence had a hand in this initial awakening, as well.
When Johnny was nine years old, in a dream/revelation, he was given Mary as his special teacher by Jesus himself. If you happen to tour the places where Don Bosco lived as a boy, you can’t help feeling that Mary’s presence is everywhere, for you will be sure to find her statue, a gilded Madonna in most cases, in a privileged altar in each church.
I haven’t said anything so far to distinguish Mary’s popular devotion common in Piedmont, from the devotion one finds in the rest of the towns throughout Europe and wherever the Catholic Church has set her roots for many centuries. But Don Bosco’s constant trusting in the Blessed Mother for help, guidance and accompaniment gives us a good example of what true devotion to Mary is all about. Devotion to Mary consists simply in placing ourselves into her hands. We, like the Lord, entrust ourselves to Mary, she leads and guides us to her Son, claiming nothing for herself. It cannot be more simple than that.
Often enough, Protestants criticize Catholics for their exaggerated expressions of veneration to Mary, claiming that this devotion is deprived of solid biblical basis. When this topic comes up, Protestants will be prompt to quote Mk 3, 32-35: “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you… Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of my Father is… my mother” They conclude that the bible is against expressing any kind of devotion to the Mother of Jesus. St Augustine gives a witness that already in the 4th Century, devotion to Mary was based on the passage quoted above. We read in one of his sermons (Sermon 25, 7-8): “I would urge you to ponder these words (Mk 3, 32-35). Did the Virgin Mary, who believed by faith and conceived by faith, who was the chosen one from whom our Savior was born among men, who was created by Christ before Christ was created in her – did she not do the will of the Father?”
We find in Don Bosco a firm grounding of his devotion to Mary in Holy Scripture, and the Writings of the Fathers, and on the teachings of the Church. He is able to discover in this devotion a divine intervention in order to confront the secularist antireligious trends of his time. He placed the gilded statue of the Immaculate Conception (so commonly found in the Piedmontese churches) on top of the main cupola of the Shrine to Mary Help of Christians in Turin. Rationalism was rampant throughout the nineteenth century. The “goddess” reason reigned supreme in the cultural and scientific world in Europe and in the rest of the Western world. Don Bosco makes us fix our attention on Mary, whose revelation of the Immaculate Conception defies the failure of the new intellectual trends to understand and capture the reality of an existence beyond the material world. The dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception reaffirms the reality of a divine revealed way of attaining to the truth, as well as affirming the existence of the authority of the Church Magisterium to proclaim the truth. And if we consider that during that same historical period Kings and Queens were raised to the throne and dethroned at the will of the people; Don Bosco dedicated the whole basilica to Mary enthroned as queen of Heaven and through Thomas Lorenzoni’s majestic picture presents her to the whole world as the crowned Queen of the Apostles and the Evangelists, and with the attributes of royalty: scepter and crown.
