Here’s an interesting video about the Salesians of Don Bosco as we celebrate 150 years!

Here’s an awesome video on the Salesian Brother! Salesians of Don Bosco are made up of both brothers and priests. They are both complimentary vocations, the order needs both priests and brothers if we are to serve the young and the poor well. The video is in Spanish but hopefully you can entiendo some of it

Siamo Salesiani! “We are Salesians” I hope I translated that right!

I think this video is a great expression of the Salesian charism and spirit enjoy!

Nicholas wrote a great post for the feast of St. John Bosco, please check it out when you have a chance.

Click here

Underneath the post has also listed a lot of great Salesian or St. John Bosco links as well.

Praise God for his work as a dedicated Catechist and Catholic!

Please pray for him and his ministry

Happy Feast of St. John Bosco! Here’s a little video about his life, St. John Bosco pray for us!

Don Bosco was a man on a mission entrusted to him by God. He knew his mission to help the poor and abandoned young people would include far more youth than merely those in Northern Italy, this was a mission of grand proportions.  What was it that drove him to send missionaries out to distant and unknown lands even in the beginning of the youth movement that he founded? Undoubtedly it was Don Bosco’s zeal for the salvation of souls, especially the souls of poor and abandoned boys. What young boys could be more poor and abandoned that those in missionary lands? The heart of Don Bosco ached for the salvation of the souls of poor boys living in far away mission territories in: Asia, Africa and America.

Originally he intended to go to the Missions himself, but his spiritual director gave him a convincing argument against it: “You can’t stand the enclosure of a stagecoach for a short trip over land. You would die getting across the ocean for several weeks in the confinement of the boat trip”.  While he accepted the direction humbly, his determination to attend to the evangelization of the “savages” burned brightly within him as waiting for the right moment to make it a reality.

The Salesian Society was approved on April 3, 1874 and the first Salesian Missionary expedition left Italy for Argentina the following year on November 1875, this was the first of eleven expeditions organized by Don Bosco himself. The chronicle or diary of the house records that 80% of the members were ready and open to traveling with the missionaries (the oldest, Frs. Cagliero and Fagnano were 37, the youngest,  Alevana was 17).

Don Bosco’s ardent desire to go along to the missions were made clear through both the “Souvenirs” he wrote to accompany them in their initial work of evangelization, and the group photograph taken in which he gives a copy of the Constitutions of the Salesian Society to  Fr. Cagliero, the leader of the expedition, signifying, as he expressed it himself, that he was traveling along with them. (Fr. Cagliero is first row first on the left and Don Bosco is to his right)

Two years later the Salesian Sisters joined the second expedition. Mother Mazzarello accompanied her daughters to Genoa. On meeting Don Bosco she said: “How about me, will I also travel to the missions some day?”  Don Bosco replied: “that will be when I will travel, myself”. Obviously the missionary soul of both saints was very much alive in them and gives the reason why they were so generous in sending their sons and daughters to the missions.

Submitted by Fr. Javier

I could not believe this when I saw this…

It looks to me that President Obama may carry around a medal of Mary Help of Christians,

I wonder if there is a picture of Don Bosco on the other side.

Mary the Help of all Christians pray for him!

More info on this can be found here

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.

And so I’m back, I appologize for the long hiatus of not posting. The Lord has been keeping me busy in a great way. I am a Salesian Brother now! Praise God and I’m now fully immersed in studying for the priesthood and also trying to find any extra moments to spend on our apostolate with the young. God is so good and He definitely keeps you busy when you give your life to Him.

We recently had a conference that emphasized the need to return to Don Bosco. How can we better understand St. John Bosco or any other saint for that matter. Our director challenged us to read Don Bosco’s writings, his dreams, as well as other texts about him (biographical memoirs) with a new twist.

Instead of reading merely for content, take one text and bring it to prayer in the form of Lectio divina. Of course please know that this does not replace the need for Lectio with the Word! However taking Don Bosco’s texts with this new sense of prayer and understanding intrigued me and I will begin to do this ASAP.

Is anyone else doing Lectio with other texts besides the Holy Scripture? I am excited to try this process and see the work of the Holy Spirit.

It’s good to be back! God Bless faithful readers!

Fr. Javier has done it again! Here is his third installment!

Why is it that we stay with Don Bosco? Quite simply, Don Bosco leads us to Christ.

We read in the Biographical Memoirs that the boys at the Oratory used to point to Don Bosco and comment: Doesn’t he look like Jesus? There is a direct testimony to this effect in volume three of the Memoirs

The spell of Don Bosco’s holiness seemed to radiate from his eyes and smile. Boys around him were heard to exclaim over and over again: ‘He looks just like Our Lord!’ a phrase that became habitual with them.

But there is an even more telling way of learning about Don Bosco’s way of leading the young to Jesus. Fr. Peter Braido SDB, has made an exhaustive study of his writings. I am transcribing a short statement taken from Don Bosco’s writings in which he spells out the way to follow Christ.

It is a picture of the Christian, who intends to model his own existence on Jesus’ existence in this life, “reassured that one day he will be glorified in Jesus Christ in Heaven, and reign with him…In fact in a Christian’s life and in his actions it must be possible to identify the life and actions of Jesus Christ himself… so that the genuine Christian should be able to say with St. Paul: It is no longer I who live but it’s Jesus Christ who lives in me.” That is why he prays, “as Jesus prayed on top of the mountain recollected, with humility and full of trust in God;” as Jesus Christ he will be “available to serve the poor, the ignorant, the children”, without arrogance; dealing with others he will be “all for all”, inspirational, charitable, tender and simple; in imitation of Jesus who “washed his apostles’ feet…he will consider himself the least, and the servant of all;” as Jesus was subjected in Nazareth and to the Father “even unto a death on the cross,” “he will be obedient to his parents, his employers, his superiors” as “he obeys God, whom they represent;” as Jesus at Cana and Bethany, he will be “sober, temperate, attentive to the needs of others;” as Jesus was with John and Lazarus, he will share with his friends, entrusting his secrets of the heart and working at bringing back to the state of grace those who may have lost it, he will be patient in his spiritual and physical sufferings; he will be “ready to accept with patience every persecution, every sickness and also death just as Jesus did it”.
Don Bosco subsumes the whole project of the following of Christ in these terms: to make the Christian conscious of the precariousness, seriousness, responsibility and dignity of his existence and the grandeur of his destiny:

Remember, oh Christian, that you are a man of eternity. Every instant of your life is one step towards eternity.