SALESIANS OF DON BOSCO

RELIGION

The second term, “Religion” , indicates that Don Bosco's pedagogy is essentially transcendent, in so far as the ultimate educational objective at which it aims is the formation of the believer. For him the properly formed and mature man was the citizen with faith, who places at the centre of his life the ideal of the new man proclaimed by Jesus Christ and who bears courageous witness to his own religious convictions.

It is evidently not a question of a speculative and abstract religion, but of a living faith rooted in reality and stemming from presence and communion, from an attitude of listening and from docility to grace. As he liked to put it “the columns of an educational edifice”, are the Eucharist, Penance, devotion to Our Lady, love for the Church and its pastors. His educational process was a pathway of prayer, of liturgy, of sacramental life, of spiritual direction: for some it was the response to the call to a special consecration (how many Priests and Religious were formed in the Saint's houses!); for all it was a perspective and a path to holiness.

Don Bosco was a zealous priest who always referred back to its revealed foundation everything that he received, lived and gave to others. This aspect of religious transcendence, the cornerstone of Don Bosco's pedagogical method, is not only applicable to every culture but can also be profitably adapted even to non-Christian religions.

(John Paul II, Letter Iuvenum Patris, 11)

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