The Nineteenth Century Apostle of the Little Ones

by E. Uhlrich

After awhile a little shed near by was rented and arranged for a chapel. In the fall of 1846 he added a few rooms, and thus he began his first school. To be sure the boys' dormitory was nothing but a hayloft pressed into service, while the housekeeper was Don Bosco's sturdy peasant mother, who had come to the city to help on the work of her beloved son.

In 1851 he was able to build a church dedicated to St. Francis de Sales, and two new houses.

Now there is a magnificent group of buildings on this same land. The church is in the centre; two imposing wings are the "Oratorium," of which Don Bosco had dreamed and talked so enthusiastically that once people even thought him crazy. The dream has more than come true. There is a little town in itself here. All about are buildings representing various kinds of trades and activity. There is a great printing establishment with ten presses, a book bindery, a large locksmith shop, a carpentering shop, a shoe factory, and a tailoring establishment. There are, moreover, libraries, study-rooms, classrooms, dormitories, gardens, and playgrounds. Over one thousand people live here and follow their various employments.

Don Bosco is dead; he died on January 31, 1888. But his work went on under Don Michelle Rua, who was himself an orphan, raised and trained by Don Bosco. Here, in the mother house, are some thirty Salesian priests, as the members of the congregation founded by Don Bosco, at the suggestion of Minister Ratazzi, are called; nearly two hundred Salesian brothers, who are the master workmen, and four hundred students. In addition to the resident pupils that are being trained and cared for, about five hundred boys and apprentices spend their Sundays and recreation hours at the institution, something in the way in which children in this country go to the Settlements that have been established here and there in the large cities.

More than one hundred and fifty of these institutions were founded by Don Bosco in Italy, France, Spain, the Tyrol, and England. He also founded a sisterhood, so as to be able to take care of young girls as well as of boys, and to help in the missions which he established in South America, especially in Patagonia, where fourteen thousand savages were baptized by his missionaries before Don Bosco's death. Latterly the sisterhood he founded has been working among the neglected Italians in this country too, especially in New Orleans, and there are Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco in New York City. This special missionary work, however, was not counted in the general estimate of the ten million children saved by Don Bosco.

Every year eighteen thousand apprentices leave his institutions and go out to work, trained in body and mind for contact with the world.

As a means of maintaining his work, Don Bosco founded a third society to which men and women, lay or clerical, can belong, their object being to help provide means for this great work, and the Holy Father himself belongs to this third society.

In appearance Don Bosco, the simple country boy, who was destined to do this great work in this day and age, and to show the world one true way of helping to solve the problems of labor and capital and government that disturb the nations of the earth so much now, was a tall man of very pleasing features and manner. He was not very eloquent as a talker, but his heart was filled with a heavenly love for poor and unhappy childhood. Few of us are so limited in means, or in opportunity, but we can follow him a little way. Even the young children who go to Sunday-school often know, or could easily learn, of some neglected child that has perhaps no parents, or has parents who have no faith, and which therefore hears nothing of religion and of right. Like Garelli, Don Bosco's first pupil and follower, regular Sunday-school children could take such a child to their own Sunday-school. The children of the Paulist Sunday-school in New York City, for instance, are constantly encouraged to bring with them any child they know which does not go to Sunday-school in any other place. If, in addition to its spiritual neglect, the child is in bodily want, bringing it to Sunday-school attracts the attention of older people who are able, on occasion, to give it material as well as spiritual help.

To those of us who are older, surely there can be no greater appeal than that of childhood for love and instruction. To withhold these is a more bitter injustice even than to withhold food and clothing. The one causes the body to suffer, but the other may mean the death of the soul, and delivers the body to the lawlessness and to the excesses that lead to untimely death in one generation and help on that lamentable degeneration--physically, morally, and mentally--in the succeeding generations which is, to-day, one of the most discouraging questions in the dark problems of the great cities.

And it must always be remembered that among the poor and the unfortunate the inspiration for better things must come from those who have more than they of means, of time, of intelligence, and, above all, of devotion.