The six intuitions of Saint Jean Bosco

Prevent and not repress

In the 19th century, the time of Miserable And Jean Valjean, education is “with the baguette”, and the young people who do not work straight are correct. It was at this time in 1850 that with courage Saint John Bosco, then a simple 35 -year -old Italian priest, denounced the traditional repression of coca(Loubards, in French). He advocates a system that takes the opposite view from the old pedagogy of “obedience first, affection after”. Father Jean-Marie Petitclerc, Salesian educator explains that “it was a defect of the French school which formed teachers to the repression of affectivity. Jean Bosco rehabilitated the affection by explaining that it was simply necessary to learn to manage it ”.

Don Bosco fights so that those around him respect young people by listening to them, trusting them and empowering them. Why do we then want to replace charity with the coldness of a regulation? he said. Simply because it went without saying that there was joy to team up with those we look at. To the point of believing in the effectiveness of a “preventive method, animated and supported by the love of benevolence”, which the Italian will quickly test by creating the oratory in 1844, in Valdocco, a disadvantaged district of Turin . He will also have the intuition that these young rebels should not remain between them but would benefit from mingling with other young people. “He hosted college students from neighboring campaigns who received a good education in their family environment,” explains P.Petitclerc. This is social diversity before the hour!

The team is strength

Counting on its forces only to implement a policy of approach and encouragement of young people in difficulty, it would be utopia. And above all, confirms P. Petitclerc, it would be dangerous! In Valdocco, where he offers the roof, leisure and training to the young rebels of the suburbs of Turin, Saint Jean Bosco quickly teams up with the oldest of his young people. Responsible, they take to heart the functions that are entrusted to them and in turn form. That makes it think of Father Pierre’s formula to the poorest: “You wouldn’t give me a hand to help these young people?” ».

Sweetness and firmness

Saint John Bosco does not choose at random to call his “Salesian” congregation: it is a tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, renowned for his sweetness and his charity. But why didn’t he call her the “Bosconians”? “It is a sign of humility on his part,” emphasizes Father Petitclerc. He entrusted his work to Saint Francis de Sales by also remembering that this great saint had been the apostle of dialogue at the time of the great tensions between Catholics and Protestants around 1595. “

The Italian congregation quickly created an “atmosphere”, an I-so-what-who is intraduceable in French: L’Amorevolezza » Salesian. The alliance between love and reason, sweetness and firmness. There is a kind of “familiarity”. We are there “secure without being locked up” but also “frustrated without being abandoned to his anxieties”. L’Amorevolezza consists in pleases each other, to experience real joy in sharing games as difficulties. This is how the “fatal barrier of mistrust” falls, as Jean Bosco said. This atmosphere, he cultivated it, with “the little word in the ear” of each and the “evening word” for all, which allowed an encouraging “rereading” of the day, both personal and collective.

Everyone in the bath!

The new conception of the relationship between the educator and the young man sounds the death knell for the distance between the “superior” master and the pupil “ignorant”. It inaugurates a pedagogy of the alliance where we find the right distance. The educator must mingle with his herd: who wants to be loved must show that he loves. You have to pay for your person, “love young people in what they like”, that is to say really interested in their tastes. This consistency between saying and doing it responds to: “We do not resist the convergence of faith and acts”, of which another educator priest speaks, Father Guy Gilbert, “parish priest of the Loubards”. It imposes respect and confers true authority over young people with loss of bearings. For Saint John Bosco, authority is like love: it is a relationship and it does not order.

Dream

What Jean Bosco teaches us, and which is more subtle, is that a visionary is not just a sweet dreamer. More than any other saint, “he drew his great intuitions from nighttime dreams which he wrote at the request of Pope Pius IX and which were the engine of his action. A bit like Martin Luther King who said: “I had a dream …”, Bosco followed his dreams to the letter and gave them life concretely, “explains Father Petitclerc.

At the beginning, as Jean Bosco advances by successive dreams from the age of 9, one wondered if he was not exalted or mythomaniac. But in view of the results, explains P. Petitclerc, when he said: “I dreamed”, we knew that it was not questionable. The pope himself will listen to him with an attentive ear … The whole of this educational “system” of which we envy efficiency, he owes it to night dreams that he took seriously.

Open to the world

The strength – always current – of Jean Bosco was to operate this reversal in the spirits in an anticlerical time, where a whole society changed from rurality to industrialization. This confused change period recalls ours when it is so difficult for young people to project themselves into the future. Saint John Bosco managed to get out of the strict framework of religion to be understood by “Laïcards” policies. So a priest was, he thus imprinted his brand to prevention of delinquency in a way that will surprise the very anticlerical policies of the time.

In 1857, the Italian Minister Urbano Rattazzi advised him to found a congregation of “religious in the eyes of the Church and free citizens in the eyes of the state”. The anticlerical Victor Hugo himself was impressed by Don Bosco and met him several times. Last lesson from the Italian saint: the educator gains to provide a global education, by teaching the opening on others and the world.