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Giovanni Bosco

Priest and educator (1815-1888), who founded the oratory and the Salesian Society at Valdocco; a saint since 1934, buried in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians.

Image from a Prima Torino publication
From a publication by Prima Torino, 13 September 2026

Giovanni Bosco (Castelnuovo d'Asti, 16 August 1815 – Turin, 31 January 1888), known as Don Bosco, was a priest, educator and writer, and the founder of the Salesian Society and of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. At Valdocco, then on the northern outskirts of the centre, he built the oratory from which the Salesian congregation spread across Europe and Latin America; he was canonised in 1934.[1]

From I Becchi to Chieri

He was born at I Becchi, a hamlet of Morialdo in the comune of Castelnuovo d'Asti (today Castelnuovo Don Bosco), on the Biglione farmstead, where his father worked as a sharecropper; in November 1817, left fatherless, the family moved into a shed converted into a dwelling, of which he would later say: «This is my home».[2] In his own recollection his birth date was 15 August, the feast of the Assumption; the parish registers give the 16th.[1] Salesian tradition places at age nine the dream in which he is said to have glimpsed his future mission among the young.[2] In 1835 he entered the seminary at Chieri, and on 5 June 1841 he was ordained a priest in Turin by the archbishop Luigi Fransoni.[1]

The priest of the prisons and the meadows

From 1841 to 1844 he trained further at the Convitto Ecclesiastico of San Francesco d'Assisi, alongside Father Giuseppe Cafasso, who brought him along in providing spiritual care to young people held in the city's prisons. He then became chaplain to the charitable works for women run by the Marchioness Giulia Colbert di Barolo, the Rifugio and the Ospedaletto di Santa Filomena, where he began gathering on Sundays young people with no family or trade. These gatherings took the lasting name of the Oratory of St Francis de Sales and, between 1845 and 1846, moved from place to place, between the meadows of Valdocco and the area around Porta Palazzo.[1]

Valdocco: the Pinardi shed

In March 1846 Francesco Pinardi offered for rent, at 320 lire a year, a shed that, converted into a chapel and consecrated at Easter, was divided into three rooms: the chapel itself, a large room and two small ones.[3] On that day, 12 April 1846, after years of wandering, the oratory found its home.[4] On 19 February 1851 Pinardi sold the house and land for 28,500 lire; the church of St Francis de Sales, begun in July 1851, was consecrated on 20 June 1852, and in 1856 the old chapel was demolished.[3] From 1853 the oratory took in apprentices: shoemakers and tailors, then bookbinders (1854), carpenters (1856), printers (1861), and blacksmiths (1862). By 1868 more than 800 people were living at Valdocco, and that same year the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, begun in 1864, was consecrated.[1][4] The complex, at number 32 of via Maria Ausiliatrice in the Borgo Dora district, was hit by the bombing of 13 July 1943; since 1928 a rebuilt chapel has recalled the original shed.[3]

Don Bosco was also a prolific author of texts for schools and for ordinary people: from the Storia sacra and the Giovane provveduto (1847) to a manual on the decimal metric system (1849). From March 1853 he launched the Letture cattoliche, periodic pamphlets which, after passing under his sole direction in 1862-1863, rose from 3,000 to around 12,000 copies.[1] His motto was Da mihi animas, caetera tolle, which he rendered as: «Lord, give me souls, and take away everything else».[1] In 1877 he set down in writing the so-called preventive system:

«This system rests entirely on reason, religion, and kindness»

Giovanni Bosco, The Preventive System in the Education of the Young, 1877

The goal, summed up in a recurring formula, was to form «good Christians and honest, hard-working citizens».[5]

The congregation and the missions

On 18 December 1859, together with eighteen collaborators, he founded the Society of St Francis de Sales, commended by Rome in 1864, approved in 1869, with its constitutions approved in 1874. In 1872 the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians were founded, in 1874 the Union of Salesian Cooperators, and in 1877 the Bollettino Salesiano.[1] From 1875 the Salesians set out for Buenos Aires and then for Patagonia, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and Chile; in Europe they opened houses in Nice, Marseille, Paris, Barcelona, London-Battersea and Liège.[1]

In the Turin of the historic Right and Left, he kept up relations with governments of both persuasions, from Giovanni Lanza to Francesco Crispi, describing himself as «most devoted to the government» while remaining loyal to the Pope. His relations were more strained with the archbishop Lorenzo Gastaldi, culminating in a "concord" signed in 1882.[1]

Death, funeral and cult

He died at Valdocco on 31 January 1888. Crispi authorised his burial at the Salesian college of Valsalice, on the hill.[1][6] The secular press paid him tribute: the Gazzetta Piemontese, forerunner of La Stampa, described him as «a most active worker, endowed with an enterprising spirit». Estimates of the numbers at his funeral range from the 50,000 given by the Corriere della Sera to the 200,000-400,000 given by Catholic sources.[7]

«One could disagree with him on political opinions, but one could not fail to admire a life entirely devoted to the works of religion and charity.»

Gazzetta di Torino, 1 February 1888

Beatified by Pius XI on 2 June 1929 and canonised on 1 April 1934,[2] his remains were moved from Valsalice to Mary Help of Christians in an urn of gilded wood by the Salesian sculptor Sebastiano Concas; the face and hands on display today are in wax, the work of Gaetano Cellini.[6]

Today

Valdocco remains the Salesians' mother house. In June 2015, on the bicentenary of his birth, Pope Francis spoke to the Salesians in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, recalling that his own father, newly emigrated to Argentina, had begun attending them: «My family is very attached to the Salesians».[8] The saint's memory also touches the Asti area: on the night of 2 June 2017 the reliquary holding a fragment of his brain was stolen from the basilica at Colle Don Bosco;[9] the carabinieri found it intact and returned it on 15 August, the anniversary of his birth.[10] The shrine at the Colle, made up of two stacked churches, was raised to the rank of minor papal basilica in 2010; among the pilgrims who climbed to I Becchi, in the heart of the Asti area and of Piedmont, was also Pope John Paul II.[2]

Pages linking here

Related articles: Basilica di Maria Ausiliatrice, Chieri, Salesian Society of Saint John Bosco

Sources

  1. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani —
  2. Colle Don Bosco
  3. MuseoTorino
  4. Basilica di Maria Ausiliatrice – Valdocco
  5. MuseoTorino
  6. Il Bollettino Salesiano — 1 April 2025
  7. SEI – in F. Traniello (a cura di), Don Bosco nella storia della cultura popolare —
  8. Famiglia Cristiana — 31 January 2019
  9. ANSA — 3 June 2017
  10. Avvenire — 16 August 2017

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