A HUNDRED WAYS OF COMMUNICATING
STRENNA 2009, by Pascual Chávez Villanueva
A VAST MOVEMENT FOR THE YOUNG
The new situation of the culture of communication offers previously unknown possibilities for education and evangelization. Today social communication is the obligatory pathway for the spreading of culture and life models. It is a significant part of the experience of youth. (CMS 19)
A great creator of educational/evangelising situations, Don Bosco knew how to take advantage of the quality and the strength of the languages of communication in order to make an impact in an original and effective way on the young. He knew how to touch the heart-strings. He was not only an evangeliser/educator but a born communicator too. The clear objective of the style of communication invented by Don Bosco was that which one of my predecessors, Fr. Egidio Viganò, described in lapidary form: educating by evangelising and evangelising by educating, the inseparable link in the Salesian mission. He succeeded in getting the best out of the youngsters by making them take the leading role in their own education, and the best out of the educators/ evangelisers by making them witnesses to the gospel and the animators of the wealth of youthful expression. In the Oratory a broad spectrum of forms of communication touched the lives of the many “poor and abandoned” boys who arrived in Turin from the valleys. The house, the school, catechism, mass, work, the band, the stage, outings, games, work-shops, the Good Nights, descriptions of dreams, sermons, a little word in the ear, slips of paper with personal messages, etc. all communicated a culture, a way of relating to God, to the world sand to others. All of this opened up life to hope, to trust to meaning, just when perhaps for some that had already been lost. The Oratory, in other words, represented a sound and well founded cultural alternative.
But Don Bosco went further. His gifts as a communicator can be seen from an impassioned letter from which I quote a short extract: “The spreading of good books is one of the principal aims of our Congregation. [...] Therefore among these books we intend to spread I propose that we concentrate on those which have the reputation of being good, moral and religious, and those are to be preferred which we have produced on our own presses […] With the SalesianBulletin, among my other aims, I also had this: to keep alive in the young people who had returned to their families a love for the spirit of Saint. Francis of Sales and for his pieces of advice so as to make themselves the saviours of other young people.” Don Bosco was therefore an educator/ evangeliser/communicator. As I wrote in the letter dedicated to Social Communication (SC). For Salesians SC is based on the very mission of the Church and is an expression of the passion for God, of the passion for the salvation of the young, of “da mihi animas, cetera tolle”. Therefore SC is not something outside, and even less, something extraneous to the mission, but rather flows from it. Therefore, the Salesian, as a son of Don Bosco, is an evangeliser-educator-communicator by nature.
