HOLINESS IN SALESIAN FAMILY - OUR SAINTS
When Don Bosco spoke to his boys about “Bread, work and heaven” inviting them to join the group of religious he had “invented” to be of service to youth not only in Turin but in the whole world, and when to his confreres he spoke about the “Salesian Paradise” as the place to rest and enjoy the fruits of holiness he certainly thought about a place that was as crowded and as cheerful as an oratory.
God has shown great love towards the Salesian Family of Don Bosco enriching it with holiness. Priests, lay people, consecrated religious, young people and adults in the Family, members dedicated to education and evangelisation, building God’s Kingdom in daily life and apostles called to the heroism of martyrdom, all find a richness of inspiration among our Saints. It is marvellous what the grace of the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of those who accept him and make themselves available to him! As it spreads, his love urges all those, who accept his gift, to perfect charity and an even deeper union. The communion which we intend to achieve as a Family has in a holiness, sought after with constancy, the richest aspect of our fellowship.
DON BOSCO
Don Bosco was a practical man, feet firmly on the ground...and yet he never lost sight of heaven! In this way he found a new and original way for his sons to become saints. “Don Bosco was the man of God in the modern era, just as Elias was in his time. This is the description that really suits him” (W. Nigg). Even if it may seem an exaggeration, this judgment by a biographer of the saint, and what’s more a Protestant, coincides with the image that Salesian tradition preserves of Don Bosco: “deeply the man of God, filled with gifts of the Holy Spirit, and living” as seeing him who is invisible” (Const. 21).
• In this way can be identified the mystery of Don Bosco’s personality, the deep roots of his prodigious activity, and the best definition of his extraordinary holiness: “In Don Bosco, in contrast with other saints, the human element did not disappear, absorbed into the divine, but rather it kept its own place, its own relative autonomy” (C. Colli). Gifted with a practical temperament and with the innate realism of country people, he had a natural inclination for action, and indeed “it would be difficult to find another saint who, in the way Don Bosco did, conjugated the word “to work” and got others to do the same” (E. Ceria). For him working tirelessly was the way to collaborate with God for the salvation of youth, his life’s work: “The Lord has sent me to look after boys” he wrote, “I must therefore cut down on other work” (BM 7, 171).
