Paul Albera was a vivacious boy in Don Bosco’s oratory (youth centre) in Turin, Italy. This is how, decades later, he would describe his time with Don Bosco: “We were caught up in a current of love. We felt loved as we had never been loved before.”
He went on to become a Salesian priest, and was the second successor of Don Bosco as the head of the Salesian order.
How did a man who had so many responsibilities and so much work, including providing for hundreds of boys, dealing church authorities and an anti-clerical government and other duties, communicate such strong love to so many under his care? How did Don Bosco manage this miracle?
He not only did this himself. He would insist that every Salesian institution should be a home, where the young and those who care for them felt at home. He wanted his institutions to be marked by the warmth of love, not by the coldness of rules.
Don Bosco built churches, schools and residences for boys. But what he built above all was a network of relationships marked by love. He was convinced of an idea that was ridiculed and rejected at the time—that the young would respond better to love than to punishments. Experience—as well as the joyful testimony of thousands of youngsters—proved him right.
Fr Joe Mannath SDB
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