The Salesian Family Marian Day has taken place in October for several years now. This year I was asked to speak. Since St Dominic Savio had so many events since August, St John Bosco High School hosted the Salesian Family… but there were four other events going on, including a football game this same morning. This is homecoming weekend at St John Bosco, after all, and a busier weekend could not have been chosen.
Today's presentation was set to be in keeping with the theme for 2012-2013 in the run up the 200th birthday of St John Bosco in 2015: Don Bosco Educator. I was asked to bring out some ideas on the educative charism of Don Bosco. For a long time I did not know how to put this together, but I finally settled on Don Bosco and His Young People. This is a theme that I have been exploring in the course that I teach in Rome on the social-religious-political-cultural context of Don Bosco's century. After I have worked on this theme, I realized that Fr Lenti has put a lot of this forward in the second volume of his study on Don Bosco. However, I also realize that Fr Lenti has said everything on Don Bosco already, so I decided not to worry about bringing out anything new.
In attendance were members of many different branches of the Salesian Family, and I already knew most of them, except for the 20 students from Bosco Tech that were brought along. Poor kids! This was not designed for young people, and nobody told me that they would be present until this morning. I had not directed my talk to them, and I consider it an injustice to constrain kids to hear speeches designed for adults. Nobody ever consulted me on this aspect… but that is another story.
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