of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Rome, kept Don Bosco busy for more than 10 years of worries and hardships. Everywhere you go you see that church, Oratory, school, hospice are Don Bosco’s inseparable institutions, in Turin as in Rome, at Vallecrosia as in Nice, Buenos Aires, Marseille, and La Spezia.569

Reference to Don Bosco’s activity with sacred buildings brings us back to the constant and often secret work he carried out, from the first to the last day of his priestly life, namely the work of building morally upright and religiously fervent consciences. He did this for the most varied types and people who were looked down on most. A treatise on Don Bosco the confessor, spiritual director, guide of souls, would be equal in size to any reconstruction of his activity as an educator. It would cover his relationship with individuals, his preaching to the masses, his specialised talks given during Retreats. At any rate, this activity penetrates and pervades his activity as an educator, shifting it from the human level to moments and reflections of a clearly Christian character.

Don Bosco also carried out enormous and constant activity, for some 30 years, as the founder of the Society of St. Francis de Sales, made up of Priests and Brothers, and of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary help of Christians, with work similar to that of the Salesians, for girls, and The Pious Union of the Salesian Cooperators. These foundations followed several clear stages: their setting up, the juridical stage, canonical recognition, the formation and animation of their members and finally, their consolidation and expansion.

This work was carried out at the same time and in close interaction with the development, direction, administration of all the other educational and pastoral institutions. It was accompanied by a frenetic search for the necessary charitable support, with consequent letters written in all directions and personal relationships with benefactors, private and public, and finally with ecclesiastics and lay people.

By comparison with these main activities Don Bosco's sporadic negotiations between political and ecclesiastical authorities were marginal but not irrelevant. These occurred in order to work out solutions to some difficult situation juridical and pastoral problems in Italy.570

And finally, we should not forget his daring action carried out from a distance on behalf of migrants and the Missions. From 1875 onwards, missionary activity gave a wider breath of Catholicity to a work with universal potential but still enclosed within national boundaries. Don Bosco lived this missionary experience with exceptional enthusiasm. It gave him, during the time of his advanced maturity, almost a tinge of a second youth. But in truth, Don Bosco went back to the same refrain: “The only desire we have is to work in pastoral ministry, especially on behalf of poor and neglected youth. Catechism classes, schools, sermons, festive recreational parks, hospices, boarding schools and institutions...all these make up our main harvest...571

2 Personality and style

What deeply motivated Don Bosco's activity was charity: the love of God and neighbor, coherently anchored to a Catholic Faith and a priestly vocation almost native to him. There are some personality traits however, which gave Don Bosco's consecration and charitable action some typical signs and elements, to the point where they became part of the preventive system he adopted.

569 It speaks of the first steps towards building the Church of San Secondo, which he had to abandon; note to the Cardinal

Vicar regarding the Church of the Sacred Heart, Rome, 10 April 1880, E III 565.

570 Cf. F. Motto,Don Bosco mediatore tra cavour ed Antonelli nel 1858, RSS 5 (1986): 3-20; La mediazione di don Bosco

fra Santa Sede e Governo per la concessione degli “Exequatur” ai vescovi d’Italia (1872-1874), RSS 6 (1987): 3-79;

L’azione mediatrice di don Bosco nella questione delle sedi vescovili vacanti in Italia dal 1858 alla morte di Pio IX

(1878), in P. Braido, Don Bosco nella Chiesa, 251-328.

571 Letter to don Pietro Ceccarelli, parish priest of S. Nicolas de los Arroyos (Argentina), Dec. 1874, E II 430.