up some communions for your parents, brothers and sisters or benefactors who provide bread and make sacrifices for you, and I recommend that you be grateful to them”. He then added that gratitude be shown to the teachers and to everyone who contributed to their cultural and moral growth.1131 There is a chapter in the Rules for the houses entitled “Behavior towards superiors”. It is quite full of suggestions as to what attitudes precede and accompany love, and are demanded by love and complementary to love. The chapter speaks about obedience, submission, gratitude, waiting for advice and warnings, reverence, deference, respect and sincerity.1132And these are all expressions of the 'fear' which has nothing at all to do with 'dread' or with 'being distant', but is due recognition of the outstanding humanity and moral maturity of the superiors from whom much is received. To not have them would turn out to be disastrous.

However, all the above does not mean education which teaches perpetual submission to the educator, even when the pupil has grown in autonomy and competence after leaving school and may still want some advice orcorrection.1133At any rate, the pupils have a lot of room left them to live their kind of

life, their demands, energies, and original contributions both positive and negative. The educators still

feel challenged by tacit or expressed protests of the young o r their dissatisfaction, and the barriers they

put up. At the frequent and regular meetings the educators and teachers at Valdocco take full stock of

all of the above, and do not fail to identify difficult situations in order to find out their causes and

provide solutions to them.

1134

4.2 Giving some structure to a community of young people: sodalities

Don Bosco did not want the community of young people to be a generic type of family, or something which relies only on vertical relationships. It has many faces even though from one single original inspiration, the prototype community of the house at Valdocco, in all its parts: the two boarding schools for academic students and working boys, the day school, the festive (weekend) oratory, the quasi- seminary and novitiate for young Salesians in formation.

The concrete realisation of the community differs according to the institutions we are dealing with: some institutions are more open, like the oratory, the day school, the youth centres; some institutions are more rigid in terms of communal living, like the boarding schools for academic students and working boys, the boarding arrangements for seminarians. Besides, each of these institutions is further divided into different kinds: classes for small boys and big boys, classes for those in the different workshops; choir members studying sacred and secular music, theatre groups, the members of the band and later on, gymnastics and sports clubs; and, everywhere religious sodalities and the altar boys group. Sometimes Don Bosco's institutions opened up to mutual aid societies, youth conferences of Saint Vincent De Paul and workers associations and, eventually additional sub-groups with various interests, religious and moral, cultural and recreational.

Particular importance was given to sodalities in the family-home setup. These bore the unmistakable features of solidarity and involvement. Their origins seem to have been the so-called 'Society for a Good Time' (Società d'allegria) promoted by Don Bosco when he was still ayoung man at Chieri, in l832. Don Bosco refers to it in the Memoirs of the Oratory, written mostly between 1873 and 1875. The Memoirs tell us about the behavioural norms which reflect precisely the guidelines in Don Bosco's mature moral pedagogy.

Everyone was obliged to look for such books, discuss such subjects, or play such games as

1131 G. Berto, Cronaca from June to December 1868, pp. 33-34

1132 Regolamenti per le case...., part I, Chap IX Contegno verso i superiori, pp. 75-77, OE XXIX 171-173. 1133 Il sistema preventivo (1877), p. 50, OE XXVIII 428.

1134 For the many questions posed at staff meetings and the superior chapter itself and especially the survey in June

1884 amongst members of the house chapter, cf. J.M. Prellezzo, Valdocco nell'Ottocento..., pp. 272-307.