authoritarian but only authoritative and capable of combining deep respect and unconditional trust with his boundless affective involvement. Only this way can there be an authentic dialogue and a
constructive confrontation with the young person, who is respected in his rights, his active role, including his right to dissent and protest.
Not only are sodalities expected to be, as Don Bosco wanted, something for the young people themselves to run, but everything pertinent to them should first of all and more universally be their business too: their life, desires, ideals, restlessness, their proposals, reasons and collaboration. As a consequence the educative community, experienced as a family, undergoes a radical change of meaning and style. It is inevitable that the kinds of relationships which in Don Bosco's era might have been rather paternalistic or too much like a family, should be replaced by free and liberating relationships which are authentically personalised and personalising.1397
16. Along with these main players in the system, once conceptual and concrete changes have been
made, the entire methodology of the prevent ive system is involved, and it should start from the basic
concepts of love and fear, reason, religion and loving kindness.
Any pastoral ministry and pedagogy based on 'servile’ fear which generates real, mental and affective dread of the ‘master’ cannot but be up for question. Dread should be substituted by mutual respect, just as the commandment 'honor your father and your mother' is not just a one-way street. Only someone who has shown himself to be respectable and trustworthy can desire respect. And then, the three words which were proper to a vaguely and obscurely romantic world (when God, country and family were 'it') should be reinterpreted in the light of totally new concepts and thinking. We also have a different view of the Christian Faith than DonBosco had: liturgical renewal, new bases for moral theology and spirituality, a return to the sources of the Christian message as proclaimed in the Scriptures and gently channeled into dogmatic reflection.1398
Loving kindness needs to be reconceived in terms of its foundations, content, the way it is
demonstrated, in view of an essential and desirably different relationship between adults and young
people, and on the basis of the self -awareness of young people today which makes them less disposed
to be won ov er in their affections and less exposed to its latent dangers.
Reason, particularly should recover its full meaning. The clarification of the concept of reason and its
re -evaluation is essential to an educative prevention the more young people and adults a re exposed to contrasting tensions such as the sudden appearance of technological rationality, the demands made on
education to control the world of desires, evasion through the world of instant emotions, the pressing
need to fantasise power, the advent of weak thinking, and the same time the demand for critical
thinking amidst the wilds of multiculturalism.
1399
Solutions may be found, given renewed methods, in the blending of instruction and education, in the
recovery of all the roles that reason should play within the ambit of human potential.
1400
17. In the general process of recovering what is 'preventive', one thing must now be given its proper
value since it is on this that the system finds its basis in its more natural and primitive form: the
family.
1401
Family stands out among other things as the system which is most open to the possibilities, problems and related solutions of the young. It is open to the unexpected, to risks and to quick decisions, new and timely ones so long as they remain consistent with fundamental general principles:
1397 P. G. Grasso, Gioventù: gruppo marginale in crisi di identità, in «Orientamenti pedagogici» 12 (1966) 759. 1398
1399 Cf M. Pellerey, La via della ragione, Rileggendo le parole e le azioni di don Bosco, in «Orientamenti pedagogici»
35 (1988) 383-384.
1400 Cf. again M. Pellerey, La via della ragione...., pp. 395-396.
1401 In 1869 Don Bosco wrote to a benefactor in Milan: “I believe you did well to bring the boy back to be educated at
home: better a father's eye than the eye of a hundred assistants. This can be said of parents who have the means to
educate them at home, as you have”. Letter to Giuseppe Brambilla, 8 May 1869 Em III, lett no. 1312).