Chapter 3
Prevention existed before the preventive system
Real experience comes before particular ways of expressing them. Although not the result of a particular work of historical research, the statement with which Don Bosco begins his exposition of the 'preventive system' responds to a thousand year tradition and longer, one which we still see in evidence today. The distinction between 'preventive' and 'repressive', whether noticed or not, has always been part of the many ways of raising and educating children. As far as Don Bosco was concerned, the expression was an answer to the personal experiences he had had in his family, school and the seminary he attended.
These broadened as his cultural experience expanded: from teaching catechism to preaching, from school-based learning to out-of-school learning.
1. Preventive themes related to post-Tridentine family education
The young John Bosco might have come to know, from the pages of the diocesan catechism dealing with marriage, that the duties of married people also included duties towards their children:
They should think seriously about responding to their needs; they should give them a good
and pious education; they should allow them to feel free to choose the state of life to which
God may have called them.88
Bellarmine, in his An abundant explanation of Christian doctrine, was convinced "that fathers’ love for their children is so natural and ordinary that there was no need of another written law to remind them of their duties towards their children”. However, in the explanation of the fourth commandment, after pointing out children's duties towards their fathers, he did not fail to remind fathers that they are also “obliged to provide for the needs of their children with food and clothing but also with the right direction and instruction”.89
Charles Borromeo was more than convinced of what we have just mentioned. Borromeo is the great post-Tridentine Council reformer who saw that that children's Christian education was a very serious obligation both for the family and the parish, especially in reference to teaching Christian doctrine. In an impressive address to the parishioners of Cannobbio, on the occasion of his pastoral visit, Charles Borromeo insisted on the educational responsibilities of parents: "It is their task, their duty to lead the children they have received from God to Christ", and "it is a useless, stupid and false kind of prudence to provide children with temporal goods and wealth when their first concern as parents should be to entrust their children to Jesus Christ, the Church, Christian doctrine classes”.90 One of the main goals of marriage is the well-planned education of children namely, that of leading their children to Christ. Just a year before he died, an ecclesiastical friend of his was writing a magnificent treatise at his request, which he read chapter by chapter as it was handed to him. It was a neat summary of the humanist and Christian pedagogy of Silvio Antoniano, a member of the Curia, a future Cardinal, connected with the spiritual circle of Philip Neri (1540-1603): On the Christian Education of Children.91
88 Compendio della dottrina cristiana as uso della diocesi di Torino, (Turin: the Eredi Avondo 1876), 126. The text is
cited unchanged in Fransoni.
89 Copiosa dichiaratione della Dottrina Cristiana. In Venice, Giovani Battista Ciotti Scenese [from Siena] 1601. 137-
138.
90 Sermon on 17 June 1583, in J.A. Saxus,Homiliae, vol I,. 247: cited by A. Deroo, S. Carlo Corromeo il cardinale
riformatore, (Milan: Amcora 1965), 369.
91 Tre libri Dell’educazione christiana dei figliuoli. Scritti da M. Silvio Antoniano ad instanza di Monsig. Illustriss.