mean by it a boy who was difficult to deal with, “quarrelsome and pugnacious”.793)
3. Don Bosco's negotiations regarding the way correctional institutions should be run
At times Don Bosco showed some interest in running institutions of a re-educational or correctional nature, Here we could drop in an item relating to the summer of 1871and casually inserted into the tenth volume of the Biographical Memoirs by Father Angelo Amadei:
In one of the above-mentioned audiences, whether in Florence or in Rome we do not
know, Lanza asked Don Bosco for news about the Oratory at Valdocco and suggested the
opening of a house of correction for 'rascals '(discoli) and abandoned youth in one or other
religious house.794 John Lanza ,at the time, was the President of the Council of Ministers
and he might have been able to help Don Bosco carry out his wish to have an institution for
youth in Rome. But this would have only been a way to manifest a rather shallow kind of
charity, rather than his willingness to have a project come true. The Government at the time
was dealing with weightier, more seriou s problems, as it was about to settle into Rome”,
where religious houses themselves had been 'plundered’.
The proposal advanced by Duke Scipio Salvati Borghese just a few years earlier, in l867-68 to be precise, was a more serious and positive one. Don Bosco had been asked to accept the administration of a Roman Agricultural School on Via Pigna. It had been founded under the auspices of Pius IX in l850 and was located close to the Tiber, two miles from Porta Portese. Don Bosco showed that he was clearly in favour.795 He immediately did his best to draft an agreement which would have guaranteed an
autonomous administration, especially concerning education. The draft made no reference to anything
which might have been incompatible with the educational s ystem in place at the Valdocco Oratory.
What was questionable and problematic was the physical condition of the school which, according to
Cavaliere Federico Oreglia, was miserable and unhealthy. His brother, a Jesuit, working at the Civilità Cattolica, shared the same opinion. The Jesuit looked at Don Bosco's likely acceptance of the school as a “heroic and meritorious act, certainly not envied by anyone in Rome”.796 In reality nothing came out of this. On August 1, l868, Don Bosco had a personal audience with Pope Pius IX. After the audience, the Pope entrusted the administration of the agricultural school to the Brothers of Mercy from Belgium.797
In 1885 -1886 a proposal had been made to Don Bosco asking him to accept the administration of a
large correc tional school in Madrid: negotiations and reasons for and against accepting this proposal
were even more complex. Among those who believed Don Bosco really was the apostle of poor and
abandoned youth, even when they were seriously so, were the members of a committee who had
received authorization to found a reformatory school in Madrid, dedicated to St. Rita (Escula de
reforma para jovenes y asilo decorreccion paternal). Don Bosco and his collaborators would end
proving this conviction wrong, at least under stood in its strict sense.
The perplexities Don Bosco and his closest helpers felt were there from the earliest meetings of the
Superior or General Council held on Sept. 22, 1885. At that meeting, all members listened to a report
by Father Branda, Rector of the hospice at Sarria (Barcelona). They had an in -depth debate on the
problem and concluded by coming to a consensus but with conditions. As Father Brenda had reported,
while the 'Escuela de reforma' was under construction, the people in Madrid had come to know about
793S. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Vol IV, Turin, Utet 1971, p. 611. 794MB X 436
795Cf letters of 18 Nov. 1867, 3 and 21 Jan. and 11 Feb. 1868, Em II 452, 475, 487 and 498. 796Letter of Fr Giuseppe Oreglia to Don Bosco, 15 January 1868, MB IX 48-49.
797For some documentation, cf MB VIII 606-607; IX 48-49, 51, 73, 114.