austraLasia
#1486
"...so matters in
the Indies and Australia don't interfere with those in
Argentina".
ROME: 12th March 2006 -- If
you don't read Italian, you are unlikely to have read Don Bosco's collected
letters or much else that he wrote other than in the Memoirs of the
Oratory. And yet, as Braido says, "the best interpreter for theorising
or writing about Don Bosco's preventive system, is Don Bosco himself".
You now have a chance to read a few snatches from some of
the letters quoted by Fr Peter Braido in Chapter 8 of Prevention, not
Repression, a study of Don Bosco and the preventive system.
Braido says at one point that we can't leave out any of Don Bosco's
written material (and there is a prodigious amount of it!) if we want to
understand how he operated and who he was.The letters are one place
where you gain an idea of Don Bosco's extraordinary general knowledge and broad
vision allied with downright practicality.
In the
snippet which forms the headline above, he is writing to Cagliero in 1876 (not
long arrived in Argentina) and says at one point, "You're a musician, I'm a poet
by profession; let's do things so that matters in the Indies and Australia don't
interfere with those in Argentina". We know that the Pope had offered him
a Vicariate Apostolic in Australia in 1876, that he would be visited by Bishop
Matthew Quinn from Bathurst but wouldn't at that stage see his way clear to be
sending men, committed as he was to South America. Possibly the reference to
'the Indies' was the East Indies, or today's Indonesia and East Timor. The
reference is only of superficial interest here, though it helps one immediately
understand the big vision that was driving Don Bosco.
There is another extraordinary citation from a letter to Fr. Dalmazzo in 1880,
when DB is much strapped for cash. "Set to work with everything you can ('in
omnibus labora' are his exact words) and if you can't succeed otherwise in
getting donations, then you'll have to carry out a robbery or do some
mathematical subtraction in some Banker's house!" Tongue in cheek of
course, and certainly out of context! We'll have to let that one
slide.
The process of working through the heavily
footnoted text of Braido's work has been moving ahead a little faster than
expected. The fact that it has reached Chapter 8/19 is a bonus for the
English reader because that's about the extent that will be made available until
the translated work is eventually published, whenever. You may read
individual chapters, or download the zipped file with all 8
chapters.
These first eight chapters form a unity in
Braido's mind. It is where he sets the scene for discussion of the
preventive system today. But the reality is that English-only readers have
not previously glimpsed the substance of Braido's work; only, perhaps, heard
that it is amongst the best we have for understanding Don Bosco in
context. It can only whet the appetite for more. You will learn some
details of his times, come to realise that many of the things he said about his
'system' were in fairly wide usage at the time, that there was a 'reality' out
there of preventive approaches long before the formula came into play, but you
will also learn just what is distinctively Don Bosco's about his employment of
these ideas and realities, and indeed, formulas. In fact Chapter 6, the smallest
chapter in the book, is a neat summary of DB's originality as well as containing
a summary of key moments in his lifetime - and the footnotes are a subtext as
long as the main text in this instance!
You know where to
find this material - www.bosconet.aust.com/bnet06ut.htm is the complete
reference URL. Enjoy.
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