With ordination came the release of a powerful spiritual energy, which, joined to his rare human gifts, was calculated to exert a lasting influence on modern youth.

The beautiful Lady of his dreams was not slow in showing Don Bosco (Don is the title given to priests in Italy) just what she expected him to do. On the feast of Mary Immaculate, December 8, 1841, the first sign came. While vesting for Mass, the priest heard the sacristan shrieking at a poor youngster who had sneaked in to get warm. "Here, call the lad back," cried Don Bosco, "he's my friend." The boy came over to Don Bosco.

Don Bosco asked, "What is your Name?"

"Bartholomew Garelli" the boy answered.

Who old are you Bartholomew?

"Sixteen," answered the boy.

"Can you serve Mass?"

"No."

"What do you do?"

"I am a bricklayer," he responded, head lowered.

"Your mother and father," Don Bosco continued.

"I am alone," the boy responded sadly.

"Can you sing’" Don Bosco broke in.

"Yes I can sing," exclaimed Bartholomew laughing.

And that friendship, struck up on the spur of the moment, began Don Bosco's worldwide campaign to bring youth to God. He told Bartholomew to stay for Mass.

After Mass Don Bosco told the boy, "Next Sunday, you bring your friends here, and we'll spend the day together."

The next Sunday, four ragged boys, looking badly in need of a meal and warm clothing, came to Don Bosco. They were certainly in very dire spiritual need. And their number multiplied in a few weeks, so that caring for them soon came to be a major problem.

"But my girls!" exclaimed the directress of the girls' orphanage where Don Bosco was chaplain. "What will become of them?"

"You can always find a priest for them," said Don Bosco, "these boys need me!"

In the 1840s the slums of Turin were overrun by the poverty that resulted inevitably from sweatshop factories with their hazardous machinery, child labor, and starvation wages. Walking through these slums, Don Bosco came face to face with his mission. As he visited the prisons with Father Cafasso, the conviction of his vocation seemed to shout within him: "These boys were not bad once. Take care of them before they fall into crime-that is your task!"

With his heart full of trust in his Lady and his pockets empty, Don Bosco courageously took up the work. From then on it was only "Give me souls-the souls of youngsters."

Don Bosco called his weekly band of ragged youngsters "the Oratory" -a term which to his mind suggested prayer and organized recreation. In the beginning it was a floating thing, its membership growing daily in large proportions. There was no one place to meet because in those troublesome times people were afraid of a large group of working boys and, besides, who relishes the uproar of some 200 lads enjoying a day's freedom from the imprisonment of a factory?

Every Sunday they would meet in a different spot-a city church, a cemetery chapel, an empty lot. Don Bosco would hear their confessions and say Mass for them. An hour of religious instruction would follow-plain, homely talks coming from the heart and embodying the solid truths of the faith. Then the priest would take his gypsy band into the country for an all-day outing of games. A final talk would close the "Oratory day," and the tired bunch would trail into Turin, scattering to their homes along the way.

During the week, Don Bosco used to tour the city shops, checking on his boys, making sure they had not forgotten his instructions to work hard and work well.

Those were heroic times-"those pioneer days," the saint used to call them. "Days of strenuous work they were, a shiftless existence that threatened to collapse any Sunday, a bankrupt enterprise with no capital and very little funds." Besides this, the city fathers, worried by the new cries of "freedom for the working classes," eyed Don Bosco's boys as a dangerous, half-baked army of the children of the people, headed by an ambitious priest. Actually this tired, penniless priest sought only a chance to bring God's peace and order to the hearts of restless youth.

In 1846 the first ray of hope broke through the clouds. Don Bosco bought an empty lot and a dilapidated shed in an underdeveloped section of Turin called Valdocco. True, next door was a saloon and across the street a hotel of shady reputation-but what did it matter? The Oratory ground was sacred for, as he later learned in a "dream," it was the burial ground of the Martyrs of Turin.

With a roof over his head, Don Bosco knew that his Lady had set the permanent basis of his work.

The shed he dug deeper and converted into a chapel, with a tiny anteroom, and every Sunday 500 lads managed quite miraculously to squeeze into it for Mass. "The Oratory of St. Francis de Sales" he called it, because he admired the gentle holiness of this great saint.

The location of the shed-chapel can still be seen today-the tiny nucleus of a worldwide organization that began in poverty with our Lady's blessing.

New fields of endeavor for his boys opened themselves to the saint. Homeless lads, many of whom found an undesired home in its squalid prisons, overran Turin. They had to be saved before they fell!

Again, a little boy started the project. One stormy night in 1850, as Don Bosco and his mother were sitting up at their work, a timid knock came at their door. As Mama Margaret opened it, there he stood, tiny and dripping wet, scared, starved, blinking in the light.

"Please," he whined. "I'm hungry. Can I come in?"

As he devoured a plate of steaming soup, he told his story: his mother had just died, the farm was taken over by creditors, and he was alone in the world.

"He'll stay with us," Don Bosco stated. "But where will he sleep?"

"If necessary, we'll sling a basket from the ceiling for a bed!" laughed the priest. The boy laughed too. He was Don Bosco's first orphan.

More orphans came. Don Bosco bought the house adjoining the shed. The boarders used to go to work or school in Turin each day, returning "home" for meals, but Don Bosco soon realized that his makeshift system had too many drawbacks and that he had to have a school of his own. One day in 1853 he took a corner of Mama Margaret's kitchen and converted it into a cobbler shop; the tiny hallway became a carpenter shop. The teachers? Don Bosco himself and two hired men. Now there was really no quiet at the Oratory with all the banging of hammers, but in the midst of all the rumpus was born the Don Bosco Trade School. Not that Don Bosco ever called it that, but that is what the movement developed into. Today the congregation of Don Bosco operates trade schools throughout the world, both in highly technological nations like the United States (Boston, Paterson, Los Angeles) and in many underdeveloped nations.

As Don Bosco's name became famous, more priests came to help him, secular priests released by their bishops for this work. Though they came from different sections of Italy, they soon realized that Don Bosco had an educational system of his own, which he called "the preventive system."

Essentially it means to prevent a boy from becoming bad. It is based on Christian charity. Its double foundation is reason and religion: in other words, a sense of understanding between teacher and pupil, engendered by daily contact, friendly chats, and an interest that is felt; and secondly, a sense of religion fostered by the sacraments of confession and holy communion. According to the saint, where other systems of education have failed, this system of kindly understanding and manly, sincere religion has more than succeeded.

The system is not new, though in Don Bosco's hands it achieved a freshness all its own. While it compensates for errors committed by youngsters, who are often changeable and always forgetful, it does not condone the errors; instead, it uses them as steppingstones to the formation of a solid character, permeated by Christian principles of Christian character.