Address given at SS. Peter and Paul Church, San Francisco, California on Monday, February 17, 1997, as part of a series on the occasion of the Centennial Celebrations of the arrival of the first Salesians to the United States in 1897.
This is the story of two saints, one religious order, and a city. The two saints are St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) and St. John Bosco (1815-1888). The religious order is the Society of St. Francis de Sales, popularly known as the Salesians, or the Salesians of Don Bosco (SDB), founded in 1859. And the city is San Francisco, founded as a mission and a presidio in 1776, reconstituted as an American city in 1846, and destined to last as long as civilization itself. After all, if you follow Star Trek, you’ll notice that Star Fleet maintains its intergalactic headquarters here in San Francisco some four to five hundred years into the future.
My thesis is simple. Between the Salesians of Don Bosco, who consolidated themselves in this city one hundred years ago, under the direction of Father Raphael Piperni, and the city of San Francisco, there is a perfect fit; and the key to that fittingness is the saint and doctor of the Church, Francis de Sales. In the rectory adjacent to this church, in the refectory, there is a copy of the famous portrait of St. Francis de Sales painted by an unknown hand for the Convent of the Visitation in Turin. It is an unobtrusive portrait, high on the west wall; but it suggests something very powerful regarding the spirituality of St. John Bosco and the order he founded, initially at the Oratory of St. Francis de Sales.
Saints come in many guises, and at first glance there could be no greater contrast than the learned doctor of the church Francis de Sales, prince-bishop of Geneva, scion of Savoy nobility, court preacher to the King of France, a cleric whose first position after ordination was provost of the chapter of Geneva, a position second only to his bishop; and the humbly born John Bosco of the town of Becchi near Turin, whose father died when he was twenty-one months old and whose pious, hard-working mother Margaret Occhiena Bosco raised him in poverty-stricken circumstances. St. Francis de Sales was born in a castle. St. John Bosco was born in a farm house. Even their physical appearances stood in dramatic contrast. Saint Francis de Sales was tall, majestic, fully bearded, aristocratic in demeanor, tending in later life to put on weight. Elegant in his bishop’s robes, he seemed every inch of what he was—at once a prince and a bishop; for the diocese of Geneva, although he was exiled to Annecy by the Reformation, carried with it princely rank. Don Bosco, by contrast, was small, thin, sprightly, a sparrow to Francis de Sales sleek black swan.
Sent to the Jesuits for his education at their famous college of Clermont in Paris, a doctor in law and theology by his mid-twenties, Francis de Sales was a prodigy of learning. The priesthood and the episcopacy came to him naturally, as a matter of education and class.
Bereft of patronage, coming from the poorer classes, Don Bosco might hardly be expected to aspire to a condition as lofty as the priesthood. He spent his early years as a shepherd. Whatever education he received was at the hands of his parish priest. Not for him would there be a great Jesuit college or the University of Bologna— but, rather, books borrowed, read and devoured, often in the midst of shepherding or other field work.
Both Francis de Sales and John Bosco, however, each had something great and grand in common— the desire to become a priest. In each instance, this desire clashed with social expectations. As the eldest son of one of the oldest Savoyard aristocratic families, Francis de Sales was expected to marry and carry on the family name; indeed, a suitable match with one of the noblest heiresses of Savoy was arranged by his father while Francis was in law school. A terrible and prolonged temptation to despair, however, caused by overlong study of the theologians of the day on the question of predestination drove Francis to make a vow of chastity, to consecrate himself to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and to aspire to the diocesan priesthood. Only with the offer of the provostship—a post suitable to a de Sales—would Francis’ father relent and allow him to receive holy orders.
It was equally difficult for John Bosco to aspire to the priesthood. Shepherd boys, after all, had little opportunity to receive an education; yet John Bosco did achieve his dream—did defy social and class categories—did enter the seminary at Chieri and after six years of study did achieve the priesthood from the hands of Archbishop Fransoni of Turin on the eve of Trinity Sunday, 1841.
At this point the differences between Francis de Sales and John Bosco—differences of class, educational background, early experiences—began to fade. They are each, after all, priests for eternity, "ambassadors of Christ," in Cardinal Gibbons’ marvelous phrase. And they are each equally devoted to their priesthood. And, more importantly, they are each attracted to unusual ministries. In Francis’ case, it was missionary work among the Calvinist cantons recently restored to the Duchy of Savoy. Making his headquarters in the fortress of Allinges, this scion of privilege risked his life, day by day, disputing with Calvinists in town and city squares, taking his arguments to Geneva itself, where he attempted the conversion of Theodore Beza, patriarch of the Reformation. Given his high position as provost, the second highest position in the diocese, there was no need for Francis de Sales to take on this arduous missionary work. He might have contented himself with administrative matters, to his profit and the benefit of the Church. But something else drove him: a priestly and missionary zeal that turned the aristocratic lawyer into a tireless, physically courageous missionary.
So too with John Bosco. Having achieved the priesthood, John Bosco had jumped five or six categories in social acceptance. For him, despite his humble beginnings, there might have been a steady progress towards a comfortable parish, or, at the least, the quiet and respected life of a rural vicar.
But just as the Reformation had Calvinized previously Catholic cantons, so too had the French Revolution destabilized the faith of Northern Italy, and so too had the Industrial Revolution created crowds of urban poor. Worse: this urban proletariat was being criminalized, as Don Bosco discovered when he began to minister in the prisons of Turin. Even worse: many of these prisoners were little more than adolescent boys, already declared surplus by their society, heading for no life but the gallows.
|
On December 8, 1841, feast of the Immaculate Conception, Don Bosco was vesting for Mass. He heard a commotion. The sacristan was driving from the church a ragged street urchin, because the urchin had refused to serve Don Bosco’s Mass. Don Bosco, hearing the cries of the boy, intervened in the conflict and recalled the boy into the sacristy. His name was Bartolomeo Garelli—and in the figure of this ragged street boy, an orphan who supported himself as best he could, being driven from the church, Don Bosco found his life’s work. Here would be his new flock, the abandoned boys of Turin.
At this point, the influence of another saint makes itself felt—St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), another lawyer, like St. Francis de Sales, who became a priest. St. Philip evolved the concept of the oratory as the organizing principle for religious life. An oratory was a place, first of all, where people gathered to pray; but a place also where people knew that there would be a priest at the center of a community. In Don Bosco’s case, his first oratory numbered thirty boys by March of 1842. By March of 1846 it numbered 400! This phenomenal growth, incidentally, reflected the rapid rise of the Salesians, almost overnight, to their preeminence as the third largest order in the Church. The Salesian work, the Salesian ideal, seemed possessed of an inevitability.
1846—the very year the American flag was raised over the Mexican village of Yerba Buena, soon, in 1850, to be re-organized as the city and county of San Francisco, of the state of California, of the United States of America. It is comforting to think of San Francisco being organized in the very same years as Don Bosco’s first oratory. Like the oratory, San Francisco, too, sprung up overnight. A Mexican village of a few hundred souls in 1845, it was the tenth largest city in the United States by 1870. And it was a city of youngsters as well, the very same youngsters whom Don Bosco was gathering into his oratory in far-off Turin. The Protestant minister Samuel Hopkins Wiley can, in a very real sense, be seen as doing a work parallel to Don Bosco in far-off San Francisco.
In 1849, at the height of the Gold Rush, the Reverend Wiley stated that it was a shame that no provision had been made for the education of the young people of San Francisco. Nonsense, it was argued back, this is the Gold Rush. There are no children here. A week later the Reverend Wiley organized a parade of some 340 adolescents down Montgomery Street to prove his point. The city fathers authorized a public school.
There are many connections which can be made between the rise of San Francisco and the rise of Don Bosco’s ministry in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s. Industrialism had transformed Turin into a tumultuous modern city. Industrialism, financed by gold from the Mother Lode, pushed San Francisco towards what historian Hubert Howe Bancroft would call "a rapid monstrous maturity." By the 1870s—"the terrible '70s," Gertrude Atherton would later call them, a time of depression and social dislocation—San Francisco, despite its brief existence, already showed many signs characteristic of Turin and other embattled industrial urban centers. This wasthe time of great homelessness, of desperate workers focusing their desperation in terrible enmity to the Chinese, gathering by night in sandlots, torches held on high, and crying "The Chinese must go!" This is the time when many young men went bad, turned criminal, became "hoodlums," a word coined in San Francisco at this time.
But this was a city as well that delighted in life, that loved the arts, that sought, even then, a certain joyousness in existence. This was a city trying out metaphors for itself, ways of describing to itself and to others what it wanted to be: the Paris of the West, a new Rome, a new Athens: grandiloquent comparisons, perhaps, for a still raw frontier city, but expressive of a persistent characteristic, part of the DNA code of San Francisco, if you will, that lasts to this day.
It is not to stretch a point to say that St. Francis de Sales and St. John Bosco were possessed of a spirit of tolerance, acceptance, and love that would characterize San Francisco at its best. John Bosco, we must remember, was attracted to the thought and example of St. Francis de Sales because in his writings and in his practice as a priest and bishop Francis de Sales had based his ministry upon a wholesale acceptance of the intrinsic goodness of human nature.
Remember: the Reformation, emphasizing, indeed pushing to extreme limits, certain aspects of Christian theology, tended to see human nature as something fallen, helpless, desperate: something to be suppressed and channeled with an almost athletic ferocity of asceticism. Having come through the fiery vale of temptation in these matters, Francis de Sales struggled towards a sense of human nature as being, in its redemption by Christ, intrinsically good. The search for sanctity, Francis de Sales emphasizes again and again in his classic Introduction to the Devout Life, is a case of grace building upon nature.
Ordinary men and women, Francis de Sales insisted, whether married or single, religious, lay, or cleric, had within themselves a capacity for sanctity which could be found within the context of their ordinary, daily life. It was this spirit which attracted John Bosco to Francis de Sales; for he too had the same optimistic attitude towards human nature. His philosophy of education, as His Eminence Cardinal Laghi pointed out a few weeks ago [Jan. 31, 1997], was based on kindness, on preventive kindness, and on joy.
John Bosco knew that instinctive to youth—even the ragged, abused youth of the Turin slums—was an instinctive joy, an instinctive desire to have fun. Charmingly, he would organize what he called festive oratories—daylong tramps out into the open air, a picnic lunch, games and presents, singing, jokes and riddles, Mass in the village church, more fun and games, then vespers and the rosary recited as the boys and their priests headed back towards the city.
Like his mentor St. Francis de Sales, Don Bosco did not believe in punishment. He believed in love. He believed that a teacher should be a father, an advisor, a friend. "As far as possible," he wrote, "avoid punishing. Try to gain love before inspiring fear." And again, in 1877, he wrote: "I do not remember having used formal punishment; and with God’s grace, I have always obtained, and from apparently hopeless children, not alone what duty exacted but what my wish simply expressed."
 |
Kevin Starr, State
Librarian, addresses Salesian Centennial gathering. |
Don Bosco loved music, and he cultivated a taste for music in his charges, because music, he believed, had a powerful and refining influence. He thoroughly believed in play as a means of arousing childish curiosity. From this perspective, Don Bosco must be seen as one of the founders of progressive modern educational theory. Don Bosco, you see, believed in the self-esteem of his charges. He did not see a ragged street urchin or a truculent young man heading for a criminal career. He saw into the soul, into the innermost being, of that young man, and he saw the possibilities of a stone mason, a school teacher, a businessman, a doctor, a lawyer—a priest.
And when the Salesians of Don Bosco brought this spirit to San Francisco in 1897, they found a city yearning in its deepest being for a spirituality and an educational theory based upon joy, acceptance, playfulness, faith in the essential goodness of life as transformed by the redemptive merits of Christ. Like St. Francis de Sales, Don Bosco was an anti-Puritan; and so was San Francisco. Here was a city struggling for a sense of identity and self-esteem; and here was an order whose spirituality and pedagogical practice was based upon discovering and actualizing that proper self-esteem which each of us possesses because of our intrinsic dignity as human beings and our eternal redemption in the merits of Jesus Christ. It can honestly be said that much of the credit for the city which San Francisco became, especially in its all-important Catholic dimension, arose from this Salesian spirituality of delight in the arts, delight in laughter, delight in the sheer goodness of creation itself.
San Francisco, in short, was possessed of an anima naturaliter Salesiana, a natural Salesian spirit—and the flourishing of the Salesians of SS. Peter and Paul only intensified that spirit. To San Francisco the Salesians brought their abiding belief, derived from the Founder, that life was good—if we only allowed it to be so—if, that is, we acted, as Cardinal Laghi suggested in his redaction of the Salesian spirit, with rationality, kindness, and religion.
Tonight, one hundred years after the arrival of the Salesians, we ask ourselves the question: why did the Salesians so flourish here? Was it merely a matter of the city’s Italian population? Or did the Salesian spirit speak to something deeper in the soul and imagination of the city: something instinctively Salesian, something beyond ethnicity, although not to be separated from the Italians of North Beach and Telegraph Hill who constituted the Salesians’ primary flock?
The question answers itself. San Francisco is a Salesian town! Joyful, accepting, civil, and civilized.
I like to think in my imagination that St. John Bosco is with us in a special way: not just through his Salesian sons and daughters, but personally, here and now, on our streets. Saints, after all, have special privileges. I see his spare, spry figure—a black sparrow in cassock and biretta—walking Polk Street and gathering unto himself runaway teenagers, turning them from a life of hustling to a recovery of their better possibilities. I see him in San Bruno prison, hearing the confession of a young man, scared, frightened, arrested for his first crime. I see him here at the altar, witnessing the vows of a young couple; or in the front pew of St. Mary’s Cathedral, seeing one of his boys raised to the dignity of the priesthood. I see him walking the streets of North Beach, knowing everyone, a smile here, a word there. He is in the confessional, giving sage and kind advice on how to deal with the embarrassingly reoccurring fact of sin. He is with us here, of course, in spirit, in memory—and so is the prince-bishop of Geneva, St. Francis de Sales, whose love of learning, whose loving kindness, whose acceptance of human nature found itself so strongly appropriated by the Apostle of Turin, Don Bosco, and the men and women who brought the Salesian Order to the City by the Bay.
|
|
