FIRST PART: SALESIANS AND LAITY TODAY: THE SITUATION
(Memoirs, p.255)
CHAPTER 1: ELEMENTS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE SITUATION1. The horizon: together in spirit and in mission for the service of the young[3] The beginning and the model At the beginning of Salesian history we find Don Bosco's love of predilection for poor youngsters and his concern for the working classes living in densely populated areas. Animated by the charity of the Good Shepherd he gathered around himself a large number of other persons because the new condition of the young, as it seemed to him in the city of Turin, needed a new and immediate response. So was born the Valdocco Oratory, a true 'laboratory' or workshop in which Don Bosco, other priests, adult laymen, youngsters and some women, first among them Mamma Margaret, lived the original and genial style of predilection for the young known as the preventive system. This system, lived first at Valdocco and then later at Mornese and other places, became a true spirituality, bringing educators and pupils together in the same movement towards holiness. It is a spirituality which lives in a quite special manner in the heart and activity of the members of the Salesian Family and of a vast movement of persons, as a gift to the Church for the salvation of the young and for the holiness of its adherents. [4] Secular and prophetic dimension of the charism The mission to the young and the poor has a particular secular dimension "because it is a charism that has been raised up in the Church for the world"1. The charism of Don Bosco, precisely because it is educative and ranged on the side of culture, creates a singular harmony with tasks proper to lay people. It is for this reason that on becoming a mission it extends beyond SDB communities and the works themselves. Mission and works, in fact, are not the same thing, even though the work may be necessary as a setting for the convocation and formation of the vast movement of those who work for the young, within and outside Salesian structures, in the Church and in the institutions of civil society. This mission has also a prophetic dimension because of its significance with regard to educational and social problems and because of the new perspectives of existence which it opens up. Evangelizing by educating and educating by evangelizing become a message of hope, light and leaven, since it does not reach immediately every individual, nor does it cover materially every space and activity in human life.2 Attention to secular values was so much alive in Don Bosco that it led him to invent an original figure of the consecrated layman, the Salesian coadjutor brother; the latter develops in himself a genial propensity to be an apostolic ferment within secular realities taken up in their autonomous consistency, on account of which the Salesian community, "enriched by its lay dimension, can meet the world in a way that is apostolically more efficacious".3 [5] Efficacious mediations: CEP and PEPS The mission is one and only, but it can be realized in different ways, as many in fact as are the historical, geographical, religious and cultural situations and contexts in which young people are living. The Salesian educative and pastoral project (PEPS) is the historical mediation and the practical instrument used in all latitudes and cultures of the same mission. The project therefore is not just a technical fact but a cultural horizon for constant reference, and is demanded by the necessary inculturation of the charism. It is specified and realized in every Salesian work by a
community which we call the educative and pastoral community
(CEP). This is the group of people (youngsters and adults,
parents and educators, religious and lay, representatives of
other ecclesial and civil institutions, including also those
belonging to other religions, and men and women of good will) who
work together for the education and evangelization of the young,
and especially those who are poorer. |