January 31 is the feast of St. John Bosco (1815-1888), the apostle of the young and the founder of the Salesians. Born at Becchi, in the Piedmontese countryside, he was ordained priest in Turin in 1841 and devoted himself to the abandoned boys of the industrial city — the apprentices, the orphans, the street children who slept under the arcades. The Oratory of St. Francis de Sales, which he founded at Valdocco, on the edge of Turin, became the mother house of the Salesian congregation he founded in 1859.
The Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, built by Don Bosco at Valdocco between 1863 and 1868, is the great Salesian shrine and the centre of the Salesian world. The body of Don Bosco lies there, in a chapel beside the high altar. The Salesian Sisters, founded with St. Mary Mazzarello in 1872, and the Salesian Cooperators, the lay association, completed the Salesian family. By his death in 1888 the congregation had houses in Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil; today it is the second-largest religious order in the Church.
Don Bosco is the patron of editors, of young people, and of Turin. The dream he had at the age of nine — in which a Lady told him that he would have to win over, not by blows, but by gentleness, the wild boys he saw fighting in a field — became the program of his life and the "preventive system" of Salesian education: reason, religion, and loving kindness. He was canonized in 1934, and the January 31 feast is kept by the Salesian family worldwide.
