Memoirs of the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales

from 1815 to 1855

 

 Preface

 

Many a time I have been urged to write my memoirs concerning the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales.1 Though I could not readily say no to the authority of the one who advised me to do this, I found it hard actually to set about the task because it meant too often speaking about myself. But now there has been added the command of a person of supreme authority, an authority that brooks no further delay.2

 

Therefore I am now putting into writing those confidential details that may somehow serve as a light or be of to the work which Divine Providence has entrusted to Society of Saint Francis de Sales. But I must say at the outset that I am writing these for my beloved Salesian sons; I forbid that these things be made public during my lifetime or after my death.3

 

Now, what purpose can this chronicle serve? It will be a record to help people overcome problems that may come in the future by learning from the past. It will serve to make known how God himself has always been our guide. It will give my sons some entertainment to be able to read about their father's adventures. Doubtless they will be read much more avidly when I have been called by God to render my account, when I am no longer amongst them.

 

Should they come upon experiences related maybe with complacency or the appearance of vainglory, let them indulge me a little. A father delights in speaking of his exploits to his dear children. It is always to be hoped that the sons will draw from these adventures, small and great, some spiritual and temporal advantage.

 

I have chosen to divide my account into ten-year pe­riods, because each decade saw a notable development of our work.4

 

So, my dear children, when you read these memoirs after my death, remember that you had a loving father who left these memoirs as a pledge of fatherly affection before he abandoned this world. And remembering that, pray for the happy repose of my soul.

 

Notes

1. Don Bosco called his work the work of the "oratory," adopt­ing the term used by Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595)- Don Bosco meant to indicate a place and an apostolate where­in boys, adolescents, and young men could gather for the ultimate purpose of prayer, i.e. Sunday and feast day Mass, confession, communion, preaching, and catechism. As we shall see, he used many means to make piety attractive to these youngsters, including games, outings, schooling, an employment service, and a hostel.

 

On Saint Philip Neri, see NCE X, 339-341; Butler's Lives of the Saints, II, 395-397; V.J. Matthews, St Philip Neri: Apostle of Rome and Founder of the Congregation of the Oratory (Rockford, Illinois: TAN, 1984); Louis Bouyer, The Roman Socrates: A Portrait of St. Philip Neri, trans. Michael Day (Westminster, Maryland: Newman, 1958).

2. The authority who first advised and then commanded was Pope Pius IX. The saint noted his advice in 1858 but only executed the command of 1867. See the introduction. On Pius IX's pontificate, see the introduction and the comment following these notes.

3. See the introduction.

4. Don Bosco, in another of his writings, also speaks of three decades, but these only involve the history of the Oratory itself. This fact is reported in BM V, 7. Here in the Memoirs of the Oratory he makes the division using wider criteria. The first decade takes in his life with his family as a boy and his period as a student. The second covers the period when he was a young seminarian and priest in the district of his birth and in Turin. The third tells the story of what happened to him and the Valdocco Oratory from the time of the Pinardi shed (1846) to the first building operations for the hospice at Valdocco.

   

Comment on Pius IX

 

Pope Pius IX (1846-1878), born Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti at Senigallia in the Marches (province of Ancona) in 1792, directed a Roman orphanage as a young priest and served as a papal diplomat in the new Republic of Chile. He became archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, bishop of Imola in 1831, and cardinal in 1840. His experience as a witness to the uprisings of 1831 and as a bishop within the Papal States convinced him that great social and administrative reforms were necessary in central Italy.

 

Succeeding the reactionary Pope Gregory XVI on June 16, 1846, Pius faced the nearly impossible task of balancing Italian nationalism and the interests of the Church in revolutionary times—more than complicated by the fact that the Pope ruled one-third of the Italian peninsula as his own sovereign state.

 

The experiences of 1848-1849 were enough to sour Pius IX on liberalism (and to finish souring the anticlerical political leaders on the Church). Only the presence of French soldiers in Rome enabled the Pope to hold the city against the tide of unification until 1870, when Napoleon III withdrew the troops on account of the Franco-Prussian War. Italy seized the papal city in 1870 and made it her capital. Pius became the "prisoner of the Vatican," as did his successors until Pope Pius XI and Mussolini resolved the "Roman Question" in 1929.

 

During Pius IX's exile at Gaeta in 1848-1849, the boys of the Oratory made their modest collection of thirty-three lire toward the Pope's relief (see chapter 49). Pius, familiar with the lot of orphans and the poor, was deeply touched. Thus a long and lov­ing relationship between Pius IX and Don Bosco began.

 

Already thinking seriously about some form of congregation to carry on his work, Don Bosco went to Rome for the first time in 1858 to seek advice from members of the Curia and from the Pope. It was the first of many visits and cemented a close rela­tionship that eventually led Pius to entrust very delicate missions to Don Bosco, and Don Bosco to consider Pius IX as virtually the cofounder and father of the Salesian Society.

 

For a brief article on the pontificate of Pius IX, see Eric John, ed., Vie Popes: A Concise Biographical Dictionary (New York: Hawthorne, 1964), II, 437-440; or NCE XI, 405-408. Longer biog­raphies in English, both giving most of their attention to Pius's pontificate and both of high quality, are Frank Coppa's Pope Pius IX {259 pages) and E.E.Y. Hales's Pio Nono (402 pages). On Pius IX and the Salesians, see BM III-XIII, passim.