Another Post on Don Bosco's Canonization

Don Bosco, Father and Teacher
of Youthful Holiness, Declared a Saint

ANS posted this on Holy Saturday.

84 years ago, on April 1, also Easter Sunday, Pope Pius XI proclaimed Don Bosco a saint. Thus ended the long process of beatification and canonization, begun in Turin on June 4, 1890.

As a young priest, the “Pope of Don Bosco, Saint” had the pleasure of sitting at table with Don Bosco and getting to know the Oratory he had founded at Valdocco. He got to know in detail the great work Don Bosco had done for poor and abandoned youngsters, which is why he did not hesitate to support the process of canonization of his friend Don Bosco, or his spiritual children. It is worth noting, too, that he also gave impetus to the cause of beatification of Dominic Savio.

Fr. Eugenio Ceria, SDB, remembered the day of Don Bosco’s canonization with enthusiasm, and his writings about that day are a poem to the Saint of the Young. “Rarely, perhaps never, has the Vatican Basilica [i.e., St. Peter’s] contemplated an Easter joy so young, so fresh, so unexpected as it did at Easter 1934. With that Easter, the Jubilee of the Redemption came to a close, and the holiness of an apostle who brought the benefits of Redemption to an infinite number of souls was celebrated.”

This poem of love continued: “Starting at dawn a cosmopolitan multitude from all parts of the city headed toward St. Peter’s. At six o’clock on the dot, the passage through the barriers was opened by the guards at the entrances, barriers which contained the impatience of the crowd, and the guards checked for entrance tickets; at 7:45, the 60,000 people the shrine was capable of hosting had already entered. At least another 100,000 would be left out. A show unique in the world! People of all conditions, genders and ages, priests, clerics, religious, students, professionals, workers, elegant ladies, and simple women of the city, with an extraordinary difference in appearance, ways of dressing, of languages, were pressed together under the vaults of the basilica and the largest square in the world, united in a unique feeling with Don Bosco and Pius XI.”

Fr. Peter Ricaldone, the Rector Major, would later write: “Vatican City, April 1, at 10:15. Alleluia! The Vicar of Christ has just proclaimed Don Bosco a saint. May he bless Turin, Italy, the world.”

The canonization of Don Bosco inevitably points out the perennial validity of the Preventive System, for today’s educators, founded on reason, religion, and loving kindness, destined to the training of honest citizens and good Christians: a educational system verified, in little more than a century, by a legion of champions of youthful holiness such as Dominic Savio, Laura Vicuña, Ceferino Namuncurá, the five young martyrs of Poznan, Albert Marvelli, young Spanish martyrs – and all the young people to come in the future, near and remote, “because our Congregation has more future than past,” reiterated the current Rector Major, Fr. Angel Fernandez Artime. Indeed.

VIDEO of the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, the papal procession, and Pius XI blessing the crowd (about 3 minutes long).