At the Heart of the Salesian Charism

At the Heart of the Salesian Charism

(ANS – Rome – June 28) – Under the painting of the Sacred Heart in the center of the basilica built in Rome in honor of the Sacred Heart by Don Bosco, there is a double portrait. The first is dedicated to St. Francis de Sales, the second to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, from whom devotion to the Sacred Heart began, after the revelations she received starting in December 1673. St. Francis de Sales had founded with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal the Order of the Visitation, to which Margaret Mary Alacoque belonged. It is not just a question of historical references.

The heart is like the synthesis of the message of Francis de Sales, communicated with his life even more than in his writings. He intended the Treatise on the Love of God as a follow-up to a Treatise on the Love of One’s Neighbor, for which he had drawn up an outline; but he was not able to carry out his plan on account of his death at just 55 years of age (in 1622).

Francis was able to enrich the Church’s journey with a charitable love without boundaries. It is the result of a maturation begun during his years of study and then continued in his nine years as a priest, seven of which he lived as a missionary in the Calvinist Chablais area, facing hostility of all kinds. His strategy was to reconquer hearts one by one, with patience and sweetness. The same approach he maintained as a bishop: “God drew me away from myself to take me for Himself and give me to his people. That is, He transformed me from what I was for myself to what I had to become for them,” he wrote in a letter to Jane Frances de Chantal about the day of his episcopal ordination.
The “heart” is the whole of his entire life and his spiritual heritage, from which also comes the gift that, through Margaret Mary Alacoque, has reached the whole Church.

Don Bosco’s spiritual history is like a big tree that comes from the same root. He wanted those who would continue his mission to adopt the name of Francis de Sales because it is the same heart that gives life to everything that was born from Don Bosco.

Two particular moments are like a testament and symbol of Don Bosco’s heart, both of which he experienced at the basilica of the Sacred Heart. The letter from Rome in May 1884, where he confides everything that is dearest to him and asks his Salesians to have the same heart that he has for young people; and the only Mass he celebrated in the basilica, on May 16, 1887, when the Lord allowed the whole journey of his servant’s life to emerge from the memory of the heart, lived as “the only movement of charity toward God and toward his brothers” (C. 3).

Returning to these roots opens the way to a path of renewal, which recreates the ‘new heart,’ with which to be Salesians, according to Don Bosco’s heart, for today’s young people.