Volume IX of Don Bosco's Letters

Volume IX of Don Bosco’s Letters

(ANS – Rome – March 1, 2021) - The ninth volume of Don Bosco’s Letters (Epistolario), edited by Fr. Francesco Motto, SDB, former director of the Salesian Historical Institute (ISS) and its current president, has been in bookstores for days now, published by the LAS (the publisher of the Salesian Pontifical University) on behalf of the Associazione Cultori di Storia Salesiana (ACSSA, the Association of Practitioners of Salesian History).

This 605-page volume contains 469 letters, written, or sometimes only signed, by Don Bosco in the period 1884-1886 (letters no. 3956-4424). These are a complex of texts that, it can be said, somehow rewrite the story of Don Bosco at the end of his life. 40% of the letters were previously unpublished; so, many correspondents unknown to Salesian history come to light.

The country boy from Castelnuovo has come a long way: in the 1880s the name “Don Bosco” resonated in Italy and abroad, including the icy Magellanic lands and various torrid cities in India.

Many letters (about a third) are written in French, a language that Don Bosco barely knew. That is not irrelevant: Don Bosco’s various trips to the Côte d’Azur, his triumphal trip to Paris in 1883, and the publishing of “biographies” in French had made him known across the Alps as the 19th-century St. Vincent de Paul. It is above all a circle of French benefactors, some of whom are very generous, who had been supporting the Salesian work in those years.

Furthermore, in the three-year period considered, we find a 70-year-old Don Bosco who was seriously ill. In many letters he is forced to justify the delay in answering, their brevity, bad spelling, the need to use a secretary, etc. Yet he never ceases to write personally to particular civil and religious authorities, to some confreres, to certain benefactors, to illustrious figures never known in person.

Like the previous volumes, this ninth volume of letters also makes it possible to distinguish between those penned by Don Bosco, those of which he wrote the draft (which was then copied by the secretary and signed by him), the letters written by others and simply signed by him, the printed circulars prepared by his collaborators, but always bearing his signature.

Highlights are Fr. Rua and two editors of the Salesian Bulletin, Fr. John Bonetti and Fr. John Baptist Lemoyne, the latter in particular, who became Don Bosco’s secretary in those years and secretary of the superior chapter. To him we owe moving letters to individual Salesians, some circulars, the circular naming Fr. Rua as Don Bosco’s vicar with full powers (1885), and, above all, the two letters from Rome of 1884.

If Don Bosco’s childhood, his youth, and his first experiences of Valdocco are well known, for the adult Don Bosco and the elderly Don Bosco the main and unavoidable source is his letters: a sort of daily autobiography.

All that remains is to wait for the last volume of the correspondence, the tenth, which will collect the letters of 1887 and January 1888 and those found after the publication of the individual volumes. The final volume will also offer the overall indexes of the saint’s entire epistolary corpus, with almost 5,000 letters.