Critical Edition of Don Bosco's Letters Completed

Critical Edition of Don Bosco’s Letters Completed

(ANS – Rome – April 30, 2024) – With the publication of the 10th volume of the critical edition of Don Bosco’s letters (Rome: LAS, 2024), the very ambitious project of the Salesian Historical Institute (ISS), launched at its foundation in 1982, has come to an end. Volume 10 collects in the 1st part the letters from 1887, January 1888, and about 80 letters not included in the previous volumes (having been found after earlier volumes were printed); the 2d part consists of the indexing of names of people, places, correspondents, subjects, in order to facilitate searches within volumes that would easily remain dusty on library shelves at a time like the present, in which history seems to have lost much of its appeal.  

As with the previous volumes, each letter is enriched with initial information that specifies the documentary value of the edited text (original draft, or autograph, allograph, without signature, with imitated signature...) and below by 2 sets of apparatus: the critical “author variants” apparatus useful for a better interpretation of the text and understanding of the usus scribendi of Don Bosco; and then the historical and biographical apparatus to contextualize some events, note significant expressions, connect the letters sent to the same correspondent, identify with precision the thousands of characters mentioned, but unknown to the greater story.

Fr. Francesco Motto
Turin, October 2009

Steering the vessel into port – in those dangerous seas with waves that can never be tamed that are the correspondence of personalities who have left indelible traces in history, such as Don Bosco – was Fr. Francesco Motto, a co-founding member of ISS, for 10 years its coordinating secretary and for 20 years its director. Collecting from all over the world, reading, comparing, deciphering, reconstructing, demystifying, and indexing with painstaking patience a bulk of 4,682 letters, mostly manuscript and arduous to read, was an undertaking that required determination and temerity from the curator in its initiation, passion and courage as he went ahead, and confidence and perseverance in its completion. And so from today we have an essential tool to know and “taste” the human, spiritual, charismatic, pedagogical, cultural dimension of an extraordinary life of Don Bosco. From today it is available to everyone, the Salesian Family and the Church in particular, a heritage of papers, reflections, and resonance of his tough daily life, year by year, month by month, day by day, it would seem, also able to help stem the ever-rising tide of fake news, that is, of expressions attributed to Don Bosco but never seriously documented.

The new Epistolario, in its paper and digital versions already largely available on the ISS website, with its 64% of unpublished letters, is obviously intended to replace the previous edition by Fr. Eugenio Ceria from the 1950s and the texts collected in the various volumes of the Biographical Memoirs.

It can be reasonably assumed that the new edition could last for decades, subject to the need to supplement it with the increasingly rare finds of letters that have escaped the searches of the past 4 decades.