St. John Bosco

Who they were

John Bosco grew up fatherless and poor outside Turin, and as a boy learned juggling and tightrope tricks to gather the village children, the price of the show was watching them repeat the Sunday sermon. Ordained into industrializing Turin, he found the city full of boys the factories used and the prisons collected, and built for them the Oratory: at its peak home, school, workshop, and playground for eight hundred. He signed Italy's first recorded apprenticeship contracts to stop masters beating apprentices, taught trades including printing, he ran presses himself, hence the editors' patronage, and founded the Salesians on his "preventive system": reason, religion, and kindness, no punishment, the teacher present in the playground rather than above it. The Salesians today are among the largest orders in the Church, still doing exactly this. He died in 1888; Turin closed for his funeral.

Why people turn to St. John Bosco

Parents of teenagers in trouble, teachers with impossible classrooms, and anyone raising a boy without a father in the house, his own biography.

How to ask their intercession

By the young person's name, with the honest version of the trouble. Ask for one adult to get through to them, his whole method was being that adult. ---