The Nineteenth Century Apostle of the Little Ones — John Shaqi
The Nineteenth Century Apostle of the Little OnesUhlrich, E.
Religion
The Nineteenth Century Apostle of the Little Ones
Uhlrich, E.
Bosco, Giovanni, Saint, 1815-1888
More than one hundred and fifty of these institutions were founded by
Don Bosco in Italy, France, Spain, the Tyrol, and England. He also
founded a sisterhood, so as to be able to take care of young girls as
well as of boys, and to help in the missions which he established in
South America, especially in Patagonia, where fourteen thousand savages
were baptized by his missionaries before Don Bosco's death. Latterly the
sisterhood he founded has been working among the neglected Italians in
this country too, especially in New Orleans, and there are Salesian
Fathers of Don Bosco in New York City. This special missionary work,
however, was not counted in the general estimate of the ten million
children saved by Don Bosco.
Every year eighteen thousand apprentices leave his institutions and go
out to work, trained in body and mind for contact with the world.
As a means of maintaining his work, Don Bosco founded a third society to
which men and women, lay or clerical, can belong, their object being to
help provide means for this great work, and the Holy Father himself
belongs to this third society.
In appearance Don Bosco, the simple country boy, who was destined to do
this great work in this day and age, and to show the world one true way
of helping to solve the problems of labor and capital and government
that disturb the nations of the earth so much now, was a tall man of
very pleasing features and manner. He was not very eloquent as a talker,
but his heart was filled with a heavenly love for poor and unhappy
childhood. Few of us are so limited in means, or in opportunity, but we
can follow him a little way. Even the young children who go to Sunday-school
often know, or could easily learn, of some neglected child that
has perhaps no parents, or has parents who have no faith, and which
therefore hears nothing of religion and of right. Like Garelli, Don
Bosco's first pupil and follower, regular Sunday-school children could
take such a child to their own Sunday-school. The children of the
Paulist Sunday-school in New York City, for instance, are constantly
encouraged to bring with them any child they know which does not go to
Sunday-school in any other place. If, in addition to its spiritual
neglect, the child is in bodily want, bringing it to Sunday-school
attracts the attention of older people who are able, on occasion, to
give it material as well as spiritual help.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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