By Corazon Damo-Santiago
A man led John Bosco at the bottom of a precipice where an enormous building towered over them. Bronze portals with inscriptions abound. The inscription on the first: “Depart from me you cursed into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41).
More popularly known as Don Bosco, he could hardly breath due to suffocating heat, “while a greasy, green-tinted smoke lit by flashes of scarlet flames rose behind the enormous walls.”
He saw six boys screaming in terror with arms outstretched, sucked, drawn and fading in the echo of the inferno. They were hurled down on portals, which “opened thunderously and slam shut with a mumble.” They are boys under his care in the oratory.
Bosco saw “something like a furnace, its jaws spouting fiery balls when the boys were thrown. Everything was like “leaping tongues of fire, glowing white, yet did not incinerate.”
A lad dashed out and with a piercing scream fell into a cauldron of liquid bronze. Instantly he became incandescent with an echo of a dying wail. Others followed him.
After a few steps, “poor wretches savagely striking each other, or clawing their own faces, tearing their own flesh and spitefully throwing it about” appeared. Then the “entire ceiling of the cave became transparent” and “revealed a patch of heaven.”
The scene made the fiery crowd “fuming and panting with envy,” sobbing and screaming blasphemies and imprecations against the saints.”
Then the guide gripped Bosco’s arm and commanded him to touch a wall—the remote rim of hell. It is a proof that “he has seen and touched the last wall of eternal suffering, millions of miles from hell’s real fire.”
The guide seized Bosco’s hand, “forced it open and pressed it against the first of the thousand walls.”
The sensation was “utterly excruciating that he leapt back with a scream and found himself sitting on the bed.”
His hands were swollen and the skin of his palm peeled off.
Bosco shuddered in fear for the boys he saw were his wards. If they were to die now, that would be their eternal destiny, according to Don Bosco’s Vision of Hell by Fr. Adolf Faroni, SBD.
Read people like books
Gifted by God with prophetic dreams, he had also a keen awareness of their moral blunders and innermost secrets, and death.
As the boys in the oratory walked past him, he could sense the condition of their souls and can read their conscience.
And because Bosco dreamt about the impending death of his wards, every night disciplinary reminders and spiritual exercises were musts.
He urged them to do Exercises for a Happy Death well because it might be their last. Likewise, he shared his dreams with a jest that they were nothing but dreams, but said, “I will still tell it to you for your spiritual benefit.”
The boys in the oratory seriously remembered his remarks, convinced that he was God-sent because he had predicted deaths and even unforeseen events accurately and used his prophetic gifts to ensure their readiness for death.
Fr. Joseph Calasso, his spiritual director assigned to perfect his theological competence after his ordination, advised him to consider his dreams significant.
When Bosco presented the Rules of the Salesian Congregation to Pope Pius IX, the similarity of the difficulties, threats and tribulations they both experienced initiated a supernatural bonding between them.
Pope Pius IX, after listening with great attention and emotion to Bosco’s extraordinary dreams, said: “When you get back to Turin, write these dreams and everything else you have told me, minutely. Save all this as a legacy for your congregation so that they may serve as an encouragement and norm for your sons.”
Realization of a prophetic dream
John Bosco was born of a poor family near Castelnuevo in the archdiocese of Turin, Italy, on August 15, 1815. His father died when he was 2 years old. His mother, Margaret, provided him with a good Christian education.
At the phase of life when children should be in kindergarten, he was tending sheep on the hills.
At 14, he studied under Father Calasso. When the priest died, he went to a public school at Castelnuevo.
At 16, he entered the Seminary of Chien and was ordained priest on June 5, 1846, in Turin. The city of Turin then was in the threshold of industrialization and beset with many challenges.
Among his prophetic dreams, one when he was 9, left the most profound impression.
Bosco was watching a group of boys having fun. When others started cursing, he went to the group and started to box them, shouting that they stop. A man, whose face radiated with light, told him to be a leader of the group, win their friendship not with blows but through kindness and gentleness.
When he asked who he was, the man said: “I am the Son of her whom your mother has taught you to greet three times a day.”
A majestic lady took Bosco’s hand and pointed to a variety of animals that took the place of the children.
She said: “Make yourself humble, steadfast and strong. And what you will see happen to these animals, you will have to do for my children.”
When Bosco looked, the wild animals became gentle and bleating lambs to welcome the Man and the Lady.
The newly ordained priest gathered the orphans and homeless boys in the slums to attend catechism lessons in the Sunday school.
With his charming personality and athletic prowess on juggling, sprint, broad jump and acrobatics, and intellectual acumen, boys flocked to his classes. He formulated a system of education with the components of kindness, reason and religion.
Aware that idleness is the devil’s workshop, he introduced vocational lessons for tailors, blacksmiths, bookbinders and printing to inculcate honest work.
Enemies of the church and labor exploiters hired killers to eliminate him. But, as always when in danger, a grey dog he named Grigio would come to the rescue to save him from harm.
In 1868 about 800 students were involved in his Preventive Educational Programs. To ensure the continuation of the program, Bosco founded the Society of Saint Francis de Sales (Salesians), which was opened in 1869.
Saint Dominic Savio, a 15-year-old prodigious saint, is the first model of his efforts in the priestly vocation.
With the help of Sister Mary Dominic Mazzarello, he founded the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Auxiliatrix in 1872.
He died on January 31, 1888. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on June 2, 1929, and canonized by the same pope on April 1, 1934. He was given the title “Father and Teacher of Youth”.
His feast day is on January 31.
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Santiago is a former regional director of the Department of Education National Capital Region. She is currently a faculty member of Mater Redemptoris Collegium in Calauan, Laguna, and Mater Redemptoris College in San Jose City, Nueva Ecija.
Image credits: Wikimedia Commons