As a child I was very interested in San Giovanni Bosco, I had read a biography, I still remember many passages, and I always felt a great person, beyond the fact that they made a saint. What has always left me perplexed, later, even as an adult and a teenager was listening to the stories - more often than not required, authentic outpourings - by other boys my age, and then by adult men, about the Salesians and religious colleges in general.
They used to say: "I send you to school!" And it was a threat, those who were afraid. The threat that the parents were naughty children, or did not want to study. The literature, moreover, is full of testimonies about the colleges: from Giamburrasca forward to the most dramatic testimony. But that's not what I wanted to talk about today, the subject is vast and certainly San Giovanni Bosco has no responsibility for what they did or did not do the followers of his work.
What I wanted to talk about is a precise memory, I re-emerged in a many states, after decades, when last winter Silvio Berlusconi swore in public for the sole purpose of telling a joke. It was not the first time, and Silvio Berlusconi is not the only one to do so. These jokes are well known, and there are fooled too, telling her: as a child and a teenager, and then perhaps in the company, that's it. From twenty-five to thirty years on, usually, they stop to tell, but these jokes never forget, occasionally resurface, he laughs and shakes his head, kid stuff, as I was looking stupid. These are the jokes, "oratorio" almost never do laugh, but are built with much care to get to say, precisely, a blasphemous or obscene words, or even "poo". It is the children who say "shit", and they do it because their parents say it is good to say, and they are adolescents who invented the jokes with the final blasphemy, and they do it to spite the priest, secretly, between them, so you see that are big and are independent. Normal stuff, of course, almost a rite of passage, something which then passes: the first not to take these things too seriously, most times, it is the priests. That there and then they get angry, they give severe penalties, but then sigh and think "we hope that soon passed, the stupidera.
Silvio Berlusconi has studied by the Salesians, ie in institutions dedicated to St. Francis de Sales, those founded in the nineteenth century by Don John Bosco. Good Silvio never misses a chance to say, who has studied the Salesians: for this he also said that a good Catholic. I wonder whether it is really a good advert for the Salesians: In numerical terms, accounting, maybe yes ("I go to school where he studied Silvio"), but as for works of faith, as the effective maturity of its students, the good education, and the mentality with which he comes out of the Salesians, perhaps I should say to Silvio to shut up and fly.
PS: I was thinking these things, I found this great crop, we have in politics nothing less than a direct descendant of Don Bosco, a great-grandson. I did not know, I am amazed - good read (by clicking on the picture reads better). (From http://www.repubblica.it/ )
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