[Example Of Definition Essay Outline Privacy Ritocco Gioc
Sharif Garmon
The nineteenth century is now part of the Church's past. The historian has the impression, we would say pleasant, that he is faced with a new landscape when he analyzes that age so candid in which Catholic authors knew almost by heart the date of the creation of the world. It was at the time of the first railways and the first typewriters ...
San Giovanni Bosco lived precisely from 1815 to 1888, therefore in the midst of that era which appears to us at the same time so close and so distant. He did not know the biblical criticism, psychoanalysis and the approaches of the separated Churches; that is, it has ignored what - fortunately - has upset so many habits in the Catholic mentality of the twentieth century. Reading his works puts us in contact with a mentality that is no longer ours. In order to prove that there was nothing extraordinary in his preaching, his best biographer recently wrote a list of the themes of his sermons, which deserves to be reported: "Importance of saving one's soul, the end of man, shortness of life, uncertainty of death, enormity of sin, final impenitence, forgiveness of insults, restitution of the stolen goods,
The fact of inexorably cataloging Don Bosco in the past may perhaps displease some of his devotees, who, in their hearts, would be happy to be able to preserve his memory from the wear and tear of time by isolating him in an equivocal extratemporal condition. But these people should be reminded of Piedmontese realism, a permanent feature of his personality. In reality, the figure of their saint not only loses out, but rather has everything to gain by inserting it critically into space, time and life of his world, and this in the strength of his authentic greatness. In any case, the transformation of existence encourages the historian to outline the master lines of his spirit, against an increasingly precise background, so that his figure gradually acquires its authentic importance. Thanks to this historical and environmental perspective, reconstruction work today is less uncertain than yesterday. If all goes well, the sooner it should be easier to establish, through surveys and surveys, what is the prehistory of the ideas and trends of this saint.
The historians of the soul and of the spiritual doctrine of Don Bosco have not completely ignored these problems that emerge in their writings. In our opinion, however, even the most valid of these authors gave little consideration to the relativity of his thought. For example, are Don Auffiay's observations on his dependence on St. Francis de Sales and St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori extremely thin? Furthermore, the quality of their documentation today is perplexing. Perhaps they were too afraid to be considered pedants, 'or they didn't think that, from the beginning, readers could accept their declarations, even the most surprising, with a minimum of prudent skepticism.
The references to the sources are almost completely missing in their works. They drew at random (we want to be indulgent, because even for the most upright souls, carelessness is a great temptation) in the immense material of the Biographical Memoirs, in which a conscientious but inexperienced compiler of the dangers that historical work entails - his successors in this regard will prove wiser - he had included all the testimonies about Don Bosco, without carefully examining the genesis of each of them and with a sometimes questionable editorial method. ' Finally, most of these authors 5 did not attribute the due importance to the writings published by the saint on spiritual problems, although they had been more meditated than the reflections captured on the fly by his admirers and transmitted to posterity in uncertain conditions.
In an attempt to respond to some of his legitimate desires, we have committed ourselves, in turn, to face the problem of "Don Bosco and the spiritual life". By choosing this title, we expose ourselves to a preliminary difficulty: the expression spiritual life is not understood in the same way by all the authors.6 But we had to choose.
4 On the literary genre of the biographical Memoirs of Don Giovanni Bosco (Turin, 1898-1948) and their main sources (among others, the canonization process of Don Bosco), see my book: Les Memorie I by Giovanni Battista Lemoyne, Etude d'un Zivre fundamental on the jeunesse de saint Jean Bosco, thesis, Lyon, 1962. Moreover, the three successive authors of this work (GB Lemoyne, A. Amadei and E. Ceria) worked conscientiously and their documents "have generally been carefully reported.
Every scholar will feel that, given the problem in these terms, to face it we had to be great gullible or presumptuous solemn. In fact, a similar purpose involves such demands as to make one dizzy, because "studying the spirituality of a man means seeking in the immediacy and concreteness of the testimonies concerning him - that is, in the daily existence as he has lived and interpreted the dogma; to find the only living synthesis that made it, the choice it made in the great themes transmitted by tradition, and the way in which it underlined certain aspects, certain details of the whole that is common to all. But it also means evaluating, as far as possible, the interpenetration of his inner life and of the historical, geographical, literary, artistic, scientific and religious framework in which he was born ". 9 As we can see, this is an immense historical problem. (We note once and for all that we will not necessarily have to take a position on the value of the doctrines described).
However, realizing the vastness of the subject has freed us from a scruple of principle. The extemporaneous discussions on the very existence of a "spirituality of St. John Bosco" would have been superfluous if one had understood about the meaning of the words. It is probably not appropriate, as has already been pointed out, to classify it among the doctors and authors of the spirit, "although he explicitly wanted to spread a" method of
Christian life "and although for a century many souls, of whom two were declared saints (Saint Dominic Savio and Saint Maria Dome
nica Mazzarello) considered him a master of their spiritual life. But, if Don Bosco had even been a Christian circumscribed in his time, he could not be denied a spirituality, that is, his way of living and, on occasion, expressing
spiritual life. Every religious conscience has its history and its characteristic imprint that can be worthy of attention
. It would at least be strange to reject an "original" spirituality to a canonized founder; unless we want to justify this strangeness with a strict interpretation of the adjective "original". But, in this case ,. we should say and repeat that "there is, in every manifestation of the life of the Church,
a constant law: the flame of a new ideal of Christian perfection never lights up, in the men chosen to spread it,
in the transcendent, cold and stripped of the pure ideal "." The world in which Don Bosco lived, as well as the structure of his character, they have always marked his "spirituality", without, however, suppressing his "originality".
The first chapter is not, in our opinion, out of place. The same works published by the saint helped shape his thinking. To deepen the doctrine of Origen it is necessary to know at least in the essential aspects the Alexandrian environment of the third century, the tradition of Filoni, the methods of exegesis used in the schools of the time, and not to ignore the persecution of Septimius Severus, the death of Leonida, the quarrels between Alexandria and Caesarea, and many other things still ... That he neglected the intimate struggles of St. Augustine and the fascination that for some time the Manichaeism exercised over him, could not fully understand his theories about grace and sin. For historians of their spirituality, it is risky to forget the Burgundian blood that flowed in the veins of Bernard of Clairvaux, the squalor of the preaching at the time of Domenico di Osma, the Spanish origins of Iffigo Lopez de Loyola and his youthful discussions on the incipient Lutheran reform. So, we too will have to try to get to know a lively boy who grew up in Italy, just freed from French domination; follow Giovanni Bosco in the Piedmontese schools that gave him an indelible mark; dwell on the masters who enjoyed his confidence and on the books that he most certainly meditated on. indelible mark; dwell on the masters who enjoyed his confidence and on the books that he most certainly meditated on. indelible mark; dwell on the masters who enjoyed his confidence and on the books that he most certainly meditated on.
Since Don Bosco did not devise elaborate theories, his experience and his spiritual thought - the main object of this book - could not be presented on the basis of an "autobiography" and of works that would have sufficed to summarize. We had to look in his work for the salient features of a doctrine lived or treated about life in union with God. We discovered them little by little, revealed by formulas that were familiar to him: "Work and temperance", "Work, piety and joy" , "Oportet pati cum Christo", "Be good Christians and good citizens", "For the greater glory of God and for the salvation of souls"; and manifested through his behavior: struggle at the service of the Church, esteem for the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, creation of societies whose members, ecclesiastical or lay, living or not in community, they would be sanctified with "active charity" at the service of men. Don Bosco revealed, more clearly than we had dared to hope, how he conceived the Christian life; which, according to him, were the instruments of holiness, the task of asceticism and the service of God and of men in a life lived according to Christ. All this will be explained by himself in the chapters of this book that intend to describe his spirituality.
Perhaps two of them require special justification. One, dedicated to the religious conceptions of the saint, is not foreign to his spiritual life. Indeed, reflection on his time invited us to examine his "intentionality". How many spiritual choices depend on the idea that one makes of God, of Christ and of the Church? It is sufficient that God be conceived as a judge or as a father, that Christ be considered as a model, friend or Lord, that the Church be seen as centralized in the Pope or in his community dimensions, to modify the essential characteristics of a spirituality. Another chapter will concern human perfection according to John Bosco. In fact, the relationship between the spiritual life and the material life of every day was, for our saint, too important for us to ignore.
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