PDF – DB Study Guide – January 2012 This issue of the Don Bosco Study Guide continues to look at the person of Don Bosco. We begin with reflections written by the great Salesian historian Fr. Pietro Stella. Fr. Stella gave us a critical historical analysis of Don Bosco from many vantage points. We will summarize Fr. Stella’s examination of Don Bosco’s understanding of God, man, and sin. Then we will make a comparison between Don Bosco and Charles Dickens.
I was fourteen when I first heard the dream of Don Bosco in hell. It was read to us as part of a retreat as I entered into high school. That dream remains with me to this day. It is not an image of a loving God that I found elsewhere in Don Bosco and it has always been incongruous to me. With the study of his time and his worldview, it has helped to place this dream within a wider context, but it
still remains a pebble in my shoe. Perhaps I need a bit of Don Bosco’s fear and a taste of his hunger for eternal things.
One day, I will wrestle this dilemma to the floor. But I tend to walk between Don Bosco’s abhorrence for sin and the maxim of Fr. John Tickle, an author and biblical Scholar form New Mexico. Fr. Tickle insists that our interpretation of scripture or any other element we might refer to as spiritual—such as a private revelation, the instruction of a priest, or an interpretation of some event—must withstand the litmus test of the Good Shepherd…