Salesians (Salesians of Don Bosco)

The Salesians are a modern congregation founded to educate poor and working boys in the industrial city, and their distinctive contribution is a method of education built on kindness rather than punishment.

Don Bosco and the young

The Society of Saint Francis de Sales was founded by John Bosco at Turin in 1859 to educate and train the poor and working-class boys drawn into the industrialising cities of northern Italy, where they were exposed to exploitation and neglect. Bosco developed what he called the preventive system, an approach to education that relied on reason, religion and affection, keeping the young occupied and cared for so that wrongdoing was forestalled rather than punished, and this method, warm and practical, is the charism the order carries. He named the society for the gentle bishop Francis de Sales.

A worldwide educational body

The Salesians grew rapidly into one of the largest religious institutes in the church, running schools, technical and vocational training centres, oratories and youth works across the world, with a parallel congregation of women, the Salesian Sisters, founded with Mary Mazzarello, and a wide lay family. The order concentration on the education and formation of the young, especially the poor and those needing a trade, has made it one of the principal Catholic agencies of schooling and social advancement, and Bosco preventive system remains the reference point of its work more than a century after his death.

John Bosco built his congregation in Turin from 1859 around a specific, practical problem: boys pulled off the land into the city by industrialisation had neither the schooling nor the trade skills to survive it, and existing charitable institutions were not built for the scale of the need. The Salesian response combined ordinary academic schooling with technical and trade training in the same institutions, a dual model that distinguished it from teaching orders built purely around classroom instruction.

The order's growth in Bosco's own lifetime was unusually fast for a nineteenth century foundation, and it reached far beyond Italy well before his death in 1888, with the first Salesian missionaries sent to Argentina in 1875 to work among Italian immigrant communities and, soon after, indigenous Patagonian populations, establishing a missionary pattern the order continued expanding for decades afterward. Bosco's own canonisation in 1934 confirmed the movement's standing within the wider church, and by the twentieth century the Salesians had grown into one of the largest religious congregations of men in the Catholic Church, still organised, as Bosco intended, around schools and technical training rather than parish ministry or contemplative life.