31 January 2019
Memorial of Saint John Bosco, Priest
As the Church continues her reflection on young people, faith, and vocational discernment, she would do well to recall the important work of St. John Bosco, who recognized the importance of working with young people long before it was fashionable to do so, and who let himself be led by the Holy Spirit to introduce new Christian pedagogies and structures that were suited to the needs of the neediest children of his time.
One youth who benefited from the ministry of a Salesian of Don Bosco was Jorge Bergoglio, who would grow up to become our current pontiff. The Salesian priest who guided him was so free that when young Jorge began to consider a religious vocation, the priest, recognizing the particularity of the ways that God was working in the young man’s heart, pointed him towards the Society of Jesus rather than his own congregation. It is well and right that all of us Catholics recognize the interdependence of all genuine charisms as that magnanimous priest did, rather than always insisting on our own particular way in a sectarian fashion.
Genuinely Christian discernment requires that, with the help of God’s grace, we learn to recognize which voices and interior movements come from God or his good spirits, and which come from the enemy, “the good, that they may be accepted; the bad, that they may be rejected” (Ignatius, SpEx 314). We should heed the admonition of today’s gospel: “take care what you hear!” (Mk 4:24) There is too much useless noise today. We have lost the proper measure both in speech and in listening, and the result is gossip, one of the most dangerous and pernicious tools of the enemy. The worst gossip for us is the gossip in which we ourselves participate, for it puffs us up when we build our nest up through it, filling us up with self-righteous indignation and suffocating our ability to love our neighbor. Pope Francis warns us about gossiptimeandagain! Let us ask God for the grace to be freed from the scourge of our own gossip so that we might begin to discern as we ought, using the right measure in both our listening and our speaking.