By Fr. Alejandro Rodriguez, SDB, Salesian Center for Ongoing Formation – Berkeley

The Salesian Family is present educating and evangelizing throughout the American continents and in the most varied places and projects. Our educational system (the Preventive System of Don Bosco) impacts the big city and the small town, the Amazon jungle, the pampas (plains) and the mountains, the poor neighborhood and the urbanized area. Our schools are agricultural, technical, vocational, primary and secondary, and we also have twenty-five universities. 

We are the educative-pastoral dream of Don Bosco for the indigenous and new generations of youth and adults of the American continent. The faces of the many SDBs and FMAs, of the members of the Salesian Family and lay people who shares in the Salesian charism make this educational model not only possible but thriving today.

I would like to share some ideas within the framework of the Salesian School in America (ESA) Meeting that was held in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Charismatically it is important for us to reinforce, recover or relaunch the following elements:

1. Our intentional educative Salesian Presence embodies the Preventive System in every instant, for every moment and with all people. We understand ourselves as educating from heart, to heart and generating an impact that inspires us to spend our lives so that others may have life in abundance. 

2. The Family Spirit is an essential educational environment for the youth that moves to the rhythm of technology—generating online followers and trends, but does not form or accompany the person integrally.

3.  The Salesian Oratory is a criterion for renewal and decision making because it is an ecological, organic and systemic proposal.  We offer and we are also an experience of nurturing and upbringing, of informal and non-formal education, of deep life and friendships that leads one to high level goals of Christian life. 

If you consider yourself a Salesian leader with preventive traits, consider the following checklist:

1. You embody the Preventive System with whatever adjective is added to your leadership style according to the context: transformational, authentic, distributed or servant…trying to achieve in others the expression of John Cagliero… “I will stay with Don Bosco!”

2. You educate by evangelizing with your intentional presence that accompanies and is formative.  You do so with your benevolent approach that precedes, sustains and projects the preventive love of God; exercising Salesian reason that is affective and reasonable, motivating and just.  You are in your person a profound experience that opens to transcendence from a deep and meaningful life. 

3. You bring together many in a transversal and multidisciplinary way in the achievement of the mission because you form an educational leadership that has no place for the culture of discarding those who are different. You bring together because in the family of God, we are all brothers and sisters among brothers and sisters.

4. You form by accompanying and you do it with ecological sensitivity because you consider that the proposal to be good Christians and honest/upright citizens is a valid and meaningful response for today’s youth.

5. You relate with familiarity, maturity and closeness, and in an attitude of openness to the current physical and virtual contexts because being a preventive Salesian leader makes possible what Pope Francis, in the Global Pact for Education, proposes, that is the quality of education resides in the quality of the educational relationship.

6. Servant because in the way of living and exercising authority in our educational-pastoral communities. The Holy Thursday table is a reference for living and exercising leadership among us and for our young people: the Master washes the feet and all are invited to the table.

Let us trust in an educational model that is method, methodology and spirituality in the face of a youth context that is said to be fragile, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible in its totality. 

Let us bet on education as an essential tool in the face of a society that seeks the commercialization of almost everything and the intermittent annulment of the other person(s). 

Let us form more leaders among our young people who are a guarantee for the future.  The Carmagnola station (where Don Bosco met Michael Magone) can serve us today as a reference to find those leaders.

Spanish translation is also available:

Reflexiones desde la periferia sobre Educacion Salesiana hoy en el Continente Americano.