(ANS – Turin) – For his first public meeting, the new Rector Major of the Salesians, Fr. Fabio Attard, chose the Ferrante Aporti juvenile prison in Turin. On Thursday, April 3, he visited the incarcerated youth at Corso Unione Sovietica. Behind juvenile delinquency, the Salesians of Don Bosco see the suffering of poor and abandoned young people.

“Passionate for Jesus Christ, dedicated to the young. For a faithful and prophetic experience of our Salesian vocation.” This is the theme of the 29th General Chapter of the Salesians, currently being held at the Mother House in Valdocco. Approximately 220 chapter members, representing the 136 nations where the Sons of Don Bosco are present, elected the new Rector Major, Fr. Fabio Attard, on Wednesday, March 25. In harmony with the Jubilee of Hope and the 2025 Strenna, “Anchored in Hope, Pilgrims with the Young,” he decided to meet first the “naughty and struggling youth,” as Don Bosco called them, “and whom today he would go out to find.”

On the morning of Thursday, April 3, Fr. Attard went to the Ferrante Aporti juvenile detention center in Turin to meet the detained boys, most of whom are foreigners, accompanied by his fellow Salesian chaplain, Fr. Silvano Oni.

“This is where Don Bosco’s Preventive System was born,” Fr. Attard explains, “and from Turin, where the Salesian charism was born, we want to continue standing beside young people who have received less, because, as our founder recommended, ‘in every young person, even the most unfortunate, there is an accessible point of goodness, and the first duty of the educator is to find this point, this sensitive chord of the heart, and make use of it.’”

It is precisely the Saint of the Youth, the Rector Major recalls, who in his “Memoirs of the Oratory” recounts how he understood that – in 19th-century Turin, with many similarities to today’s global peripheries – it was necessary to give hope to the most vulnerable and poorest young people. “To see crowds of boys, aged 12 to 18, all healthy, robust, and bright, but to see them there idle, tormented by insects, starving for both spiritual and material bread, was something that horrified me,” Don Bosco wrote.

“Who knows,” I thought to myself, “if these boys had a friend outside who cared for them, assisted them, and instructed them in religion on feast days, who knows if they might stay away from ruin or at least reduce the number of those who return to prison? I shared this thought with Fr. Cafasso (his spiritual father, patron of prisoners, and confessor of those condemned to death, Ed.), and with his advice and guidance, I began to study ways to make it happen.”

It was 1855 at the “Generala” (as the juvenile prison in Turin was then called, now “Ferrante Aporti”): here Don Bosco visited the detained boys. From those afternoons spent playing and chatting with them, he invented the Preventive System, as a plaque dedicated to him in the corridors of the institution recalls.

For this reason, since then, the chaplains of the “Ferrante” have been Salesians, and they strive, following in Don Bosco’s footsteps, as happens in all Salesian oratories worldwide, to love the youth: “more can be obtained with a glance of charity and a word of encouragement than with many reprimands,” the saint wrote. After all, Fr. Attard concludes, “Pope Francis, by opening the second Holy Door after St. Peter’s Basilica at the Rebibbia prison, has shown us where we must bring hope and consolation.”

Marina Lomunno

Source: La Voce e Il Tempo