(ANS – Rome) – Fr. Fabio Attard, Rector Major of the Salesians and the 11th Successor of Don Bosco, was a guest on Tuesday, November 4, on the television program Chiesa Viva, (Church Alive) broadcast by the Catholic channel TV2000. On that occasion, joined by other guests and testimonies, he spoke to the general public about the mission of the Salesians and the relevance of Don Bosco’s charism today.
To address the main theme—the Salesian educational and formative mission in the world—Fr. Attard began with the Founder himself, Don Bosco: a boy born into a poor family who greatly desired an education, which he could only obtain as an older teenager by supporting his own studies and working in the evenings, far from home in Chieri. “His life was marked by sacrifice for the value of education,” observed the Rector Major.
He then highlighted another distinctive aspect: unlike many who, after escaping poverty, wish never to look back, Don Bosco chose to dedicate his life to young people who, like him, risked being left without education. For that reason, he moved to nineteenth-century Turin, then undergoing rapid industrial growth.
To the many young men who, like him, had left the countryside in search of better opportunities, “Don Bosco gradually made a truly integral proposal,” one that responded to “the human need to meet others, to feel accompanied and loved, but within an experience that opened to both educational and spiritual dimensions.”
Today, however, the reality in many contexts differs from Don Bosco’s time, and the Salesians have adapted. Thus, the 11th Successor of Don Bosco clarified: “Don Bosco’s charism is not built around things to do, but on attitudes to cultivate: listening to young people and being close to them. And if there has ever been a time in history dominated by loneliness, abandonment, and the lack of meaningful adult role models, it is precisely the time we are living in today!”
“We do not make a photocopy of what Don Bosco did,” Fr. Attard continued. “Rather, we grasp his spirit of going out to meet young people and offering them human spaces of contact—different in form, but the same in the heart of the young people who are searching today.”
Commenting on the words of Pope Leo XIV about education, spoken a few days earlier during Mass with the students of the pontifical universities (October 27, 2025, opening the Jubilee of the Educational World), the Rector Major summarized that, in essence, the Salesian educational charism is all about “meeting the person who cannot stand up alone, standing beside them, taking interest, looking them in the face, to discover where that person can and must arrive.”
The current reality of Western and technologically advanced societies is highly developed but often poor in relationships. In response to these challenges, the Rector Major emphasized the importance of people who make themselves “beggars for others—those who are searching and need help.”
“In a culture like ours, it may seem that young people are distant—but I don’t know who is distant from whom: young people from us, or we from them,” Fr. Attard continued. “But one thing is certain: young people are searching, and it is up to us adults to perceive that search, interpret it, and place ourselves as their servants, beginning a relationship.”
Fr. Alejandro León, speaking from Buenos Aires, recalled the international dimension of the Salesian mission and focused attention on both the 150th anniversary of the First Salesian Missionary Expedition and the geographic and human peripheries where Don Bosco’s sons still work today.
In the final part of the program, the 11th Successor of Don Bosco spoke about the new challenges facing the Salesians. Once again, the Rector Major returned to the foundations of the mission to look at the present and the future. He recalled the centrality of religious consecration: “We are educators and pastors because we are consecrated. Community life is not merely functional—it is a contagious experience that continues Don Bosco’s own. Therefore, the aspect of consecration drives us further—to complete self-giving, universal fraternity, and accompanying young people in their search for meaning… And our very witness communicates this, even before our words do.”
Finally, referring to the main challenges identified by the 29th General Chapter of the Congregation, Fr. Attard pointed to the need to deepen Salesian identity, ensuring that at the heart of pastoral processes “there is not functionalism, but always the person.”