Saint John Bosco

Saint John Bosco: Teacher of the Two Pillars

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In the autumn of 1873, Saint John Bosco shared a vision with his spiritual director that would crystallize the spiritual wisdom of his entire life’s work. In this dream, he beheld the Church as a mighty ship besieged by enemy vessels bent on her destruction. Yet amid the chaos and bombardment, two towering columns rose from the sea, steadfast and unshakeable. One was crowned with a statue of the Immaculate Virgin, bearing the inscription “Help of Christians.” The other, taller and more enduring still, supported a Eucharistic Host and proclaimed, “Salvation of believers.” The Pope, steering the flagship through the storm, safely moored the Church to these two columns. At that moment, all enmity dissolved.

For Bosco, this vision was no mere spiritual fantasy. It was the culmination of decades spent educating poor and neglected youth. It revealed the deepest conviction of his pedagogical mission: that the salvation and flourishing of souls rests entirely upon devotion to Mary and frequent reception of the Eucharist. To understand Saint John Bosco as a teacher is to understand him as a herald of these two pillars, and to grasp their central importance for Catholic life today.

The Foundation: Reason, Religion, and Love

Don Bosco’s approach to education, which he termed the “Preventive System,” stands in sharp contrast to the harsh disciplinary methods of his era. Where other educators relied on fear, punishment, and distance, Bosco built his entire method on a trinomial foundation: reason, religion, and love. This was not mere sentimentality. It was a profound theological conviction about the nature of the human person and the work of formation.

The Preventive System sought to prevent faults rather than punish them after the fact. Bosco believed that young people, prone to fickleness and distraction, often stumbled not from malice but from momentary forgetfulness or weakness. A strict system of repression might stop disorder, but it could never transform hearts. It would breed resentment, bitterness, and revenge—scars that lasted into adulthood. Instead, Bosco positioned educators as loving fathers who would walk alongside their charges, offering counsel, warning them of dangers ahead, and drawing them toward goodness through affection and trust.

The genius of Bosco’s method lay in its recognition that education is fundamentally a work of the heart. An educator must first be loved before he can be respected. He must be present, not as a distant authority, but as a benefactor invested in each student’s welfare. This way, the educator becomes a cherished guide, whose words and counsel stay with the student long after school ends.

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From Uncle Wendell to Don Bosco

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By: Meg Naumovski

I grew up listening to stories about my dad’s Uncle Wendell.  At first, I remember thinking that this was some magical character my dad invented to entertain and inspire us, just the way my father seemed to be entertained and inspired by this man he adored. We would hear how when dad was a kid, he would follow Uncle Wendell around, entranced by his mechanical abilities to fix anything and entertained at the same time with his warm personality.

I imagined scenes of breezy late summer days in northern Ohio, white clouds in blue skies, soft lake breezes and the sound of Cicadas humming in the trees. I could picture a young version of my dad, blue eyes, tight blond curls, trying to make a whistle sound from his blade of grass (he always taught us this important skill as kids.) Little Glenn might have his freckled nose too close to the engine as he positioned himself “overseeing” Uncle Wendell’s work.  Maybe he tried to direct where he thought his uncle should connect a wire, and then I would recall some joke about how awesome “copper tubing” was, though I never quite understood what that meant. 

Many of the things my dad proclaimed to love about his uncle were the very things I loved about my dad. He was a handy man, an inventor, a jokester, and a craftsman.  As Dad would work in the garage, from a large project pile of scrap metal, wires, and other things that bewildered me, he whistled a tune that would float through the air, and his peaceful contentment was palpable. I would linger near him for hours at a time, just drawing or playing with dolls; whatever I could do to absorb any amount of his serenity.

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A 1474 Word Interview about Catholic Liberal Arts Education

/ chicoinematt

Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Elisabeth Sullivan, Executive Director of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, via email in 2025. We have rearranged and edited some of the questions. This provides the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given.

You describe Catholic education as an “engine of evangelization.” Can you share a specific example of how a Catholic classical liberal arts approach has transformed a student’s or school’s understanding of faith and learning?

At one of our member schools, Holy Innocents School in Long Beach, California, the results were almost immediate after the pastor and principal welcomed ICLE in to form their teachers in 2018-2019. Fr. G. Peter Irving was intent on offering a deeply formative education to the children entrusted to his care in this low-income and socioeconomically diverse Catholic community. His new principal and teachers were devoted to their students and were keen to learn new approaches that would engage them with rich content and better pedagogy.

Principal Cyril Cruz reported that, once the teachers stopped teaching to the test, standardized scores in reading and math jumped dramatically. Both teachers and students were enlivened by a more substantive curriculum.

As one veteran teacher described the change: “It’s not just something that’s compartmentalized into religion class, but it really is the most coherent way to explain reality itself. And the purpose of education is to help our children be able to grasp what reality is, what truth is, and to be able to know how to live according to that truth in their lives. That’s what we call growing in wisdom and virtue.”

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