One August morning in 1815, in the hamlet of Becchi near Castelnuovo, in Italy, a boy was born: John Bosco. The family lived on whatever the land gave: a little wheat, a few grapes, the milk of their cows. Before John was two, his father, Francis, fell ill and died, and his mother was left alone with three sons to raise.

Her name was Margaret Occhiena, though the world would know her by a warmer name: Mamma Margaret. She could neither read nor write, but she knew how to work from dawn to dark and how to pray. She taught her boys that God sees everything and that being poor is no reason to hang your head. John grew up minding sheep and listening, at night, to his mother's stories beside the fire.

The Dream He Had at Nine

When John was nine he had a dream he never forgot and would tell all his life. He dreamed he stood in a wide yard full of boys at play. Many were fighting and shouting ugly words, and John, who could not stand that, waded in swinging his fists.

Then a man appeared, dressed in white, his face full of light, and called John by name.

— You will never win those boys with blows — the man said. — You must win them with gentleness and charity.

John asked, frightened, who he was, and the man answered that he was the Son of the Lady his mother had taught him to greet every day. Beside him stood a Lady in a shining cloak, who laid her hand on the boy's shoulder and pointed to the yard.

— Look again.

John looked. The boys had turned into wild beasts, growling and baring their teeth. The Lady told him to look once more, and the beasts became gentle lambs, gathering quietly around them both.

— This is your field — said the Lady. — This is where you are to work.

John woke with his hands aching from all that punching in his sleep and ran to tell the family. One brother laughed and said he would end up minding goats and sheep; Mamma Margaret only murmured that perhaps the boy would be a priest one day. Nobody understood the dream that morning, not even John, but he kept it inside like a seed under the ground.

The Boy on the Tightrope

On feast days, jugglers and tightrope walkers came through the village. John watched them the way a pupil watches a teacher, and then practised alone in the yard until he got it right.

Soon he was putting on a show of his own: a rope stretched between two trees, somersaults, vanishing coins, birdsong whistled through his teeth. Admission was free, but there was a price agreed beforehand. Before the show everyone prayed together, and afterwards John repeated the sermon he had heard at Mass that morning. The boys laughed, clapped, prayed, and came back the next Sunday.

The Priest and the Boy in the Sacristy

School was not easy. John started late, walked miles to his lessons and worked for a tailor, a shoemaker and a baker to pay for his books — trades that would one day teach poor boys a living. In 1835 he entered the seminary, and on 5 June 1841 he was ordained a priest in Turin. It is said that his mother, seeing him a priest for the first time, made no fuss and no speech: she only said that to begin saying Mass is to begin to suffer.

Turin was growing far too fast. New factories were opening, and boys of ten and twelve came in from the countryside looking for work; many found nothing and ended up sleeping under the bridges. When the young priest visited the city prisons and found boys of that same age behind bars, he came away certain that somebody had to reach them before hunger and the street did.

On 8 December 1841, Don Bosco was vesting for Mass in the sacristy of Saint Francis of Assisi when he heard shouting: the sacristan was chasing out a ragged boy who had come in only to get warm.

— Leave the boy to me — said Don Bosco. — He is a friend of mine.

The lad came back slowly, afraid of being struck again. His name was Bartholomew Garelli, an orphan who worked on building sites and could not read. Don Bosco asked whether he knew how to whistle. Bartholomew's eyes went wide, he said he did, and the two of them laughed right there — enough to begin with. The next Sunday he brought some friends; then twenty, then thirty, and within a few years, hundreds.

The Wandering Oratory

In time, Don Bosco named the work the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales, after a saint famous for gentleness. Sundays meant Mass, catechism, bread, games and a great deal of noise — and the noise was the problem: neighbours complained and landlords asked for their ground back. For five years that band crossed Turin end to end, praying in a courtyard one week and a field the next.

At Easter 1846, when there seemed no room left in the whole city, a man named Pinardi offered an old shed in the Valdocco district. The roof was low, the floor bare earth, the rain came in — and Don Bosco took it on the spot. That Sunday more than three hundred boys came running in, and the Oratory had an address at last.

Mamma Margaret at Valdocco

That same year Don Bosco fell so ill he nearly died. As soon as he was well he walked up to Becchi and asked his mother for something enormous: to come down to Turin and look after his boys. Margaret was fifty-eight, with a quiet house. She tied up her bundle and went.

At Valdocco she cooked, mended, nursed fevers and boxed ears when that was needed. She sold the little she owned of value, even her wedding keepsakes, to buy food and cloth. The boys, most of them motherless, began calling her Mamma Margaret, and the name stayed.

Salesian tradition remembers an afternoon of ruined laundry and a trampled vegetable patch, when she told her son she was going back to Becchi. Don Bosco did not argue; he simply looked at the crucifix on the wall. His mother followed his eyes, dried her hands and went back to the stove. She served there ten years, until her death on 25 November 1856.

Reason, Religion, Kindness

Don Bosco summed up his way of teaching in three words: reason, religion and kindness. He explained the rules instead of just issuing them; he wanted every boy to know God without fearing him; and he knew there is no use being fair if the other person does not feel loved. So he spent his days among the boys, telling newcomers they could run and jump and make all the noise they liked, so long as they did not sin.

In an age when masters often took advantage of apprentices, he opened workshops in his house and signed contracts to protect the boys: whoever left Valdocco left with a trade. And one lad of that house, Dominic Savio, learned its lesson so well — stay cheerful, do each day's duty — that he died a saint at fourteen.

A Family That Grew

The work grew far too large for one priest. On 18 December 1859, Don Bosco gathered the young men his Oratory had raised and founded with them the Society of Saint Francis de Sales — the Salesians. In 1868 the church of Mary Help of Christians was finished at Valdocco; he liked to say that Our Lady was building it, not he. In 1872, with Mary Domenica Mazzarello, he founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, and three years later the first Salesian missionaries sailed for South America.

Don Bosco worked until he could work no more, stooped, his eyes worn out from writing letters begging help for his boys. In the small hours of 31 January 1888 he died at Valdocco, aged seventy-two. He had asked that the boys be told one thing only: that he would be waiting for them all in Paradise.

In 1929 Pope Pius XI declared him blessed, and on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1934, a saint. A hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II gave him the title that sums up his life: Father and Teacher of Youth.