Catholic Schools Week is upon us once again. Held annually since 1974 during the last week of January, the event gives us the opportunity to celebrate not only the nearly 45,000 students in our Catholic elementary and secondary schools and academies, but also the almost 2,000 administrators, faculty and staff members who fill our school classrooms, offices, cafeterias, laboratories, gymnasiums, auditoriums, play yards, athletic fields, libraries, study halls and resource areas as well.
From reading to religious studies, from physics to foreign language, our Catholic schools provide a formidable frontline force of well-trained, well-prepared teachers, administrators and support staff dedicated to providing for the intellectual, social, physical, emotional and most of all, spiritual development of our students.
It is particularly fitting that during Catholic Schools Week we also celebrate the Jan. 31 feast day of St. John Bosco, an Italian priest named patron of Catholic school teachers in 1934 by Pope Pius XI. Popularly known as Don Bosco, he dedicated himself to the education and care of the boys and girls he saw working at manual labor in local factories, then begging for food and sleeping in the streets during the mid- to late-19th century in Turin, Italy.
Though not a scholar himself, Don Bosco knew that education, including religious instruction and formation, would allow these children to not only experience a better life, but also to bear witness as they grew and matured to the mission of Jesus.
Don Bosco set up shelters for boys and girls throughout Italy that provided for their care and education. He dedicated his work to St. Francis de Sales, and named his congregation, founded in 1859, the Salesians in honor of the saint.
Don Bosco promoted a teaching method and philosophy that came to be known as the Salesian Preventative System. Based upon love, compassion and understanding rather than condemnation and punishment, Don Bosco insisted that it was not he who had developed the method at all, that he was just following Jesus, the Master Teacher.
Ask any Catholic school administrators, faculty and staff what their most important role as a Catholic school employee is and they will quickly answer, to be and bring Jesus to the children and youth who enter our schools. Like Don Bosco, our Catholic school lay women and men, religious sisters and brothers and priests seek to “teach as Jesus did.”
As a teenager, Don Bosco had worked as an acrobat, a clown and a magician. Because of this, he is also considered the patron saint of magicians. How even more fitting then that he is the patron of Catholic school teachers, for every day in every diocese around the world, they work magic in their classrooms.
Piro, a freelance writer for Catholic publications, including Liguorian and St. Anthony Messenger, is a native of the Diocese of Brooklyn.
