One Woman, Many Dresses
Although Don Bosco is best known as the apostle of Mary, Help of Christians, his devotion to Mary transcended all titles and shifted over time. For the Father and Teacher of Youth, Mary is always the Madonna, Our Lady, always Theotokos, Mother of God and Mother of Jesus, always present in the Church to guide, defend and intercede for her children as a loving mother, always faithful to her God-given role in his plan of salvation, always the object of a tender, personal relationship.
Perhaps a summary for Don Bosco’s constant love of Mary under different titles might be: “the same woman, in a different dress.” At various moments in Don Bosco’s personal and pastoral life, a particular Marian devotion rose to prominence. This is certainly true of Mary as the Immaculate Conception.
A Guiding Presence becomes an Article of Faith
Even before Pope Pius IX’s 1854 Bull Ineffabilis Deus defined the Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, the Immaculata was already a constant, guiding presence in Don Bosco’s life and ministry. The Chieri seminary chapel was dedicated to Mary Immaculate; her statue stood behind the main altar, and her image was venerated at a side chapel. Don Bosco received all his sacred orders, including priestly ordination, in the church of the Immaculate Conception attached to the Archbishop’s palace in Turin.
The launching of the oratory occurred on the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1841, in Don Bosco’s famed encounter with Bartholomew Garelli. The Oratory of St. Aloysius was dedicated on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. As early as 1842, Don Bosco had begun a tradition of preaching a December 8 conference to recall and invoke the protection of Mary Immaculate on the work of the Oratory. Domenic Savio arrived at the Oratory some five weeks before the 1854 proclamation of the Dogma; straight away, he learned from Don Bosco to invoke Mary as the Immaculata, which culminated in his founding of the Company of the Immaculate Conception. Starting in 1847, prayers at the Oratory were regularly offered for the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Don Bosco’s Month of May in Honor of Mary Immaculate, published in 1858 in the Catholic Readings, helped to spread devotion to Mary and to honor her particularly as the Immaculate Conception.
An Immaculate Catechesis
Don Bosco’s insistence that Rollini’s painting convey the Immaculate Conception with bodily beauty in some way presages St. John Paul’s Theology of the Body, a catechesis in which the human body is presented as necessarily the hinge to the sacred. To be sure, “holy purity” includes bodily chastity, but it is much more. The holy purity modeled by Mary is the intentional, total self-giving to one’s God-given mission for the good of others. Mary embodies “holy purity” in mind and heart, body and spirit; she is beautiful because she is Immaculate, and she is immaculate because in every aspect she is beautiful, this is, a reflection of God in whose image she is made.
Contemplating she who is always free of sin motivates us to accept where we are in need of conversion; while Mary is full of grace, we must make intentional choices that open us to incremental grace. We become more “immaculate” whenever we strive to build communion. The catechesis we can offer is to strive for spiritual integrity, within and without. Perhaps the head of the serpent we need to put beneath Mary’s feet is this: our attitudes, behaviors, or ideologies which undermine communion, a communion which we may too easily take for granted, or which we have grown sadly accustomed to living without.
Mary our Mother, inspire in us that immaculate beauty of body, mind, and spirit that she manifested so perfectly.
- by Fr. Mike Pace, SDB, Casa Don Bosco Museum
