(ANS - Rome) - "The 28th General Chapter, a bit like Vatican Council I, will be remembered as an interrupted Chapter. Not by the Italian troops who entered Rome, but by an invisible and aggressive virus that has spread so quickly around the world that it has blocked everything." With this pointed similitude, Fr Rossano Sala, SDB, Director of the magazine Note di Pastorale Giovanile, who participated in the last two Synods of Bishops, opens his re-reading of the message that Pope Francis sent to the Salesians on the occasion of the Congregation's 28th General Chapter. His "meditative" analysis deeply delves into the papal text, "the word of a father that comes from the heart and asks everyone to start from Don Bosco, inviting us to achieve what he has repeatedly called the 'Valdocco Option'."

We invite you to read this commentary carefully.

(ANS - Rome) - We will soon return to our educational mission in our schools and in our Vocational Training Centers (CFP). Thank God! But nothing will be like before. The learning environment, classes and workshops will never be the same again. It will be necessary to keep social distances, to live with protective masks, to transform timetables, schedules, spaces, with lots of disinfectant gel, because the new normal will be very different.

(ANS – San Francisco) – Br. Alphonse (Al) Vu is of Vietnamese origin, a current member of the Provincial Council and Youth Ministry Delegate (SUO province), elected already for the second time as General Chapter delegate (GC27 and GC28). Here he shares his CG28 experience: “It has been a little over two weeks since I returned from the General Chapter and I’ve passed the days in quarantine. Those quiet days of seclusion allowed me to take time to unpack my experience of the Chapter and reflect. It seems so surreal that only a few weeks ago I was living at the heart of our Salesian charism and for a month I was immersed in conversations that were carrying the Salesian Congregation forward. So much has changed in the course of a few weeks— not only at the Chapter, but the whole world.”