News

St. Mary Mazzarello, with St. John Bosco, is the co-foundress of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians - more commonly known as the Salesian Sisters. Mary lived most of her life in Mornese - a small farming village in Piedmont. She grew up in a rural environment where she learnt from her family how to love Jesus and to use the strength she had been gifted with to help with the heavy work of the... Read More »

1815 - 1888

John Bosco was born into a farming family on the 16th of August 1815. His father died when he was two after which his mother taught him to work in the fields and to see God in nature as well as in the faces of those who were poor.

Dream

John had a vivid dream at the age of nine in which he saw wild animals change into boys who were fighting and swearing at each other. Just as he was about... Read More »

1567 - 1622

More than a name St Francis de Sales is one who learned and lived the gentle love of Christ to such an extent that those who knew him would say that if Jesus were to appear at any time, they would know him because he would be just like Francis. Don Bosco made it clear that anyone who wanted to share in his work for young people had to have "the spirit of Francis de Sales", that is they were... Read More »

The 1960's in Britain marked a watershed in popular culture and a radical change in the nature of the Catholic community in the UK. Free secondary education, which had been the result of the Butler 1944 Education Act, promoted the development of the Catholic grammar school. With their existing foundations the Salesians were in a good position to receive state scholarships and to expand their schools.... Read More »

In the wings stood Fr Thomas Hall. A convert to Catholicism, he brought his training at art school, a considerable eloquence and a capacity to make influential friends with people like Philip Tilden, the architect of Shrigley Church, Lady Bovey-Tracey at Blaisdon and the Lomas family at Shrigley. All of this made him a welcome alternative to the previous Provincial. Fr Hall, during his 12 years in... Read More »

The war involved the effective shutting down of the programme of publicity and the radical restructuring of the Formation houses. Schools were being evacuated and seminaries were in danger of attracting the unwelcome attention of the military authorities looking for billets, recruiting students as soldiers or simply occupying property for the duration. The new Provincial, Fr Couche, moved quickly to... Read More »

The post-war period saw an extraordinary expansion of the Salesians in the United Kingdom. The numbers rose dramatically from 80 Salesians in 1920 to 160 in 1925. Through Fr Sutherland's connections with the Irish Free State government and the coincidence of having Bishop Denis Hallinan, as Bishop of Limerick, the Salesians began the college at Pallaskenry in 1919. This was followed soon afterwards... Read More »

This period saw the growth of the Salesian presence in the south of England, the foundations in Cape Town (1897) and Malta (1903) and the beginnings in Ireland (1919). In the south of England houses were founded at Burwash in 1897, Farnborough in 1901, and Chertsey in 1902. These foundations came largely through the direct or indirect intervention of Bishop Francis Bourne who had met Don Bosco as a... Read More »

The origins of the Salesian presence in England dates back to the 1850's with the dream of Dominic Savio which illustrates the vivid impression that reports of the so called 'Second Spring' of the Catholic Church in England had made in contemporary Piedmont. At a political level, the perception of Camillo Benso di Cavour, architect of Italian Unity, was that the expulsion of Austria from Italy and... Read More »

The use of the term 'Great Britain' in the name of the Province was only introduced after the twenty-first General Chapter (1978) in response to the sensitivity of Fr Martin McPake, a Scot, who was a delegate at the Chapter and later elected as 'Regional' for the English speaking region. The term 'Great Britain' instead of Inghilterra (England) appeared in the new style 'Elenco Generale' in 1980. Inghilterra... Read More »