St. John Bosco

Born to a poor farming family in Piedmont and orphaned of his father at two, "Don Bosco" became a priest devoted to the abandoned boys of industrializing Turin. He invented a "preventive method" of education — reason, religion, and loving-kindness, never punishment — and founded the Salesians of Don Bosco, today one of the largest religious orders in the Church, present in more than 130 countries.

From the age of nine he had a recurring dream: a radiant lady showed him a field full of wild animals that became lambs when he approached them with gentleness. He took the dream literally, gathering street boys into his oratory, teaching them trades, and staging plays and acrobatics to keep them close. His was a sanctity of joy — "It is not enough to love the young," he said, "they must know they are loved."

He worked himself to exhaustion and died on January 31, 1888, mourned by thousands of the young men whose lives he had saved from the factories and prisons of industrial Italy. Canonized in 1934, he remains the patron saint of young people and a witness that cheerfulness is not the enemy of holiness but its companion.