Salesian Family

We are the Sons and Daughters of St. John Bosco who work and live in the eastern United States and in Canada. We belong to a worldwide Family, a “vast movement of persons” at work in over 130 countries for the entire well-being – physical, material, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual – of the poor, the ill, the weak, and the marginalized, but most especially of poor and abandoned, at-risk, young people.

Ours is a Family “totally of Mary.” Don Bosco himself always taught that it was “Mary who has done everything.” She was the teacher whom Jesus, Her Son, entrusted to him in his Dream of Nine Years Old. It was she who guided Don Bosco in his work with the young and in the founding of his Religious Family.

The apostolic Family of Don Bosco is called Salesian because it is linked to Saint Francis of Sales, whom Don Bosco chose as his inspiration and patron as with his work and writings he proposed that Christian humanism and that expression of charity which corresponded so well to his intimate aspirations. It is a humanism that does not ignore man’s weakness, but is based on an unshakable confidence in the intrinsic goodness of the individual who is loved by God, and by Him called to Christian perfection, in every state of life. This humanism is a constitutive element of the charismatic and spiritual experience of the Groups founded by Don Bosco, and as a precious inheritance has been made their own by the other Groups which today are aggregated to the single Family. The whole Salesian Family, therefore, enters into this large movement, offering to the Church an original contribution in the field of education and in apostolic work.

Parts have been adapted from the Charter of the Charismatic Identity of the Salesian Family of Don Bosco.