History
In 1845 Don John Bosco ("Don" being a traditional Italian honorific for a priest) opened a night school for boys in Valdocco, now part of the municipality of Turin in Italy. In the coming years, he opened several more schools, and in 1857 drew up a set of rules for his helpers, which became the Rule of the Society of St. Francis de Sales, which Pope Pius IX approved definitively in 1873. The institute grew rapidly, with houses established in France and Argentina within a year of the society's formal recognition. Its official print organ, the Salesian Bulletin, was first published in 1877. Over the next decade, the Salesians expanded into Austria, Britain, Spain, and several countries in South America. The death of Don Bosco in 1888 did not slow the institute's growth, and by 1911 the Salesians were established throughout the world, including Colombia, China, India, South Africa, Tunisia, Venezuela and the United States. The society continues to operate worldwide; in 2000, it counted more than 20,000 members in 2,711 houses. It is the third largest missionary organization in the world.
Read more about this topic: Salesian Order
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)