THE VENERABLE DON BOSCO
hundred boys... and my Oratory must apparently come to an end this evening. Are all my labors, then, thrown to the wind? Have I toiled in vain? Must I disperse all these boys and bid them good-by forever? O my God! show us some place where we may go or tell me what I am to do!"
Even then the grievous trial was coming to an end, for at that moment a man leaped the fence and brought an offer of what was to prove a permanent place of meeting; it was the poor and dilapidated coach-house in the Valdocco field—Valdocco, now so famous for its wonderful history and the benefits conferred on the world by Don Bosco's Festive Oratories, educational institutes and industrial establishments, all diverging from that first modest Oratory.
From that Palm Sunday of 1846 to 1916 what an outgrowth, what a marvelous train of consequences, of prodigies, inconceivable to human thought! Look on this picture, then on that: Pinardi's shed converted into a pathetic chapel in a piece of meadow land, and today dispersed through the world behold two hundred and fifty flourishing "Don Bosco Institutes" with their churches and seminaries in Italy, and five hundred and twenty in other countries of Europe, North and South America, Australia, Africa and Asia, in which are gathered for religious instruction, secular education and training in the arts and sciences, trades and agriculture, nearly four hundred thousand children and youth of both
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