austraLasia 752
AN HOLY ROW!
ROME: 11th November -- Should that be 'unholy'? Let the historians decide, but Sunday last's Beatification of Padre Luigi Monti, Founder of the Sons of The Immaculate (or 'Concettini', as they used be called), triggers a memory of Don Bosco that may not have been his own happiest memory. It was strange how I came upon this, even. Last Thursday I was catching a bus close to the Vatican, just outside the Hospital of the 'Santo Spirito' and wondered vaguely just how it came into being, who ran it, and so forth. That evening, leafing through don Braido's recent weighty two volume study of Don Bosco (Prete dei giovani nel secolo della liberta`) my eye caught mention of the Santo Spirito hospital - and there it was, the story that briefly tangles the two lives of Bosco and Monti in a situation that neither of them would have wanted, in fact, but which Don Bosco saw as the will of the Holy Father, and so to be taken up.
Though Blessed Luigi Monti is called 'Father', he was in fact always a consecrated layman. Father is a term of veneration on the part of this good man's 'Brothers' (a number of whom these days are priests) and many admirers both during his life and afterwards. His fledgling Congregation, founded to look after the sick, but also poor and abandoned youngsters, had run into some organizational difficulties - lack of money to start with, but some formational problems also. Pius IX was fully supportive of them and turned to Don Bosco, with his recent experience of founding a Congregation, and also because of their good friendship, and asked Don Bosco to step in and help, to become 'Visitatore', in fact, with fairly direct powers. Apparently after the initial meeting about this, Don Bosco came away with a firm conviction...the Concettini's mission included enough that made it similar to the Salesian Society's to warrant the possibility of aggregation or better - absorption. There is nothing in what Don Bosco said subsequently (and it is all faithfully recorded by his secretaries and scribes) to suggest that Don Bosco ever changed his mind about this! But Pio Nono did and so did most of the Concettini, including their Founder.
According to Braido's account, and it is something we know anyway, Don Bosco was so intensely busy with other 'founding' projects in 1877, the year this all happened, that he could not pursue the matter further and other factors entered, including the Roman clergy, to allow the Brothers to go their own way. But it is interesting to note that the Elenco of that year lists a Salesian community in Rome, which was in fact the 'Casa dei Concettini' and the Salesian Superior nominated as the Spiritual Director of the Concettini. Don Bosco, of course, wanted a House in Rome, but this one was short-lived!
One wonders what we would have done with a hospital, just at that stage. One also marvels at the work of the Holy Spirit who alone could untangle a moment of history and keep both holy Founders holy when they possibly each thought the other was something of a problem!
And the Concettini today? No longer at Santo Spirito, but running an important Dermatological Institute in Rome and a Centre for Youth Spirituality in the countryside, as well as several other institutes throughout Italy.
