Don Bosco Bracelet

Don Bosco Bracelet — Italian Silver-Tone Saint John Bosco Medal, Medjugorje Handwoven Cord

The Don Bosco bracelet centers a small oval Saint John Bosco medal in silver tone on a handwoven cord — a devotional bracelet to the priest the Italians simply call Don Bosco, the Turin-born founder of the Salesians and patron saint of youth, students, schoolchildren, apprentices, and Catholic publishers. Born Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco on August 16, 1815, in the village of Becchi near Turin, he lost his father at age two and was raised by his mother Margaret Occhiena in rural poverty. Ordained a priest in 1841, on December 8 of that same year he met an orphan named Bartolomeo Garelli in a sacristy and began catechizing him — the seed of a life’s work that would eventually shelter, educate, and find trades for thousands of street boys in industrializing Turin. In 1859, with the encouragement of Pope Pius IX, he gathered seventeen of his older boys and founded the Society of St. Francis de Sales — the Salesians — which received papal approval in 1869. In 1872 he co-founded the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians with Maria Domenica Mazzarello to extend the work to girls. His Preventive System of education — rooted in reason, religion, and loving kindness — became one of the most influential pedagogical movements in modern Catholic history, and his motto «Da mihi animas, caetera tolle» (“Give me souls, take away the rest”) is engraved over Salesian institutions worldwide. He died in Turin on January 31, 1888, was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929, and was canonized by the same Pope on April 1, 1934. Saint John Bosco’s feast is celebrated each January 31, and his most enduring counsel to the young remains the simplest of all: “Be cheerful, do good, and let the sparrows chirp.”

Each Don Bosco bracelet features a single oval Saint John Bosco medal in silver tone, produced in Italy and hand-knotted onto a woven Medjugorje cord. Available in 15 cord colors for Catholic schools, Salesian institutions, youth ministries, oratorios, parish religious-education programs, First Communion classes, school chaplaincies, and devotional wholesalers. Supplied in packs of 10.

Handwoven in Medjugorje by women who pray as they tie each knot, every Don Bosco bracelet from MIRJAM DOO carries devotion at its source — Italian medal, Bosnian hands, in honour of the priest who taught the Church that the young are not vessels to be filled but fires to be kindled.