Page 147 - Reflections on St. Joseph

Marello speaks in his first letters from 1864. (Bishop Balma was an Oblate of the Virgin Mary
expelled from the Missions of Cocincina; he will become later Archbishop of Cagliari; in the
meantime he lived in Turin at the Mother House of the Congregation which had been founded
by Venerable Pio Lanteri).

6 – In 1871, the Bishops of Piedmont gathered in Turin, discussed greatly about recent events
in the Church in Italy and on the pastoral consequences which came from them.

The Bishops found themselves facing mostly new social problems brought about by the first
industrialization movements which, particularly in Turin, where being felt with greater
urgency. In Turin, the “Worker Societies”, with an anarchist-socialist bent, were being
established, modeled after those which already were prospering in nearby France.

All of this left the Bishops not at peace. Those who got to work on this were the Piedmont Saints:
Don Bosco for the youth, Fr. Leonardo Murialdo for the workers, Francis Faa di Bruno for the
domestic servants, etc. An authoritative word from the Bishops was needed and so there is this
from the minutes of their gathering: “If there is need to make some sort of grave decision
regarding the worker Societies and among other things encourage the Holy See to prohibit
them; they were unanimous (…) in deploring the great evils coming from the worker Societies,
but all were of the opinion that it was not expedient to obtain a prohibition from the Holy See
also because such a condemnation, instead of diminishing the evils born from the Societies,
could actually increase them and that therefore it is more the case that each Ordinary adopts
in his Diocese as much as he can and knows how to so as to bring them to an end, seeking to
establish Catholic worker Societies, cultivating Confraternities, in order to lead them to
revive the spirit for which they were begun, and exhorting them to introduce into their rules
charitable giving and public assistance”.

Adhering to this invitation, there began in Turin, an later in all of Piedmont, a race to institute
Catholic Associations, both youth models and worker Society models. The one and the other
were both at the origins of the reawakening of the Catholic laity and of the social action of the
th
Church in the 19 Century.

7 – All of the introduction was necessary in order to understand the birth in Asti (or at least the
attempt) of the “COMPANY OF ST. JOSEPH”, in the following year of 1872.

Asti was a small, provincial town of a agricultural, commercial character, with very few
factories which has just been started at that time; there were the factories of matchsticks, the
Vetraria and the first canteens (the Vinciola) of an industrial character. Asti was still not fertile
soil for this type of novelty. The first youth Association which arose in Asti was the “Silvio
Pellico Circle” in 1885, in the Parish of St. Martin, run by the Barnabites (the pastor Father
Pezzuti).

But we can imagine Bishop Savio, after that gathering, in which his Secretary Marello had also
participated, accompanying him to Turin, asking himself the question: what can we do here in
Asti? The elderly Bishop found no other answer than in the intuitions of his young Secretary;
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Reflections on st. joseph