St. Dominic Savio

Dominic Savio was fifteen years old when he died, and his story should not be sentimentalized. The life follows a brief arc: the pious boy from Riva di Chieri who came to Don Bosco's Oratory at Valdocco when he was twelve, who absorbed Don Bosco's formation with almost frightening thoroughness, and who died of tuberculosis before reaching adulthood. The primary source is Don Bosco's biography, written by someone who knew him directly, which makes it unusually reliable for a modern saint. The incidents it records are chosen to show not a boy who was merely well-behaved, but one who was genuinely serious about holiness in a way that other boys recognized and occasionally resented.

The episode of the fight averted in the school yard — Dominic stepping between two boys who were about to throw stones and holding up a crucifix, refusing to move until they had made peace — is one of the more striking scenes. His great resolution, the one Don Bosco records from their first meetings, was "death rather than sin," not adolescent rhetoric but a formed spiritual conviction that Dominic tested repeatedly against the ordinary pressures of school life. The illness that killed him was short and violent, and the last days showed him in prayer, apparently consoled by interior experiences he did not fully articulate. The mystical claims made after his death deserve restraint, but the picture of the boy that emerges is coherent and impressive. He was beatified in 1950 and canonized in 1954, with the cause handled more rigorously than such causes had sometimes been in earlier centuries.