Margherita Occhiena

Margherita Occhiena was born on 1 April 1788 in the village of Capriglio in the Asti countryside of Piedmont, then belonging to the Kingdom of Sardinia. She grew up in a rural household of modest means, formed by agricultural labor and the ordinary Catholic practice of the region. In 1812 she married Francesco Bosco, a widower from the hamlet of Becchi in Castelnuovo d’Asti, and assumed care of his young son Antonio from his first marriage. The couple had two sons of their own: Giuseppe, born in 1813, and Giovanni Melchiorre, born on 16 August 1815, later known as Saint John Bosco. Francesco died in May 1817, leaving Margherita a widow with three boys and an elderly mother-in-law in a poor farm household. She declined to remarry in order to keep the family together and supported them by field work and extreme economy.

During the long widowhood at Becchi she was the principal religious and moral teacher of her children. In conditions of real poverty she insisted on honesty, daily prayer, and the sacraments, and she taught the catechism at home. She backed Giovanni’s schooling and his path toward the priesthood even when it increased hardship and provoked resentment from the older stepson Antonio, who objected to the cost. Local clergy and, later, the seminary at Chieri received the young Bosco in part because of her perseverance. Her correction was remembered as firm but not harsh. Don Bosco later attributed to her the foundations of his own pastoral manner and of his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1846, when Giovanni, by then a priest working among abandoned boys in Turin, fell seriously ill, Margherita left Becchi and settled at the nascent oratory in the Valdocco district. Already in her late fifties, she cooked, sewed, and kept house for her son and for the poor and often difficult youths who gathered around him. The boys called her Mamma Margherita. She imposed a simple domestic order, required cleanliness and respect, and supplied a maternal presence that complemented his apostolate. Salesian tradition regards her as a first-rank co-operator in the origins of the work that became the Salesian Congregation, though she remained a laywoman and never entered a religious order.

Margherita Occhiena died in Turin on 25 November 1856. Don Bosco and the oratory community mourned her as a mother. Her reputation for holiness endured among Salesians, and a cause for beatification was in time introduced. She has been declared Venerable in recognition of heroic virtue lived in the ordinary duties of wife, widow, and mother. She is remembered above all as the mother of Saint John Bosco and as a model of Christian parenthood and of humble service to the young and the poor.