Saint John Bosco and the promise kept beyond the grave

On the night of April 3-4, 1839, the seminarians at the Chieri seminary in Piedmont, Italy, were awaken by a frightful noise that caused them unspeakable fear. The dormitory door opened violently. They knew that someone had just entered, but they saw no one. Then a powerful voice rang out in the room, which they all recognised perfectly as that of their friend, Luigi Comollo. But Luigi had died the day before... Only one of them, John Bosco, knew that the dead man had just kept the promise they had made to each other the previous summer - a promise that the first of them to die would come and reassure the survivor of his eternal fate.

Fresco of the Last Judgement, Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral © Shutterstock / SvetlanaSF

Reasons to believe:

John Bosco, a peasant full of common sense, was not given to mystical inventions and was always baffled by the strange phenomena he experienced throughout his life, for which he always sought, as far as possible, rational explanations, and from which he wished to be rid, even praying for it.

Shaken by the sudden death of his best friend, he had completely forgotten the promise they had made to each other, and the incident frightened him to the point of becoming ill. This shows that it wasn't an autosuggestion.

The twenty seminarians who shared the dormitory with Bosco, awakened at the same time as he, witnessed the same scary phenomena.

The overseer, Father Giuseppe Fiorito, a priest, would often tell this story in order to prove the existence of an afterlife, a special judgement for the dead and the existence of purgatory. Many priests from the Oratory, founded by Don Bosco, witnessed these stories and reported them.

Saint John Bosco recounted this impressive episode in his autobiographical notes, written at the end of his life, not to boast about this communication with the next life beyond the grave, but to remind us that we should not risk it and that the promise he and Luigi had exchanged was wrong. So he didn't take pride in it, quite the opposite.

Summary:

Since their secondary school days, John Bosco had formed an unfailing friendship with Luigi Comollo, a young man about his age, whose piety, sacrifices and self-imposed penances he admired and which, when he joined Bosco at the seminary in Chieri in 1836, made him considered a saint by his fellow students and his superiors.

At the end of the summer holidays in 1838, Comollo had a premonition of his imminent death and told his friend Bosco, confiding in him that he had "such a desire for Heaven that he could no longer stay on earth". Then, shortly afterwards, inspired by the life of a saint they had both just read, Comollo exclaimed: "It would be beautiful if the first of us to die came back from the beyond to give news to the other!"At the time, life expectancy was low, medicine was powerless against most diseases and premature deaths were commonplace. So it came as no surprise that twenty-two year olds (Bosco was born on August 15, 1816), let alone seminarians, were thinking about death, God's judgement and the happy or unhappy eternity that awaited the dead.

It is true that the Church forbids attempts to communicate with the dead - Luigi and John knew this - but they ignored it, their only concern being to find out whether the deceased needed to be prayed for and Masses celebrated for the repose of their souls (to shorten their purgatory and purifying suffering as much as possible). This is how we should understand the promise that Comollo asked from Bosco, which Bosco soon stopped thinking about, because the idea oh his best friend's death was so repugnant to him.

Luigi was doing very well - or so it seemed - until the morning of March 25, 1839, when he fainted in the chapel while attending the Mass of the Annunciation. He was carried to the infirmary trembling with fever, and died there at dawn on Easter Tuesday, April 2, shaking hands with Bosco. His last words were to express his regret that God had not wanted them to become priests together, and to ask his friend to pray for him.

For Bosco, the shock was obviously terrible and the grief immense. All he could do was pray, which he did. He no longer thought of that absurd promise, but Luigi had not forgotten it... Don Bosco himself recounted the rest of the story: "On the night of April 3-4, I was in bed in the dormitory with about twenty other seminarians. Around half past eleven, a terrible noise was heard in the corridors. It sounded like a very large cart pulled by many horses approaching the door. All the seminarians woke up, but nobody said a word, they were all so terrified. I was petrified with fear. And the noise came closer. The dormitory door opened violently. And Comollo's clear voice could be heard saying three times: "Bosco! I'm saved! " Then all the commotion stopped. My comrades all jumped out of their beds to huddle around Don Giuseppe Fiorito, from Rivoli. It was the first time in my life that I got scared. At the time, I was so frightened that I wanted to die! In fact, I fell ill and almost died."

Anne Bernet is a French biographer, novelist and essayist, specialised in the history of the Church. She is the postulator of a cause for beatification, a journalist for a number of Catholic media, and the author of more than forty books, most of them on the topic of holiness.

Beyond reasons to believe:

Don Bosco never made this kind of imprudent promise again, but he did receive other apparitions from deceased persons on other occasions, without having asked for them.

Going further:

The Life Of Saint John Bosco: Biographical memoirs and Legacy of saint John Bosco by Cole M. Gabriel, Independently published (January 30, 2024)

More information:

The Venerable Don Bosco: Apostle of Youth and His Works Paperback by M S Pine, Independently published (March 15, 2022)
Forty Dreams Of St. John Bosco: From St. John Bosco's Biographical Memoirs by John Bosco, TAN Books; Revised ed. edition (February 1, 1997)
Movie "Don Bosco: The True Story of the Apostle of Youth", directed by Leandro Castellani (1988)
Movie "Saint John Bosco: Mission to Love" directed by Lodovico Gasparini (2004) (trailer).