Feast day: May 6
St. Dominic Savio
A pupil of St. John Bosco who resolved to become a saint through ordinary schoolboy life, founded a sodality among his friends, and died of illness before his fifteenth birthday.
Dominic Savio was an Italian schoolboy, born in 1842 to a peasant family in Piedmont, who in his very short life became a model of youthful holiness. Bright and devout from early childhood, at twelve he was taken into the Turin oratory of St. John Bosco, who became his teacher and spiritual guide and later wrote his biography.
Under Don Bosco's direction Dominic threw himself into an ordinary boy's life of study, play, and friendship, but with an extraordinary spirit. He made it his rule to do small things perfectly and cheerfully for God, founded a sodality among his schoolmates to help Don Bosco, and was known as a peacemaker — once stepping between two boys about to fight with stones.
His chosen motto, adopted at his First Communion, was simple and absolute: 'Death rather than sin.' He had a tender concern for the souls of his companions and a precocious gift for prayer, sometimes becoming so absorbed in God that he lost all track of time.
Always frail, he fell ill and was sent home, where he died in 1857, not yet fifteen, with serene joy. Canonized in 1954, he became the youngest non-martyr saint of the Church and a patron of choirboys and of the young — proof that holiness has no minimum age.
He is one of the youngest non-martyrs ever canonized — a teenager whose motto was simply 'Death rather than sin.'
“Death rather than sin.”
— St. Dominic Savio
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: vatican.va/content/pius-xii/it/speeches/1954/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19540612_canonizzazione.html
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