8 How the Church Has Changed the World in the faith. They needed recreation, so he took them also to the park, where he mingled instruction with games and athletic feats. Kindness, not punishment You must not think that Don Bosco was a man of ordinary intelligence who was simply good with children. He was a brilliant man. He wrote more books in his life than a lot of people have read— nearly a hundred. His superiors gave him the chance to be a professor at a university, and he would have taken it, because he was an obedient priest, but he told them that he still felt he needed to take care of the poor children—that was where his calling lay. Three hundred boys—and his ministry was just beginning! Imagine having three hundred boys playing in the courtyard of your church. Not all priests were happy about that, or the parishioners either. Boys are noisy creatures. They trample the grass. The ball they’re kicking bounces off into the flowerbeds. All kinds of terrible things like that can happen. So you must imagine Don Bosco leading the boys on a Sunday walk, miles and miles into the countryside, arriving at a church, asking permission to say Mass there, doing so with all those boys in attendance, then having breakfast in the open air, followed by play, and catechism, and the long walk back into Turin, singing hymns as a choir would sing them,
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