Hajja Salesjana November December 2017

26 In 1880, Michelangelo Maria Mizzi, an influential person both at Church and State level, met personally with Don Bosco and lunched with him for the "last time", meaning that he had met him other times before. He used to go to Valdocco for the yearly Procession of Mary Help of Christians. Mr. Mizzi was sent to Liberia by Pope Pius IX, great friend of Don Bosco, to assess the situation of the Church there. Mizzi is probably buried abroad. In 1882, Peter Paul Galea, asked his 21-year- old Alphonsus to send £40 to Don Bosco for the needs of his boys. Two years earlier, Alphonsus had gone to Valdocco to try to meet Don Bosco. Unfortunately, the saint had left for France a couple of hours before. Maria Zammit, daughter of Alphonsus, once stated that her father was trying to become a Salesian. A Salesian Alphonsus did not become, but it was he who succeeded in meeting Fr. Patrick O’Grady, to whom Don Bosco had prophesied the date of his death, together with three other confreres arriving in Malta to stay. In 1884, Mons. Aloysius Farrugia met with Don Bosco in Valdocco, lunched with him and asked him to send some of his Salesians to Malta. Fr. Farrugia was an official in the Archbishop’s Curia and Dean of the Mdina Cathedral. In 1886, Michelangelo Maria Mizzi, in the name of the Bishop of Gozo, sent a letter to Don Bosco asking him to send some of his professional people to start a printing press in Gozo. Mr. Mizzi used to go to Italy to print his books at Sampierdarena, Don Bosco’ second largest printing press. Mr. Mizzi was also the cousin of Alphonsus Maria Galea. In 1888, Don Bosco died peacefully at Valdocco in his first Oratory. As we have seen from the above, a good number of Maltese people, in person and in writing, had contacted Don Bosco during the last 10-15 years of his life. More research will probably discover a few more in future. Alphonsus Maria Galea spent his married life living in a villa near the Church of Stella In 1857, the 42-year-old Don Bosco wrote the Life of St. Paul in which he dedicated five pages to Malta, its geography, name, faith and history. A research compiled by Fr. Francis Zammit SDB and others History Of The Maltese Salesian Delegation