Women in History: Venerable Margherita Bosco, the Mom Backup I Needed

For Holy Women’s History Month, Barb Szyszkiewicz recalls how the mother of a saint modeled radical hospitality.

Twenty years ago, the mother of Saint John Bosco was declared Venerable by the Church. That’s right about the time I began to need her.

I learned about Venerable Margherita about 20 years too late. She is a holy woman I could have looked to when one of my sons was young and our house became the de facto hangout for the boys who once admitted when I opened the front door, “You’re the only one who lets us in.”

Long ago, I entrusted the boys on my block to the care of Saint John Bosco. Most of them were living in tenuous family circumstances, and I guess they needed stability as much as they needed my homemade cookies.

Saint John Bosco, widely known for his work with the street kids of Turin, Italy, couldn’t have done it without the help of his mom. He enlisted her to be the house mother, the bonus mom: to feed, clothe, and shelter the boys her son brought in off the streets.

I Resented the Mission I Was Called To

I spent a lot of years walking that fine line between welcoming those boys and allowing them to walk all over me. I provided pretzels, root beer, and plenty of homemade cookies, as well as the more-than-occasional dinner. A lot of the time, I resented that I had extra boys to supervise. They learned my limits, though; one day when I told them to clean up a mess they’d made in the family room, one calmly directed another, “You have to vacuum, because you were throwing breath mints.”

I Needed Venerable Margherita as an Intercessor

If I had known about Venerable Margherita back in those days, I could have asked her to pray for me when I had to tell the boys they needed to go home and check in with whatever grownup was in charge of them before showing up at my door, right off the school bus. Or when I bribed them with donuts to catch a mouse hiding in the back porch and relocate it a block away at the creek. Or when I sent them home for breaking the “no f-bombs in my house” rule (no one broke that rule more than once).

I remember thinking, way back when, that I didn’t want those boys to grow up to be the ones binge-drinking at someone’s house party and destroying property or mistreating others. I realize this is a very low bar, but these were not my kids, and I didn’t want to overstep, nor did I feel equipped to do that. But they could, and did, vacuum up the breath mints they threw.

The Saintly Approach

Venerable Margherita Bosco, over the years, assumed the care of hundreds of young boys whose parents could not or would not handle their responsibilities as parents. Given money to buy herself a much-needed new dress, she spent it all on new shirts for the boys. She showed them the same motherly love she’d shown her own children.

Now that I’ve learned about Venerable Margherita, I like to think that she did intercede for me, keeping me going when I was exasperated with the boys and angry at their parents for not stepping up. I often resented being mommy to the whole block.

I didn’t handle every situation with grace, that’s for sure, but it may well have been her influence that kept me opening the door, baking the cookies, and making the boys clean up their messes.

Venerable Margherita Bosco, pray for us.

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Copyright 2026 Barb Szyszkiewicz
Images: (banner) Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo; Wikimedia Commons