Rwanda: Presentation Day of the 2024 Rector Major’s Strenna

On Saturday, 6th January 2024 at Don Bosco-IFAK Kimihurura, a presentation of the 2024 Strenna of the Rector Major of the Salesians of Don Bosco was held with the presence of the Salesian Family in the Province of the Africa of Great Lakes (Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda).

In 2024, the Salesian Family around the world will celebrate the second centenary of the dream that the young John Bosco – the future Don Bosco had in 1824, at the age of nine. In fact, it is well known in the Salesian Family as “the dream at nine years of age”.

For this reason, the Rector Major of the Salesians of Don Bosco, Fr Ángel Fernández Artime, decided to dedicate the theme of Strenna for 2024 to this dream, and as is the case every year, at the end of the summer plenary session of the General Council he announced the motto that will inspire it: “The dream that makes you dream”. A heart that transforms “wolves” into “lambs”.

The event began with a prayer and was followed by the explanatory session of the Rector Major’s Strenna in the context of the AGL Province.

The session was followed by Holy Mass presided over by Father Provincial Pierre-Célestin Ngoboka who also emphasized the Rector Major’s Strenna in the context of setting the line of helping the youth to overcome the current issues they are facing.

“I believe that the 200th anniversary of the dream which “conditioned Don Bosco’s whole way of living and thinking. And in particular, the way of feeling the presence of God in the life of each one and in the history of the world” (cf. P. STELLA, Don Bosco in the history of Catholic religiosity), deserves to be placed at the center of the Strenna, which will guide the pastoral educational year of the whole Salesian Family”, explains the Rector Major.

The dream at 9 years contains the vocational project given to Don Bosco and the re-reading of his life, “grasping the ways in which the Lord has been and is its protagonist.”

However, says Fr. Ángel “this dream has to do with today, with the dreams of the Salesians, his children, of the whole Salesian Family and above all of the young. In this sense, the dream continues to make us dream and to invite us to think about who we are and who we are for today.”