Bishop Bosco Interviewed by SJCS Pupils

Published April 22, 2025

Before Easter, Bishop Bosco visited St Joseph’s Catholic School and our pupils had lots of questions to ask him!

In their interview, they asked about everything from about God’s omnibenevolence and how be a better person, to which sports team Bishop Bosco would choose to play on. Click here to read about Bishop Bosco’s visit, and read the full interview below.

What would you choose to be if you couldn’t be a Bishop?

Bishop Bosco: It’s really hard to think of that because I’ve been a priest for so long now that it becomes a part of you. I played sport quite seriously when I was younger and I also I trained to be a teacher, so I may have been a teacher. But that’s a really good question because it’s quite a hard one to answer!

How can we know if God is omnibenevolent if he is out of our knowledge and beyond all?

Bishop Bosco: I love the word omnibenevolent – you often think of God as omniscient which means he knows everything, and you think of Him as omnipotent, meaning He’s all powerful, but omnibenevolent means He’s all good as well. He’s all goodness.

So, I think the way to think about God for me is not to think about God as some really big thing in the world or even outside the world looking at the world and holding the world. Because God is, like Thomas Aquinas taught us, God is actual, isness itself, so – it’s very hard to put it to words – but we would say God is the ground of being. If you ever think about how you exist – how do you know you exist? Pinch yourself and you could feel it, and you see things and hear things and can think about things, but so our existence is something that’s given to us. But God’s existence is just outside of all of that.

So, I think that to try to think of God, we should try to think of God as not just one more big thing in the universe, admittedly a very big thing, but that God is outside of all that and he is the ground of all of that.

How do we know if we can’t see him? Well, the best explanation that I can give is an illustration of how you can’t see the wind, but we know what the wind can do. When I drove up here, I saw there were some trees down in fields and that’s because we’ve had some very powerful winds this winter. We’ve had a few storms where the wind has been so powerful it’s taken trees down and damaged houses. You can’t see the wind, though – all you can see is things moving about because of the wind.

So maybe think about God like that – that we see his effects, and we could certainly see any goodness that you come across in life within yourself or within other people who are good – it’s all God.

If you could be a top player in any sports team, what would you choose and why?

Bishop Bosco: I’d be centre forward for England. Football, no doubt about it. I liked a lot of sport when I could play it, but football was the one. I think it’s something to do with my school – the school that I went to really liked rugby, and I think they sort of felt that if they allowed people to play football, no one would want to play rugby, so they wouldn’t allow us to play football at school.

I noticed when I was walking around your playground at break time, there were a lot of students in the tarmac area over there playing with full-size footballs. When I was at school, if you were in sporting you had to play rugby, so as a concession they would let us play football in the playground with a tennis ball! So, I played football outside of school instead and I’ve loved it ever since. But it would take a lot of God’s grace to make me a centre forward for England!

How can I be a better person?

Bishop Bosco: Well, first of all, I’m sure that you are a great person. But how can you be a better person? If you read anything about the saints, you’ve got four saints connected with this school – five, actually, if you count Saint Joseph.

I’m going to pick one of your four saints – Saint Teresa of Calcutta. After she died, there were a lot of things that she wrote that were uncovered and that were published, and one of them was that for many, many years, she lived with a sort of doubt that she was doing the right thing. Everyone else knew that she was doing the right thing, but she herself didn’t. And it’s made me wonder that when a person gets very saintly, they’re even more aware of their own failings, and that was certainly true of Saint Teresa.

It’s certainly true of Saint Paul. He speaks about it as well in his letters, and many of the saints have that. And we can think, if Mother Teresa thought she wasn’t very good, what hope does that give me?

It makes me think that the closer you get to God, the more you realise how much you need God. So I would say, don’t worry about whether you’re a good person or not – in a way, it’s not for anyone else to judge. But just try to be close to God, try to talk to Him every day, try to pray to Him and try to put yourself in the way of His grace. And one of the best ways you could do that if you are a Catholic is that you could go to mass.

How can I know I’m being guided by the Holy Spirit in my decisions?

Bishop Bosco: What a great question – do you know, every saint I can think of has asked themselves that exact question. How can I know that this is God’s will? And the simplest answer is to pray, to get into the habit and practice of praying. When we prayed earlier [during our service], we prayed to Our Father. And remember what I said at the beginning? I said that the apostle’s job, the bishop’s job and priest’s job, is to be faithful to what Jesus taught and make sure that as many people as possible know about it. So that’s why priests try and teach us to pray. If you’re not sure how to pray, a good person to speak to would be a bishop or a priest, or your parents could teach you as well, or other people – but bishops or priests especially can teach you how to pray.

What is prayer? We could spend the whole day talking about prayer, but I would say, give time to God. Think about it like if you you’ve got friends in school and you do stuff with your friends, you talk to them, you might chat them on the phone or the internet. If you didn’t do that, you’d lose your friends, the relationship would probably break down eventually. So, devote time and give attention to God in in prayer. And then God can speak to us. He doesn’t have to use words. Mostly he inspires us, which we can see as part of your school’s mission statement!

We would like to say a big thank you again to Bishop Bosco for visiting our school, and for taking the time to answer everyone’s questions!

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