Feast day: February 8
St. Josephine Bakhita
Kidnapped into slavery in Sudan as a child, she gained freedom in Italy, became a Canossian sister, and radiated forgiveness for 50 years.
She was born about 1869 in the Darfur region of Sudan, into a loving family, but her own name was lost to her forever: kidnapped by slave-traders when she was around seven, she was so terrified that she could not remember it, and her captors mockingly called her 'Bakhita' — Arabic for 'lucky one.' Over the next years she was sold and resold in the slave markets, beaten, and so cruelly treated that her body bore over a hundred scars for the rest of her life.
At last she was bought by an Italian consul, and then passed to another Italian family, who took her to Italy and left her in the care of the Canossian Sisters in Venice while they traveled. There, for the first time, she encountered the Christian faith and came to know the God who, she realized with wonder, had been watching over her and loving her through all her sufferings — the true 'Master' she had been seeking all along.
When her owners returned to claim her, Bakhita refused to leave, and an Italian court ruled that since slavery was illegal in Italy she had never lawfully been a slave and was free. She chose to be baptized and, in 1896, to become a Canossian sister herself, spending the next fifty years in the convent at Schio as cook, sacristan, and doorkeeper.
The townspeople came to love their gentle 'Madre Moretta' (the little brown mother), whose serenity and forgiveness, after all she had endured, seemed to come from another world; asked what she would do if she met her kidnappers, she said she would kneel and kiss their hands, for without them she would never have come to know Christ. She died in 1947, was canonized in 2000, and is a patron of Sudan and of the victims of human trafficking.
Her kidnappers' trauma made her forget her own name. 'Bakhita' — 'fortunate one' — was the name slavers gave her. She made it true.
“If I were to meet the slave-traders who kidnapped me, I would kneel and kiss their hands, for if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian today.”
— St. Josephine Bakhita
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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