About St. Josephine Bakhita
Who Was St. Josephine Bakhita?
Patron saint of human trafficking
St. Josephine Bakhita was born in Sudan in 1869. She was kidnapped and sold into slavery, suffering tremendously in body and soul.
She was eventually bought by an Italian consul and after some years gained her freedom. She put her faith in Christ and was baptized in 1890.
She discerned the call to religious life and became a Canossian Daughter of Charity. Her life was marked by joyful, heroic virtue. She died in 1947.
She was beatified on May 17, 1992 by Pope John Paul II, and canonized October 1, 2000, also by Pope John Paul II.
Slavery
In 1877, when she was 7–8 years old, she was seized by Arab slave traders, who had abducted her elder sister two years earlier. She was forced to walk barefoot about 960 kilometres (600 mi) to El-Obeid and was sold and bought twice before she arrived there. Over the course of twelve years (1877–1889) she was sold three more times and then she was finally given her freedom
‘Bakhita’ was not the name she received from her parents at birth. It is said that the trauma of her abduction caused her to forget her original name; she took one given to her by the slavers, bakhīta (بخيتة), Arabic for ‘lucky’ or ‘fortunate’. She was also forcibly converted to Islam.
In El-Obeid, Bakhita was bought by a rich Arab who used her as a maid for his two daughters. They treated her relatively well, until after offending one of her owner’s sons, wherein the son lashed and kicked her so severely that she spent more than a month unable to move from her straw bed. Her fourth owner was a Turkish general, and she had to serve his mother-in-law and his wife, who were cruel to their slaves. Bakhita says: “During all the years I stayed in that house, I do not recall a day that passed without some wound or other. When a wound from the whip began to heal, other blows would pour down on me.”
She says that the most terrifying of all of her memories there was when she (along with other slaves) was marked by a process resembling both scarification and tattooing, which was a traditional practice throughout Sudan. As her mistress was watching her with a whip in her hand, a dish of white flour, a dish of salt and a razor were brought by a woman. She used the flour to draw patterns on her skin and then she cut deeply along the lines before filling the wounds with salt to ensure permanent scarring. A total of 114 intricate patterns were cut into her breasts, belly and into her right arm.
THRIVING IN HOLINESS 