By William Saunders, IHE Scholar and Director of the MA in Human Rights
Around the turn of the century, I met Saint Josephine Bakhita amid a forgotten and ignored conflict in a foreign land. However, this meeting requires a word of explanation since she died long ago in 1879.
In the late 1990s, at the behest of a Sudanese Catholic bishop, I established a non-governmental organization to help Catholics and others persecuted by the National Islamic Front. As part of my work, I journeyed in secret to the parts of Sudan under siege by that government. I found people who had been driven from their homes and farms, driven into barren hills, forced to travel hours every day to get fresh water; people who dug ditches as protection from the shrapnel bombs constantly dropped by government planes; people whose lives were at risk every day; people without many material blessings.
Yet, those same people had faith that is by far the strongest I have ever encountered. It was a privilege to be in their midst as they gathered, hundreds strong, to hold Mass under immense trees that shielded them from the sight of government planes. They put their faith in God and called upon their particular friend in Heaven—Josephine Bakhita. I had not heard of her before, but I quickly came to know her as the patron of these suffering people, who had entrusted their fate to her intercession. Bakhita was well known by the Sudanese (indeed, throughout East Africa) because she had been taken as a slave in Sudan as a young girl. She was kidnapped, traumatized, and beaten daily. However, through God’s grace, she came to Italy. There, she encountered the Canossian Sisters and was instructed in the Faith. With them, as she put it, she finally “came to know the name” of the God whom she had first encountered “as a child in the bush.” When she was later asked whether she harbored hatred towards those who kidnapped and enslaved her, she said that she would instead “kiss their hands” because, as the Bible teaches, God turned what man meant for evil into the incomparable joy of entering the Catholic Church. Before meeting the Canossian Sisters, Bakhita had been so traumatized by the kidnapping that she could not speak her name; her enslavers, hating her traditional African culture, cruelly named her Bakhita, or “Fortunate One.”
Nevertheless, in God’s providence, she had become truly fortunate. Eventually, Bakhita entered the Canossian order. There, her faith, hope, and love shone so brightly that she became deeply beloved by the whole Italian nation. In the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, I visited Rome for her formal canonization. “Blessed Bakhita,” whom I had come to know in Sudan, became Saint Bakhita for the entire Church. Bakhita, the patron saint of the IHE’s Human Rights Program, became the patron saint of the Universal Church’s effort to combat human trafficking. In his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Spes Salvi, Pope Benedict held her up as the great example of Christian hope for the entire Church. Bakhita’s life is a beacon of hope. Let’s listen to her and seek her intercession.
