St. Josephine Bakhita

Who they were

Bakhita, meaning fortunate, was the mocking name her kidnappers gave her, and the trauma took her birth name permanently. She was seized from her Darfur village as a small girl and sold several times across years of brutality, and she carried the scars of her enslavement on her body for life.

Bought at last by an Italian consul and brought to Italy, she was left with the Canossian sisters in Venice while her holders travelled, and there encountered, in her words, the God she had known in her heart since childhood without knowing his name. When the family returned to claim her she refused. The case went to court, and in 1889 an Italian tribunal ruled that since Italian law did not recognize slavery, Bakhita had never legally been a slave. She was free. She chose baptism, then the Canossians, and spent fifty years as the beloved doorkeeper and cook of a Venetian convent town that called her Madre Moretta. Asked once what she would do if she met her captors, she said she would kneel and kiss their hands, because without the road she was on she would not have come to know Christ. She was canonized in 2000.

Why people turn to St. Josephine Bakhita

Survivors of trafficking, enslavement, and abuse, and everyone who works against those trades. Sudan claims her as patron in a country that has needed one. Her feast, 8 February, is the international day of prayer against human trafficking.

How to ask their intercession

There is nothing you have to say correctly here. If you are in danger or someone you know is, the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the United States is 1-888-373-7888, and it is staffed at all hours. Bakhita's prayers and that number belong on the same page.