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St Josephine Bakhita, 8th February

 

St Josephine was a former slave who, after winning her freedom, spent 50 years as a nun in Italy, developing a reputation for simple way of holiness.

Born in 1869 into the Daju tribe in the Darfur region of western Sudan, she was snatched by armed slave traders when she was just seven years old. She was too frightened to give them her name so one of them dubbed her “Bakhita”, which means “lucky one”.

Along with another girl she was transferred to a slave market, where she tried unsuccessfully to escape, before she was marched east to the town of El Obeid and sold to an Arab chief who gave her to his daughters as a maid. One of his son’s beat her unconscious, however, and it took her a month to recover.

St Josephine was then sold to a general in the Turkish army and she was treated cruelly by his mother and wife who not only tattooed her with some 140 cuts to her stomach, chest and arms to denote their ownership but also kept her wounds open with salt, leaving her seriously ill for another month.

Three years later, in 1882, the general decided to return to Turkey and he sold St Josephine to Signor Calisto Legnani, the Italian consul in Khartoum, who treated her far more kindly. When the time came for him to return to Italy St Josephine begged him to take her with him and she joined the family on their boat to Genoa.

In Italy she was given work by Augusto Michieli, a friend of Legnani’s, and was introduced to Christianity by Illuminato Cecchini, one of his business associates who gave her a crucifix and began to tell her about Jesus.

Cecchini also persuaded Michieli to leave St Josephine in the care of the Canossian Sisters at their Institute of Catechumens in Venice while travelling abroad. When Michieli returned after a year away he tried to take St Josephine back to her work in his hotel but she refused, appealing successfully to the Cardinal Patriarch and to government officials who assured her former boss that slavery was not permitted in Italy.

In 1890 St Josephine was received into the Church at the Institute. Three years later she entered the Canossian novitiate and in 1896 she made her profession after an examination by the Patriarch of Venice, the future Pope St Pius X.

She was transferred to a house near Padua where she helped to nurse troops wounded during the First World War. They were consoled by her transparent goodness and she was known to many of them as Mother Moretta (Little Brown Mother).

The remainder of her life was comparatively uneventful though she was considered to be very holy by her fellow nuns, who believed that her saintly presence protected them from bombing in the Second World War.

St Josephine died of pneumonia on 8th February 1947 but after he death, in the second half of the 20th century, she became a symbol of resistance and hope for the persecuted Christians of Sudan and for women and oppressed people in Africa in general.

She was beatified by Pope St John Paul II on 17th May 1992 and the following year he personally delivered a casket of her relics to the Church in Khartoum.

The same pope canonised St Josephine on 1st October 2000.

Source: Butler’s Lives of the Saints