Josephine Bakhita

Josephine Bakhita (c. 1869–1947) was a Sudanese-Italian Canossian sister whose path from slavery to sainthood is one of the most well-documented conversion stories of the modern Catholic Church. Born around 1869 in the Darfur region of western Sudan, she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders at approximately age seven. The trauma of the abduction caused her to forget her birth name entirely — 'Bakhita,' meaning 'fortunate,' was a name her captors gave her. Over twelve years (1877–1889), she was resold three times, suffering escalating physical and psychological abuse. One owner, a Turkish general, had his servants cut 60 patterns into her skin with a razor and pack salt into the wounds — a form of scarification she later described in harrowing detail in her oral autobiography. In 1883, Bakhita was purchased by the Italian Vice Consul in Khartoum, Callisto Legnani, who treated her with genuine kindness. When the Mahdist revolt made Sudan untenable for foreign nationals, Legnani brought her to Italy in 1885. She was subsequently placed in the care of the Canossian Sisters in Venice as a companion to the young daughter of an Italian merchant family. It was among the Canossians that Bakhita first encountered formal Christianity — an encounter she described not as discovery but as recognition of the God she had always sensed in nature without knowing His name. When her employers tried to take her back to Sudan, Bakhita refused. In a landmark 1889 ruling, an Italian court determined that since slavery had never been legal on Italian soil, she had been free from the moment she arrived. She chose to remain with the Canossians, was baptized on January 9, 1890, and took the name Josephine. She professed her vows in 1896. Bakhita spent her remaining years at the Canossian convent in Schio, in northern Italy, serving as cook, seamstress, and doorkeeper. Her warmth and the story of her life drew people from across the region. She died on February 8, 1947; tradition holds her last word was 'Madonna.' Pope John Paul II canonized her on October 1, 2000. She is the patron saint of Sudan and of human trafficking victims.