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The saints

St. Josephine Bakhita

Kidnapped at nine, sold five times, she discovered a master who loved her.

Feast: 8 February · about 1869 to 1947 · The modern era · Darfur, Sudan, and Schio, Italy

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The simple room of St. Josephine Bakhita at Schio: a narrow bed with a blue cover, a chair and a crucifix.

Xavier Hemmer, 2022. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Home / The saints / St. Josephine Bakhita

Darfur, Sudan, about 1878

A little girl in Darfur, about nine years old, is seized by slave traders.1

She is sold five times in the slave markets of Sudan, and will carry the scars of her beatings all her life.1

She had only known masters who despised her. In Italy she heard of a different kind of Master.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church keeps her feast on the World Day of Prayer and Reflection against Human Trafficking.

01St. Josephine Bakhita

Paron

In Venetian dialect she called the living God her “paron”, her master, the Lord above all lords who is goodness itself.1

“I am definitively loved”

Josephine Bakhita, quoted by Pope Benedict XVI in Spe Salvi1

She was baptized on 9 January 1890 by the Patriarch of Venice.1

02St. Josephine Bakhita

Free

When she was about to be taken back to Sudan, she refused: she did not wish to be separated again from her Paron.1

In 1896 she took her vows with the Canossian Sisters, and traveled around Italy to promote the missions.1

The simple room of St. Josephine Bakhita at Schio: a narrow bed with a blue cover, a chair and a crucifix.
Bakhita’s room at the Canossian convent in Schio. Xavier Hemmer, 2022. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Live it this week

Pray for people who are trafficked

Bakhita was kidnapped at nine and sold five times, and then found a Master who loved her. This week, pray every day for people who are trafficked, and look up one group in your diocese working against it.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Spe Salvi, 30 November 2007. Holy See, official English text. vatican.va

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.