Saint Josephine Bakhita
Saint Josephine Bakhita. From Enslavement to Freedom — Her Life, Mission, Legacy and Words
Few saints of the modern era embody the passage from being treated as property to discovering oneself as a person of inviolable dignity as powerfully as Saint Josephine Bakhita.
Her story begins in nineteenth-century Sudan with kidnapping, enslavement and violence. It ends in a convent in northern Italy, where an elderly African sister became known for an extraordinary gentleness. Yet the heart of Bakhita’s story is not simply that a slave became free. It is that a woman from whom almost everything had been taken—including even the memory of her birth name—came to believe that no human being could ultimately possess her.
For Bakhita, there was only one true Paron—the Venetian word she used affectionately for “Master”: God. And this Master did not enslave. He made her a daughter. Vaticaan
The child whose name was taken away
Bakhita was born around 1869 in the Darfur region of Sudan, into a family she later remembered with affection. We do not know her original name.
That absence is itself part of her story.
Around the age of seven she was kidnapped by slave traders. The trauma was so profound that she later said she could no longer remember the name her parents had given her. Her captors called her Bakhita, an Arabic name meaning approximately fortunate or lucky. Vaticaan
There is something painfully paradoxical about the name. The “fortunate one” was a terrified child separated from her family and repeatedly sold.
During the following years she passed through the hands of several owners and endured severe physical abuse. Some of the scars remained on her body for the rest of her life. The Vatican biography records the brutality of these years without disguising what slavery meant: Bakhita was subjected to the will of people who regarded another human being as something that could be bought and sold. Vaticaan
And yet Bakhita later remembered another experience from those years.
She would look upward.
At the sun.
At the moon.
At the stars.
And she wondered who had made such beauty.
One of the memories attributed to her expresses the question beautifully:
“Who could be the Master of these beautiful things?”
She longed, she said, to know and honor that mysterious Creator. Vaticaan
Long before she knew Christian theology, creation had become her first book of prayer.
Italy — and the discovery that she was free
Eventually Bakhita entered the household of the Italian vice-consul Callisto Legnani and subsequently accompanied an Italian family, the Michielis, to Italy. Through circumstances involving their daughter Mimmina, Bakhita was entrusted for a time to the Canossian Daughters of Charity in Venice. Vaticaan
There she encountered Christianity systematically.
But something even more fundamental happened.
When the Michieli family wanted her to return with them, Bakhita refused.
The question eventually came before Italian authorities. In Italy, the claim of ownership over her had no legal standing; Bakhita was free to choose her own future.
For perhaps the first time since childhood, the decision about Bakhita’s life belonged to Bakhita herself. Vaticaan
She chose to remain.
And that moment is crucial to understanding her spirituality. Her later religious obedience cannot properly be understood as the continuation of servitude. The woman who had known coerced submission first obtained her civil freedom—and then freely chose a religious vocation.
“Here I became a daughter of God“
On 9 January 1890, Bakhita received Christian initiation and the name Josephine.
The baptismal font became extraordinarily precious to her. The Vatican biography preserves her habit of kissing it and saying:
“Here, I became a daughter of God!” Vaticaan
Those few words may be the key to her entire life.
The slave traders had said, in effect: You belong to us.
Her Christian faith told her: You are a daughter.
Her former masters had assigned her a price.
Her faith told her that her worth could not be priced.
People had controlled her body.
Her baptism proclaimed a dignity no human owner could confer—and none could remove.
This is why Bakhita’s spirituality of divine “mastership” is so striking. She continued to call God the Master, il Paron. But she had discovered a radically different kind of Master: one whose authority expressed itself not in degradation but in love.
Becoming Sister Josephine
Bakhita discerned a vocation among the Canossian Sisters, the community founded by Magdalene of Canossa.
On 8 December 1896, Josephine Bakhita made her religious profession.
She would spend much of the remainder of her life at Schio, in northern Italy. Vaticaan
There was nothing spectacular about most of her apostolate.
She cooked.
She sewed and embroidered.
She worked as sacristan.
She answered the convent door.
She welcomed children.
She comforted poor people who came seeking assistance.
And gradually the woman whose childhood had been characterized by violence became known precisely for gentleness.
Children loved her. The suffering sought her out. Her fellow sisters remembered her serenity and simplicity. Her apostolate became, in a sense, the apostolate of presence: receiving the person standing before her as someone worthy of tenderness. Vaticaan
Her theology could be summarized in words attributed to her:
“Be good, love the Lord, pray for those who do not know Him.” Vaticaan
No elaborate system.
Goodness.
Love.
Prayer.
And a life that made those three words credible.
The astonishing heart of Bakhita: forgiveness
Perhaps no aspect of her legacy is more challenging than her attitude toward the people who enslaved and tortured her.
She was once asked what she would do if she encountered her kidnappers again.
Her remembered answer is startling: she said that she would kneel and kiss their hands. Vaticaan
This statement needs to be understood carefully.
Bakhita was not saying that slavery was good. Nor does her story justify tolerating abuse, remaining in captivity, or denying the demands of justice. Indeed, when given the opportunity to exercise her freedom, she firmly refused to return to the life others had chosen for her.
Rather, she came to interpret even the catastrophe of her past through her belief that evil had not been allowed to possess the final word.
She could condemn what slavery had done without allowing hatred of her enslavers to determine who she became.
That distinction is essential.
In a 2023 reflection devoted to Bakhita, Pope Francis presented her particularly as a witness to the transforming power of forgiveness and emphasized that her fame now reaches people whose identity and dignity have been denied. Vaticaan
Forgiveness, in Bakhita, was therefore not forgetfulness.
It was freedom.
The people who once possessed her body would not be permitted to possess her heart.
Her mission
Bakhita was not primarily a writer, theologian or founder. Her mission was her life.
She became a living proclamation of several truths.
Human dignity precedes social status. A slave market could assign Bakhita a monetary value; it could not determine her human worth.
Freedom involves more than removing chains. Bakhita’s external liberation was essential, but she also described an interior liberation—the discovery that she was loved and capable of loving without being governed by hatred.
Forgiveness and justice are not opposites. Her refusal to hate those who harmed her did not transform slavery into something acceptable. Her life has instead become an international Christian symbol in opposition to human trafficking and modern slavery.
Holiness can inhabit ordinary work. After the drama of her youth, Bakhita’s mature life consisted largely of kitchens, sewing rooms, doorways, children, prayer and community life.
Her great apostolate was goodness practiced repeatedly.
Did Bakhita leave writings?
Unlike many modern saints, Bakhita did not leave behind a large body of theological writings.
What we possess instead are recollections, testimony, sayings and an account of her life recorded with the assistance of others. Consequently, quotations attributed to her should be handled with some care: wording can differ between Italian sources and later translations.
This actually makes her somewhat similar to Cosmas and Damian, whom we discussed before. Her deepest “text” is not a theological treatise.
It is the shape of her life.
Her spirituality survives especially in remembered phrases—and some are extraordinarily powerful.
The words of Bakhita
One of the most beautiful concerns creation. Remembering her childhood wonder before the heavens, she spoke of seeing the sun, moon and stars and wondering about the “Master” behind such beauty. Vaticaan
Another is her baptismal declaration:
“Here, I became a daughter of God!” Vaticaan
And then her simple spiritual testament:
“Be good, love the Lord, pray for those who do not know Him.” Vaticaan
During illness, when people asked how she was, she characteristically answered:
“As the Master desires.” Vaticaan
These sentences reveal something distinctive about Bakhita. Her vocabulary was uncomplicated, but behind it stood enormous experience.
When someone who had once been owned by human “masters” spoke peacefully about the Master, the word had been completely transformed.
Her final years
Old age brought considerable suffering. Bakhita endured illness and physical decline.
Near death, memories of slavery apparently returned with terrible vividness. According to the Vatican’s biographical account, during her agony she pleaded:
“Please, loosen the chains… they are heavy!” Vaticaan
It is a heartbreaking detail.
The elderly nun was again, in memory, the enslaved child.
But those were not her final recorded words.
On 8 February 1947, at the Canossian convent in Schio, Josephine Bakhita died. Her final invocation was remembered as:
“Our Lady! Our Lady!” Vaticaan
The frightened child of Sudan had reached the end of an extraordinary journey.
From Bakhita to Saint Bakhita
Her reputation for holiness spread rapidly after her death. She was beatified in 1992 and canonized by Pope John Paul IIon 1 October 2000. Vaticaan
At the canonization, John Paul II drew particular attention to the significance of her experience for women suffering oppression and violence. He presented her story not as an invitation to passive endurance, but as an inspiration to work for the liberation and restoration of the dignity and rights of oppressed women. Vaticaan
That point matters enormously.
The legacy of Bakhita cannot properly be reduced to:
“She suffered quietly.”
It is much closer to:
She suffered; she became free; she discovered her dignity; and suffering did not teach her to inflict suffering on others.
Bakhita and today’s slaves
This may be where her story speaks most urgently to the twenty-first century.
The slave markets through which Bakhita passed belong to history, but human trafficking, forced labor, sexual exploitation, forced marriage and other forms of modern slavery have not disappeared.
So the girl who lost even her name has become a symbol for people whose names the world still refuses to learn.
The child who was sold speaks for children who are trafficked.
The woman whose body carried scars speaks for survivors whose wounds remain long after physical captivity ends.
The freed woman speaks for the right of every person to determine the course of his or her own life.
And the nun who forgave speaks of another freedom: refusing to reproduce the violence one has received.
That is perhaps Bakhita’s most radical legacy.
The paradox of her name
And finally we return to that strange name.
Bakhita.
The fortunate one.
It was not the name her mother whispered over her cradle. It was a name given in captivity.
Yet somehow she made it her own.
The enslavers who called her “fortunate” could not possibly have foreseen that generations later, people across Africa, Europe and far beyond would speak that same name not as the designation of someone’s property but as the name of a saint.
They could take her home.
They could take her childhood.
They could take her original name.
They could scar her body.
But they could not determine the final meaning of her life.
And therein lies the enduring message of Josephine Bakhita:
A human being is more than what has been done to her.
Her dignity was older than her captivity.
Her identity was deeper than her wounds.
Her freedom became greater than the chains she once carried.
And the woman who had every human reason to pass hatred onward chose instead to leave behind a remarkably simple inheritance:
goodness without naïveté,
forgiveness without approval of injustice,
faith without bitterness,
and freedom without revenge.
That is why Bakhita remains far more than an inspiring survivor from the nineteenth century.
She is a witness to the extraordinary possibility that a wounded human life can become a source of healing for others.Vaticaan
Vatican biography of Saint Josephine Bakhita
Pope Francis’s 2023 catechesis on Bakhita and forgiveness
