Miraculously Destined for Better Things
St. Josephine Bakhita’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom
By: Laura Loker

Car accidents and natural disasters, international warfare and pediatric cancer: if there is an argument against the goodness of God that ever tempts me, it is the reality of suffering. We can sometimes feel as though God is doing very little about it. And if he is, he seems to be lacking urgency.
When I notice myself thinking like this, I try to recall stories of saints who, in spite of their suffering, were radiant with the goodness and love of our heavenly Father—saints like Josephine Bakhita. Captured by slave traders at a young age in Sudan, she experienced great cruelty at the hands of her owners but eventually found both the Christian faith and her freedom in Italy.
Few could have blamed Bakhita if she had grown angry and embittered; her body alone, permanently scarred from the physical abuse of her owners, was proof of her suffering. Yet she took a different path. She came to realize that, through all her years of pain, God was with her.
The “Lucky” One. The child who would become St. Josephine Bakhita was born to a large, loving family in the Darfur region of Sudan around 1869. At the time, the Arab slave trade dominated the eastern side of the continent. One day slave traders raided the village and kidnapped her older sister. The family was devastated. “This was my first experience of suffering, and oh, how many more would soon follow,” Bakhita later recounted.
A few years passed and more slave traders arrived, this time capturing the young Bakhita herself. Threatened at knife- and gunpoint, the frightened nine-year-old child was forced to walk through the night to the traders’ village, leaving behind all the people who knew and loved her. Her captors even gave her a new name: Bakhita, which means “lucky” in Arabic, though her new circumstances were anything but lucky. Her given name would eventually fade from her memory.
The years that followed were marked by abuse and suffering. Still in Sudan, one household treated Bakhita with respect until she made an innocent mistake. She was beaten severely for it and sold to another household. Another owner expected her to rise at dawn and work well into the night but gave her little to eat in between. “The wounds that I received one day would not be healed before others were added the next, without my knowing why,” Bakhita recalled.
Perhaps worst of all, one owner decided to give her and two other slaves “tattoos,” a brutal practice that marked them for their masters. Hundreds of cuts were made in their skin with a razor, and salt was rubbed into the wounds so they would not close. In agony, Bakhita lost consciousness for several hours. “The scars are still with me,” she shared many years later. “I can honestly say that the reason I did not die was that the Lord miraculously destined me for better things.”
A Sense of the Divine. In spite of her suffering, Bakhita—without any religious instruction—developed a sense of God’s presence from a young age. Even as a child, she said, “I remembered looking at the moon and stars and the beautiful things in nature and saying to myself, ‘Who is the master of all these beautiful things?’ And I experienced a great desire to see him and know him and honor him.”
Eventually, Bakhita was purchased by an Italian consul from Khartoum, who treated her with kindness. When he was called back to Italy two years later, she felt a sudden desire to go, too. So she asked him to take her, and he agreed. “I knew later that it was God who wanted this to happen,” she said. “I can still taste the joy I felt at the time.”
In Italy, the consul gave Bakhita to friends of his, an Italian couple, Augusto and Turina Michieli. Bakhita became the nanny of their young daughter Mimmina, who loved her very much. The family traveled to Sudan, where they planned to settle. But when Turina returned to Italy to sell their house, she took Bakhita and Mimmina with her. “In my heart, I therefore bid an eternal farewell to Africa,” Bakhita remembered. “A voice inside me told me that I would never see my continent again.”
A Firm Conversion. After selling the house, Turina planned to return to Sudan before coming back one more time to Italy to settle the family’s affairs. Bakhita and her young charge were to stay in Italy until Turina returned. Then they would all travel back to Africa. Illuminato Checchini, their estate manager, convinced Turina to let the two live at the boardinghouse for catechumens with the Canossian Sisters. He also gave Bakhita a silver crucifix and told her that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had died for her. “I remember that I looked at it in secret and felt something inside that I could not explain,” Bakhita recounted.
To Bakhita’s great joy, the sisters who took them in began to teach her about their faith. She came to understand that the “benevolent presence” that she often felt as a child was the same God who sent his Son to die for her. And as she reconsidered her past through the lens of her new faith, she began to see that he had been guiding her path all along. “Those holy mothers instructed me with heroic patience and introduced me to that God who from childhood I had felt in my heart without knowing who he was,” she said.
Bakhita began preparing for her Baptism. When Turina returned to Italy to retrieve her and Mimmina, Bakhita refused to go. She had not yet finished her catechesis, and she deeply desired to be received into the Church. “It was the Lord who filled me with such firmness, because he wanted to make me all his!” she said. Turina was furious, but since the slave trade was illegal in Italy, she had no recourse. Bakhita was free.
Taking the name Josephine—and “with a joy only the angels could describe”—Bakhita received the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion on January 9, 1890.
A Deeper Call. Bakhita remained in the Canossians’ house of catechumens for several years after her Baptism. During this time, she discerned a call to join the community that had so profoundly impacted her. She worried, however, that she would not be accepted because she was Black. But the sisters welcomed her, once again, with open arms. She entered the novitiate on December 7, 1893, and professed her vows three years later on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Bakhita spent most of her years in the Canossian community in Schio, Italy, where she had been transferred in 1902. At the request of her superior, she shared her story with another Canossian sister, who transcribed a short autobiography. Later she spoke with Italian writer Ida Zanolini, who published a biography of her called Tale of Wonder.
With the book’s publication, Bakhita’s popularity grew beyond the city of Schio, and her superiors asked her to travel to promote the Canossians’ worldwide missions. People from all over came to see her. But she found herself uncomfortable with her fame. “They also say, ‘Poor little thing, poor little thing.’ But I am not a poor little thing, because I belong to the Paròn”—her personal name for God, which means “master” in the Venetian dialect—“and I am in his house,” she said. “Anyone who is not with the Lord, they are the poor ones.”
Indeed, far from self-pity, Bakhita expressed amazement at the way God had used every situation, even the most painful, to draw her closer to himself. She also forgave those who abused her. It was as if no chains—neither of slavery nor of a bitter heart—had any hold on her. She was free to love the Lord and her neighbor totally, and for her remaining decades, she did.
Bakhita died, peaceful and free, on February 8, 1947.
Hope in Suffering. St. Josephine Bakhita has become a symbol of radical hope for the Church in Africa. She has also been popular in her adopted Italy. And in the decades since her canonization in 2000, she has become a beloved saint in the global Church. As Pope St. John Paul II said at her beatification, she is our “universal sister.”
Bakhita’s story tells us that God always triumphs. Where the slave traders sought to erase her sense of self by giving her a new name, God restored her identity as his own daughter. He brought her to emancipation and her freely chosen vocation. Now this woman—who was once humiliated and abused—sits with him and all the angels and saints in heaven.
When we are in the midst of our own suffering, it may be hard to trust that God will win out in the end. In these moments, we can take comfort in another key lesson from Bakhita’s life: that God is always with us. Even before Bakhita knew him, the Lord was with her. He was with her in her family, who taught her to love; in the small voice in her heart telling her to go to Italy; and in the sun and moon and stars that first moved her to believe.
Laura Loker writes from northern Virginia.
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