Lucky Girl

Today's Saint is Josephine Bahkita, a former Sudanese slave. I was present for her canonization (in the same ceremony, fittingly enough, as St. Katharine Drexel), but had learned about her some years earlier, probably in the L'Osservatore Romano write-up from her beatification. As a child of eight, Bakhita (the name means "lucky," but it can be rendered "blessed") was kidnapped, as many children of the Sudan are today, and kept as a household slave. "Bakhita" wasn't even her given name; it was the name the slave-traders assigned her. It seems that the trauma caused her to forget her own name. Her body was marked with decorative scars from wounds that were traced with a razor and then rubbed with salt to achieve that desirable, three-D effect. Heaven only knows what other forms of abuse she suffered. She never talked about it. Eventually, Bakhita was sold to an Italian diplomat. Keep in mind that this is happening circa 1880, not in some pre-modern era. When the diplomat was recalled to Italy, he brought the slave-girl with him. It was there that she became acquainted with Catholicism. Meanwhile, she was still being held in slavery! Bakhita, now a Catholic, found herself drawn to the religious life, but her master refused to let her go. It took some outside intervention for this courageous young woman to be free to enter the convent. (What a bold person she must have been!) She lived a long life as a teaching sister in the Canossian order, dying less than 60 years ago, and was so full of faith that she blessed God for having been captured and enslaved, because in God's mysterious providence, she would otherwise never have come to know Jesus.

How many Sudanese girls are reliving the same kinds of trauma that little Bakhita went through! It is bewildering that her people are still being captured and enslaved, only now the whole world is watching, hesitant to intervene. Is it racism? Fear of the powerful Arab-speaking slave-runners? Guileless diplomacy with the government in Khartoum?

Speaking of Sudan, one of the best films at the Sundance Festival, according to Barbara Nicolosi, was on the "lost boys" who walked thousands of miles to escape forcible conscription, slavery or death, and were taken in by American families. It will be a movie to look for, even if it only shows in the art houses. Evidently, these young men are every bit as bold as Bakhita, able to appreciate what has been provided to them, but retaining the ability to critique it based on values that do not begin and end with themselves.