Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / St. Bakhita — 114 Scars and Not One Ounce of Bitterness
Transcript
- : I want you to think about the angriest you have ever been in your entire life. Maybe it was betrayal, a relationship that fell apart, a family member who let you down in a way you never saw coming, a job that was taken from you unfairly, a church that hurts you, whatever it was. Hold that feeling for a second. Now, I want you to imagine someone kidnapping you as a child, selling you into slavery, beating you. passing you from owner to owner for 12 years like you were furniture, and then one day, as a kind of entertainment, taking a razor blade and carving 114 cuts into your skin and then rubbing salt into every single one so the scars would never fade. Now, tell me, how much forgiveness do you have left? Because today's saint not only forgave the people who did that to her, She said she would kneel down and kiss their hands if she ever saw them again, and she meant it. Hi, my name is John O'Connor, and this is Everyday Saints. Last week we talked about a man who failed spectacularly, denied the person he loved most, Jesus, three times in a single night, and was restored anyway. That was Saint Peter. This week, we are going somewhere different. We are talking about a woman who didn't fail, who did nothing wrong, who had suffering handed to her at age seven before she even understood what suffering was. And somehow, on the other side of all of it, became one of the most joyful, peaceful, and beloved human beings anyone who met her had ever encountered. Her name was Josephine Bikita. Now, parts of her story are going to be difficult to hear. I'm not going to sanitize them because they matter. They are the whole point. But stay with me, because where this story ends up is unlike anything else I've come across putting the show together. This is the story of St. Josephine Bakita. We're going back to Sudan. The year is somewhere around 1869. A little girl is born into a loving, prosperous family in a small village. Her father is the brother of the village chief. She has brothers and sisters, including a twin. She grows up surrounded by people who love her. She would describe her early childhood years later with these words, I lived a very happy and carefree life without knowing what suffering was. So sit with that sentence for a second because you need to hold on to it for the rest of this episode. She had a name, a real name given to her by her parents. We don't know what it was because what happened to her at the age of seven or eight was so traumatic, so sudden, so violent. that she had forgotten it. The terror of a single morning erased her own name from her memory entirely. We know her only by the name her kidnappers gave her, Bakita. In Arabic, it means fortunate. They said it as a joke, a mocking, cruel joke. A little girl being torn away from her family and marched into slavery and they called her Fortunate. She would spend the rest of her life accidentally proving them right, but that part comes later. In 1877, two slave traders arrived in the village. Bikita's older sister had already been abducted two years earlier. Now, it was her turn. She was seven or eight years old, barefoot, and forced to start walking, not for a day, not for a week, hundreds of miles on foot through the Sudanese desert to a slave market in central Sudan. Picture what that actually looked like. Relentless heat during the day, bitter cold at night. rocky ground to walk on barefoot. No familiar faces, no mother, no father, no sister. Just the men who had taken her, moving through a landscape she didn't recognize, toward a destination she couldn't even begin to imagine. I assume she would have been crying at first, then too exhausted to cry, then just walking, because stopping meant being beaten or left behind. That's what the first chapter of her life outside her village looked like. A child learning to survive by just putting one foot in front of the other and nothing else. At the slave market, she was sold for the first time, then sold again, then again. Over the next 12 years, Josephine was bought and sold over a dozen times, passed from owner to owner like a piece of furniture because that is exactly how she was treated. Some owners were indifferent, others were brutal. Her first owner gave her to her daughter as a maid. The work itself was tolerable until one day she accidentally offended the owner's son, possibly for something as small as maybe breaking a dish. The punishment was a beating so severe she couldn't move for a month. When she recovered, she was sold again. Think about the psychology of that for a child. Already no power, no family, no name. and now learning that even the smallest mistake could end in violence. She would have had to learn to become invisible, to speak quietly, to brace herself constantly, to never fully relax because you never knew when it was coming. She tried to escape once. She and another girl hid in a tree trying to evade their captors. They were found and sold again. Freedom was literally within arms reach and then gone. Then came the owner who left marks she would carry for the rest of her life. Literally. She was sold to a Turkish general whose household was cruel to their slaves. She would later say, during all the years I stayed in that house, I do not recall a day that passed without some wound or other. When a wound from the whip began to heal, other blows would pour down on me. And then came the day that is almost impossible to describe. The general's wife decided she wanted her slaves permanently marked. While a woman held a whip ready, another woman drew patterns on Bakhita's skin with flour and then cut into her flesh with a blade, 114 times, rubbing salt into each wound so the scars would stay open and permanent. I want to be careful here. I'm not telling you this for shock value. I'm telling you because these scars were still on her body 60 years later when people who loved her were lining up to say goodbye to her. Because the story of what she did with those scars is the whole point of this episode. Somehow, and I mean somehow, they didn't define her. In 1883, the Turkish general sold Bikito one more time. This time to an Italian man, the Italian vice consul working in Sudan at the time. And something completely different happened. The first thing this man did was give Paquita proper clothing. That's it. That's the whole gesture. A piece of clothing. I know that sounds small, but understand what it meant to someone who had spent years being treated as property. A man looked at her and thought, This person deserves basic dignity and he acted on it. He didn't beat her, he didn't punish her for mistakes. He spoke to her like a person. When she made the kind of errors that had previously earned her a month of recovery, nothing happened. No whip, no punishment, just a man who apparently believed that the human being in front of him was exactly that, a human being. For Bikita, who had learned to brace for pain every single day for years. This must have been almost incomprehensible at first. She would have been waiting for it, waiting for the moment the kindness revealed itself as something else, a trick, a pause before something worse, but it never came. And for the first time since she was seven years old, Josephine Paquita felt something she had almost forgotten existed. She felt safe. When this man eventually had to return to Italy, Bacchita begged to go with him. Think about what that says. She was leaving the only continent she had ever known, the country where her family might still be alive somewhere, heading to a place she had never seen, whose language she definitely didn't speak, whose customs she had no idea about. And she went willingly because she trusted this man and because anything Anything was better than what she was leaving behind. They arrived in Italy in 1885. Bacchita eventually ended up working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Venice, caring for a little girl she clearly loved. When the family needed to travel abroad for business, they placed Bacchita and the little girl in the care of group of Catholic sisters in Venice, a religious order who ran a school and a house of formation for people preparing for baptism. and something started happening to Paquita that nobody had engineered or planned. She would later describe it this way, even before she ever walked into a church, even back in Sudan as a child, she had looked at the stars at night, at the mountains, at the natural world around her and felt overwhelmed by the sense that someone had made all of it. That there was a presence behind everything she could see. She just didn't know his. name. Seeing the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the beauties of the universe, she said, I would say to myself, who could be the master of all these beautiful things? And I felt a strong desire to see him, know him, and pay him my respects. The sisters gave her a name for what she had been looking for her entire life. And Bikita, who had survived kidnapping, slavery, and torture, quietly, privately, completely fell in love with God. In 1889, the family decided they were moving back to Sedan permanently and they expected Paquita to come with them. But Paquita said, no, I want you to feel the weight of that moment. This woman had been told where to go and what to do every single day since she was seven years old. Every time a decision was made about her life, where she would live, who would own her, what she would do. She had no sec, no choice, no power. And now, for the first time in her adult life, she was using her voice. She said, and I love how she said this, there is no hesitation in it at all. No, I cannot return to Africa because I would not be able to profess my faith in the Lord. I love the lady and her little girl very much, but I cannot lose my God, so I am remaining. The family. spent three days trying to change her mind. They appealed to loyalty, to affection, to everything uh they had shared together. Bikita didn't move an inch. The case went all the way to an Italian court. And here's where I need you to picture this scene. A Sudanese woman, formerly enslaved, no family in Italy, no money, no legal standing, no powerful friends. standing in a courtroom in 1889 essentially saying, I am a person, I am free, and I am choosing where I go next. On November 29th, 1889, the court agreed with her. The ruling was remarkable because slavery had been outlawed in Sudan before Bakhita's birth and Italian law had never recognized slavery as legal. The court declared that Bakhita had never legally been a slave. She had been treated as property for 12 years and a court was now telling her, in the eyes of the law, you were always free. You just didn't know it yet. For the first time in her adult life, Josephine Bikita was free. And what did she do with that freedom? She stayed exactly where she was, with the sisters, by choice. On January 9th, 1890, she was baptized and received her first Holy Communion. She was given the baptismal name Josephine Margaret Fortunata. Fortunata, the Latin word for fortunate. Bakita Fortunata, the name her kidnappers gave her as a cruel joke. Now her name before God. After she knelt down and kissed the baptismal font, the stone basin that held the water she had just been baptized in. and said, here I became a daughter of God. Bacchita formally joined the religious sisters and took her final vows in 1896. A few years later, she was assigned to a convent in a small town in Northern Italy, and she spent the next 42 years of her life there. Now you may ask, doing what? Well, cooking and answering the door. That's it. No famous sermons, no great writings, no dramatic missions to some far off places. She cooked meals and she opened the door when people knocked. And people came from all over the region just to have her open that door. Not for advice, not for a theological conversation, just to see her, to be near her, to have that specific woman with her specific smile look at them and say, hello. Children would crowd around her whenever she appeared. They would follow her through the corridors of the convent, pull at her clothing, and climb on her. A woman who had been denied her own childhood, giving other children something they would remember for the rest of their lives. When people asked her how she was doing, especially in her final years when her health was failing, her answer never changed. She'd say, as the master desires. Not resignation, not defeat. just genuine peace, the kind of peace that made strangers stop and stare. She became known throughout the whole region. The locals had a name for her, Madre Moreta, their little dark mother, said with complete affection, the kind of nickname that only sticks when people love you. During World War II, when the towns around them were being bombed, the people of her town felt protected by her presence, and their town was spared. She didn't do dramatic things. She just lived fully, warmly, gratefully every single day. A woman with 114 scars on her body who smiled at every single person who came to her door. When people asked her about the years of slavery, she always ended up in the same place every single time. She said, and I'm paraphrasing from the original Italian here, If I were ever to meet the men who kidnapped me, even the ones who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands, because without all of it, I would never have found God. In her final days, Bikita was confined to a wheelchair. Nearly 80 years old, and the body that had survived forced marches, beatings, and torture, finally giving out. And in her last hours, Her mind went somewhere none of the people around her expected. She cried out, the chains are too tight. Loosen them a little, please. The chains, the real physical iron chains from her childhood coming back into her mind as her body failed. After 50 years of peace, after 50 years of smiling at strangers and welcoming children and answering that door. The wounds of her earliest years surfaced one final time. I think that's one of the most honest details in this entire story because it tells us something important. Bikita's extraordinary peace was never the same thing as forgetting. She remembered, the body remembered, the chains were real and they left marks that didn't disappear just because she had chosen not to be defined by them. And then, A moment later, she came back to herself. Someone nearby said to her gently, today is Saturday. Saturday is the day dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus in Catholic tradition. And Bikita's face changed. Yes, I am so happy, Our Lady, Our Lady. Those were her last words. From chains to Our Lady, from the worst memory of her entire life, to the name of the person she loved most. That is where she landed at the very end. She died on February 8th, 1947. For three days, thousands of people came to say goodbye to their madre Moreta, their black mother. She was declared a saint in the year 2000. All right, back on the porch. Now... I've been thinking about how to say this next part since I started researching her story. Because, well, I don't want to wrap it up too neatly. Bikita's life doesn't deserve a tidy bow. And here's what I keep coming back to. She didn't get what she deserved. She deserved a normal childhood. She deserved to grow up in that village with her family, knowing her own name, living the happy and carefree life that she described. None of what happened to her was fair. None of it was just, none of it was her fault. And if you're sitting there thinking, well, she found God through it all, so maybe it was worth it. Well, I want to push back on that hard because that framing turns her suffering into a transaction. Like the pain had to happen to get to the good ending. And that's not what her story is about. Her story is about what she chose to do with suffering she never asked for. She could have chosen bitterness. Nobody would have blamed her. She had more justification for bitterness than almost any human being I have ever read about. The scars were there every single day. She couldn't forget. She couldn't pretend. But she chose something else. She chose to look at her entire life, all of it, the worst of it included, and find a thread of something she could only describe as grace. Not because the suffering was good, but because she refused to let it be the only thing. I'll be honest with you, I have carried bitterness over things that look embarrassingly small next to what Bikita endured. Things I told myself I had every right to be angry about. And maybe I did, but here's what I've noticed, and maybe you've noticed this too. The bitterness never actually fixed anything. It didn't change what happened. It didn't heal my wounds. It just became weight. Extra weight I was just carrying around on top of everything else I'm dealing with. Bikita isn't telling us suffering doesn't matter. She's telling us bitterness doesn't help. There is a difference, and it's worth sitting on. The practical challenge for this week is this. Think of one thing you are still carrying bitterness about. Don't dismiss it. It may be genuinely serious, but ask yourself honestly. Is the bitterness serving you? Is it protecting you? Or is it just weight? You don't have to have the answer. Just ask the question honestly. Bikita sat with far harder questions than that, and she came out smiling. Now it's time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Josephine Bikita. Thank you for a story that doesn't let us look away from suffering, but also doesn't let us stay there. For everyone listening right now who is carrying wounds that they didn't ask for, remind them that the scars don't have to be the last word. That you can do something with a broken life that a perfect one might never make room for. And for anyone who has ever been used, discarded, or treated as less than human, let them know they are seen, they are known, and they are not defined by what was done to them. We love you, even when we don't understand you. Amen. One more thing before we go, Josephine Bikita is the patron saint of Sudan, the only saint originally from that country. She is also the patron saint of victims of human trafficking and modern slavery. That second one is worth pausing on because human trafficking isn't a history lesson. It is happening right now in 2026 in every country in the world, including this one in America. Tens of millions of people are living in modern slavery today. Bakita's feast day, February 8th, has been set apart by the Catholic Church as the World Day of Prayer against human trafficking. If you want to do something concrete with what you heard today, maybe look up an organization fighting trafficking in your area. There are good ones in almost every city. The girl who was kidnapped and sold became the Patriot Saint of everyone who was kidnapped and sold. Yeah, I don't think that's an accident. That is episode two of Everyday Saints. If Makita's story moved you, share it with one person, just one. Someone who might need to hear that suffering doesn't have to produce bitterness. Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely helps more people find the show. Next week, a man who had wealth, status, and the admiration of everyone around him and walked away from all of it. His story is one of the most unexpected in the entire history of the church. I'm John O'Connor, thanks for sitting on the porch with me, see you next week.