Abbey-Roads2

Yo! 

Traditionalists I worked with in the bookstore I once managed, made fun of me for putting out books on black saints for Black History Month.  Some very conservative people do not believe African-Americans need a special month of their own.  Indeed, some very nice people, white and black, don’t realize they are racists either.  I think if secular culture celebrates black people who have made history, we Catholics ought to celebrate black people who made it into the calendar of saints.

That said,  I completely overlooked St. Josephine Bkhita’s feast day this year!  (February 7)  She is one saint our Holy Father refers to by name in his recent encyclical, Spes Salvi.

St Josephine Bakhita

As a little girl she was captured in Sudan and forced into slavery.  Having the good fortune to be ‘owned’ by an Italian family, she was able to enter a convent of Canossian Sisters as a religious, responding to Our Lord’s call.  He chose her from birth, through her terrible ordeal and suffering, to be His bride.

That is so awesome to me.  Treated like an animal, she suffered abuse greater than most of us are able to comprehend.  She was dehumanised and treated as a commodity or a functional piece of livestock.

She is a patron for her Sudan, the poor of Darfur suffering genocide in our own time.  She is a patron of the abused, and the enslaved through sexual exploitation.  St. Bakhita is also the patron of our Afro-American brothers and sisters, descendants of slaves.  Her life can help us understand better the anguish of being kidnapped from their homeland and families, and sold into slavery. 

White people have difficulty understanding black people living under the burden of their heritage.  (Even the most affluent and successful people of color experience a sense of being ‘other’ by society.  It’s peculiar to Americans, although elsewhere in the world, not so much.  I know people will get angry with me for saying that however.  You just have to have been marginalized at one point in your life to understand it.)  Many believe, because of guaranteed equal rights, all the sins of the past should be forgotten.  Try to tell the same thing to the Jew whose family died in the Nazi concentration camps, or the Cambodian refugee - victims of that ‘other’ genocide… an effect remains in the unconscious of their descendants.  Unless one comes from a background of terror and abuse, one cannot fathom it’s dreadful legacy.

St. Bakhita is one who witnesses to the Lord’s providential design in suffering and abuse and slavery.  She shines with the healing mercy of the One who emptied Himself and took the form of a slave.  Her redemption from slavery, and exaltation to the glories of Heaven, give hope to all of us who suffer the ignominious slavery to sin, yet on a more natural level, those who are the descendants of slavery, and those who find themselves enslaved today - children exploited for labor or sex throughout the third world.

Go to the Vatican website for a brief history on the life of St. Bakhita.  Pray to her, asking her intercession that we may all live as brothers and sisters, without hatred, in peace.