Who was St. Josephine Bakhita?
She was born around 1869 in Darfur, in western Sudan, in a village Franciscan Media calls Olgossa. She was kidnapped by slave traders as a small child. Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican News say she was nine; Pope John Paul II's canonization homily and Franciscan Media say seven. The traders called her Bakhita, "fortunate one," and the name stayed. She was sold five times, in the markets of El Obeid and Khartoum. Two of her owners, the mother and the wife of a general, had her flogged, and Benedict XVI writes that "as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life."
In 1882 (Franciscan Media says 1883) an Italian merchant bought her for Callisto Legnani, the Italian consul in Khartoum. He did not beat her. When he prepared to go home, she asked to go too. "I dared to ask him to take me with him to Italy," she said later. In Italy, in 1884 or 1885 depending on the source, Legnani handed her on to a friend, Augusto Michieli, and she became nanny to the Michielis' small daughter near Mirano in the Veneto.
In 1888 the Michielis went back to Africa on business and left Bakhita and the child with the Canossian Sisters in Venice. There she heard the Gospel for the first time. In Venetian dialect a master is a "paron," and Benedict XVI records that she came to know "there is a 'paron' above all masters, the Lord of all lords." When Signora Michieli came back for her, Bakhita refused to leave. The matter went to court. The Canossians and the Patriarch of Venice stood with her, and the judge ruled that slavery was illegal in Italy, so she had been free since she set foot in the country. On January 9, 1890, the Patriarch baptized and confirmed her and gave her First Communion. She took the name Josephine Margaret Fortunata.
She entered the Canossian novitiate in 1893 and professed her vows in Verona on December 8, 1896. In 1902 she was sent to the convent at Schio, northeast of Verona, and stayed forty-five years as cook, sacristan and doorkeeper. She died of pneumonia on February 8, 1947, and the town mourned her. She was beatified in 1992 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 2000, with 122 others, among them Katharine Drexel and the martyrs of China.
Why Catholics pray to St. Josephine Bakhita for healing and forgiveness
Nothing in her story was fixed by forgetting. She carried the scars to the end. What changed was whom she believed she belonged to. Benedict XVI, in his encyclical on hope, Spe salvi, chose her as his first example of what Christian hope is. She went, he writes, from "the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel" to something else entirely. In his words: "I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good."
That is the healing Catholics ask her for. Not the erasing of a memory, but the discovery of being loved underneath it. She is prayed to by people who were abused as children, by women and men who have been trafficked or used, by migrants far from home, and by anyone whose body still remembers what was done to it.
Then there is forgiveness. She once said, as Vatican News records: "If I were to meet those men who abducted me, or even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands." She said this as an old woman who had been free for decades. It was not expected of her at the start, and it is not expected of you tonight. It is where the road can end.
John Paul II, canonizing her, drew the lesson outward. Through her suffering, he said, she came to understand that "God, and not man, is the true Master of every human being, of every human life," and he called her "a shining advocate of genuine emancipation," a call to act against the violence still done to women and girls, not to accept it. Her patronages follow from that and are traditional, not decreed. Vatican News calls her "patron saint of modern Sudan" and of "all victims of human trafficking." Since 2015 the Church has kept an International Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking on her memorial, February 8, and in his 2025 message for the day Pope Francis wrote: "Together - trusting in the intercession of St Bakhita - we can make a great effort."
How to pray to St. Josephine Bakhita
Her memorial is February 8, an optional memorial on the General Roman Calendar, which means it is kept in many parishes but not all. The nine days before it, January 30 to February 7, are the time for a novena. On the day itself the Church prays for people caught in trafficking, and that is a good intention to carry with you whatever your own trouble is.
Say the prayer below slowly. Then, if you can, tell her one specific thing. She was a doorkeeper for decades; she heard people's troubles at the door and was known in Schio for her gentleness. Pair the prayer with Confession if you carry shame that was never yours, and say so to the priest; and with the Eucharist, which she first received from the Patriarch's hands the day she was baptized.
If what you carry is abuse, trafficking or violence, prayer goes alongside a counselor, a doctor, a shelter or the police; it does not replace them. Bakhita's freedom came through a court, the sisters and a patriarch as well as through grace, and she did not have to choose between them. If you are in danger now, call emergency services first and pray on the way.