Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin

Bakhita was born about 1869 in Darfur in Sudan. At about seven or eight she was kidnapped by slave traders, who gave her the name Bakhita, “fortunate”; she had forgotten her own. Sold several times, she was beaten and marked with over a hundred cuts rubbed with salt. In 1883 the Italian consul in Khartoum bought her and later took her to Italy, where she was nanny to a family near Venice.

When the family wanted to take her back to Africa, she refused, and in 1889 an Italian court declared her free. In 1890 she was baptized as Josephine and in 1893 entered the Canossian Sisters. For most of her remaining years she lived at Schio, as cook, sacristan and doorkeeper, called by the townspeople “Madre Moretta.” She died there on 8 February 1947 and was canonized in 2000.