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Saved in Hope: St. Josephine Bakhita, St. Peter, and the Good News

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5 February 2010 - 3:09pm — joyce

 -By Jeremy J. Priest

Pope Benedict begins his encyclical about hope with a story of hope from the life of St. Josephine Bakhita – whose feast we celebrate on Monday, the 8th.  “We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God.”  Josephine Bakhita lived without hope because she lived without God. 
Born in Darfur, Sudan sometime around 1869, Josephine was kidnapped at age nine and sold into slavery.  “Eventually,” Benedict relates, “she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled”—bearing 144 scars on her body.  In 1882 she was purchased by an Italian trader who brought her back to Italy. 
 
Benedict continues, “Here, after the terrifying ‘masters’ who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of ‘master’—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name ‘paron’ for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a ‘paron’ above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron’, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father's right hand’. Now she had ‘hope’ —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.”
In Josephine’s life we see illustrated what happens to St. Peter in today’s Gospel.  In the face of Jesus’ goodness, love, generosity, and mercy, Peter knew the depth of his sinfulness, his unworthiness.  Simultaneously, he knew the depth of God’s goodness.  Peter knew his life was good because he was not only awaited by this love, the Love sought him out, personally. 
The pope concludes, “Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed’, no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world—without hope because without God. Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused…she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.”
So it was with St. Peter: “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching men…[and] they left everything and followed him.”