The legacy of St. Josephine Bakhita: World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking

Today is the annual World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking. The day of prayer is celebrated in the Catholic Church worldwide every Feb. 8, the feast of African-born St. Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese-Italian Canossian religious sister active in Italy for 45 years, after having been a slave in Sudan. In 2000 she was declared a saint by the Catholic Church. In 2015, Pope Francis designated Feb. 8 as St. Josephine’s feast day, and as the World Day of Prayer, Reflection and Action Against Human Trafficking. This year will be the sixth iteration. She is also the patron saint of Sudan.

There will be a “Together against trafficking” march Feb. 9, which will start at 10 a.m. from Castel Sant’Angelo and end in St. Peter’s Square at 12 noon local time.

St. Josephine Bakhita was born in 1869 in the west Sudanese village of Olgossa in the Darfur region of Sudan. She was a member of the Daju people and her uncle was a tribal chief. Due to her family lineage, she grew up happy and relatively prosperous, saying that as a child, she did not know suffering (https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=5601).

“Historians believe that sometime in February 1877, Josephine was kidnapped by Arab slave traders,” reports Catholic Online, a project of Your Catholic Voice Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, based in Bakersfield California..

“Although she was just a child, she was forced to walk barefoot over 600 miles to a slave market in El Obeid. She was bought and sold at least twice during the gruelling journey.

“For the next 12 years she would be bought, sold and given away over a dozen times. She spent so much time in captivity that she forgot her original name.

“As a slave, her experiences varied from fair treatment to cruel. Her first owner, a wealthy Arab, gave her to his daughters as a maid. The assignment was easy until she offended her owner’s son, possibly for the crime of breaking a vase. As punishment, she was beaten so severely she was incapacitated for a month. After that, she was sold.

“One of her owners was a Turkish general who gave her to his wife and mother-in-law who both beat her daily. Josephine wrote that as soon as one wound would heal, they would inflict another.

“She told about how the general’s wife ordered her to be scarred. As her mistress watched, ready with a whip, another woman drew patterns on her skin with flour, then cut into her flesh with a blade. She rubbed the wounds with salt to make the scars permanent. She would suffer a total of 114 scars from this abuse.

“In 1883, the Turkish general sold her to the Italian Vice Consul, Callisto Legani. He was a much kinder master and he did not beat her. When it was time for him to return to Italy, she begged to be taken with him, and he agreed.

“After a long and dangerous journey across Sudan, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean, they arrived in Italy. She was given away to another family as a gift and she served them as a nanny.

“Her new family also had dealings in Sudan had when her mistress decided to travel to Sudan without Josephine, she placed her in the custody of the Canossian Sisters in Venice.

“While she was in the custody of the sisters, she came to learn about God. According to Josephine, she had always known about God, who created all things, but she did not know who He was. The sisters answered her questions. She was deeply moved by her time with the sisters and discerned a call to follow Christ.

“When her mistress returned from Sudan, Josephine refused to leave. Her mistress spent three days trying to persuade her to leave the sisters, but Josephine remained steadfast. This caused the superior of the institute for baptismal candidates among the sisters to complain to Italian authorities on Josephine’s behalf.

“The case went to court, and the court found that slavery had been outlawed in Sudan before Josephine was born, so she could not be lawfully made slave. She was declared free.

“For the first time in her life, Josephine was free and could choose what to do with her life. She chose to remain with the Canossian Sisters.

“She was baptized on Jan. 9, 1890 and took the name Josephine Margaret and Fortunata. (Fortunata is the Latin translation for her Arabic name, Bakhita).” St. Josephine professed her vows as a Canossian Sister on Dec. 8, 1896. She died on Feb. 8, 1947.

“Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, explained, “she [St. Josephine] 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 – am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’ Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed’, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.” (Spe Salvi, §3).

Francesca Sabatinelli, of Vatican News, the information system of the Holy See created in June 2015 with the publication of a Motu Proprio by Pope Francis, announcing the creation of a new Dicastery of the Roman Curia: the Vatican Secretariat for Communication, reported today the “numbers paint a grim picture; around the world there are over 40 million victims of modern slavery of which 70 per cent are women, while about 20 per cent are minors.”

Research developed in 2017 by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) found that of the more than “40 million people around the world [who] were victims of modern slavery in 2016 … The research showed that women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting for almost 29 million, or 71 per cent of the overall total,” notes the Diocese of Parramatta in Australia’s New South Wales.

The Catholic Church is joined in speaking out against the evil of human trafficking, by many others, both religious and secular.

The True Story of Canadian Human Trafficking, published in June 2018, was written by my friend Paul Boge, a talented Mennonite Brethren evangelical Christian award-winning book author from Winnipeg. The book, published by Larry Willard, of Castle Quay Books in Pickering, Ont., won three awards last June at the Word Guild annual awards, honouring the best of Canadian Christian writing from 2018. The book won awards in the general market “Life Stories” category, received the Debra Fieguth Social Justice Award and also won the Grace Irwin Award for best book of 2019. N.J. Lindquist and Wendy Elaine Nelles founded the Word Guild in 2002. In 2008, the Word Guild merged with Christian Info Canada (CIC), a registered not-for-profit charitable organization.

Said Boge at the awards last June: “I dedicate the awards to all the survivors of human trafficking and to the victims who need to be rescued. Thank you Joy Smith and all the survivors who helped me with this book. Thank you Larry Norman Willard for publishing the book. Thank you Steve Bell and all the endorsers the book. Thank you Melissa McEachern and Lorie Hartshorn for all your promotion of the book. Thank you Joel Oosterman for your help and support. And thank you to all my friends and family for supporting this work … All award money will be donated to the Joy Smith Foundation to raise awareness about human trafficking in Canada and to rescue victims. For more information you can visit http://www.joysmithfoundation.com.

Boge went onto say, “Human trafficking is happening in every city in Canada. Youth from all backgrounds are at risk. Ninety per cent of all victims of human trafficking in Canada are born and raised in Canada. May God continue to raise up people to fight human trafficking.”

It was little more than four years ago in October 2015, an emergency room doctor in the United States reported finding a small RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, the size of a grain of rice, implanted under the skin of a human trafficking victim he was treating, after getting a triage note that said, “I have a tracker in me.” Each RFID chip is encased in a small capsule, which also contains a copper antenna coil and a capacitor. The chip stores a unique binary number that is transmitted to the scanner.

Human trafficking, while an often hidden problem, is in reality a scourge across a wide spectrum. “The hospitality industry is highly vulnerable to human traffickers especially when it comes to child sexual exploitation and forced prostitution, forced criminality, domestic servitude,” says the EHL Swiss School of Tourism & Hospitality, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Where I have worked for the last five years almost at the Quality Inn & Suites in Thompson, Manitoba, front desk employees and other management and staff receive training such as “DoesYourHotelKnow,” an awareness campaign by ECPAT-USA (formerly End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, based in Bangkok founded in 1990) that alerts hotels and travellers alike to educate themselves about the signs of sex trafficking, with a call to action (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=KllVVJ4seBA&feature=emb_logo).

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Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote:  “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an  Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican  Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of  using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren.  While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

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Today marks the feast day of the remarkable Saint Gianna Beretta Molla – pediatrician, mother and a powerful pro-life witness both in her life and death

April 28 marks the feast day of the remarkable Italian 20th century saint, Gianna Beretta Molla, who was canonized by now Saint Pope John Paul II on May 16, 2004. The miracle recognized to canonize Gianna Molla involved a 35-year-old Brazilian mother, Elizabeth Comparini Arcolino, who sustained a tear in her placenta that drained her womb of all amniotic fluid. Because a normal term of pregnancy is 40 weeks,  Arcolino was told by her doctors the baby’s chance of survival was “nil.” Arcolino said she prayed to Gianna Molla asking for her intercession, and was able to deliver a healthy baby girl, Gianna Maria, on May 31, 2000, despite the lack of amniotic fluid.

The case of the miracle was studied by the Consulta Medica of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and on April 10, 2003 it was determined that, despite the grave prognosis for the fetus and the mother as the result of the total loss of amniotic fluid at the 16th week of gestation, and despite medical treatment that failed to alleviate and was inadequate for such a grave situation, the positive outcome of the pregnancy, both healthy mother and healthy child, was unexplainable in medical terms. The decree super miraculo was promulgated by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the presence of now Saint Pope John Paul II on Dec. 20, 2003.

Gianna Beretta was born in Magenta, about 24 kilometres west of Milan, on Oct. 4, 1922, as the 10th of Alberto and Maria Beretta’s 13 children. The name Gianna derives from the Hebrew, and means “God is gracious.”

During high school and her undergraduate years in university, she applied her faith in apostolic service among the youth of Catholic Action and charitable work among the elderly and needy as a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

After earning degrees in medicine and surgery from the University of Pavia in 1949, she opened a medical clinic in Mesero, near Magenta, in 1950. She specialized in pediatrics at the University of Milan in 1952 and thereafter gave special attention to mothers, babies, the elderly and poor.

She first met Pietro Molla, an engineer, factory director and fellow member of Catholic Action, who was 10 years older than her and would become her future husband, just in passing, in September 1949. But it was a meeting more than five years later on Dec. 8, 1954 – the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and the 100th anniversary of the day on which Pope Pius IX solemnly defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception – which proved to be the decisive moment in the attraction that was developing. Both had been invited to the first mass of a mutual friend, Father Lino Garavaglia. They were married on Sept. 24, 1955, in the Basilica of St. Martin in Magenta. In November 1956, she gave birth to Pierluigi, followed by Maria Zita, known as Mariolina, in December 1957, and Laura in July 1959.

In September 1961 towards the end of the second month of her pregnancy with a fourth child, Gianna Emanuela, she developed a fibroma in her uterus.

She rejected the possibility of having an abortion to save her own life, instead opting for risky surgery, before which she told Pietro, “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child – I insist on it.” Gianna Emanuela was born on April 21, 1962. Her mother, Gianna Beretta Molla, died a week later on April 28, now her feast day, as the result of complications from the pregnancy. She was 39. Gianna Emanuela, like her mother, became a doctor, and is a geriatrician living in Milan. There is also now a Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild, founded by Catholic laymen who saw a need for physicians and other healthcare workers to bring their faith into their lives and medical practices in a more pronounced way. The mission of Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild, based in San Diego, California, is to unite and encourage Catholic physicians, and those in the healthcare profession, to promote and defend Catholic principles in a public way by word and example, and to inspire sanctification in their lives.

“Conscious immolation” was the phrase used by now Blessed Pope Paul VI to define the self-sacrificing act of Gianna Beretta Molla, remembering her at the Sunday Angelus of Sept. 23, 1973 as, “A young mother from the Diocese of Milan, who, to give life to her daughter, sacrificed her own, with conscious immolation.”

Pietro Molla, then 91, was present at the canonization ceremony in St. Peter’s Square in front of over 100,000 people for Gianna Beretta Molla on May 16, 2004, marking the first time in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church that a husband had witnessed his wife’s canonization. The entire Arcolino family was also present for the canonization.

Along with  Saint Pope John Paul II , Saint Gianna Beretta Molla has been named patron saint of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September, which Pope Francis is scheduled to attend during his first papal visit to the United States.

In 1979, Saint Pope John Paul II  was the first pope to visit Philadelphia, where he said mass on Logan Circle for nearly one million people filling the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In 1994, he celebrated the first World Meeting of Families in Rome, which aimed to strengthen the bonds of family across the globe. Upon his canonization a year ago on April 27, 2014, he was declared “the pope of the family.” Saint Gianna Beretta Molla is the patron saint for mothers, physicians and unborn children.

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