Today A Prayer For The Liberation Of Slaves

If today were not a Sunday we would be celebrating the feast of St Josephine Bakhita. we can however remember her life and ask her intercession. We can also pray for those who, as she did, endure the injustice of slavery. As we all know slavery is as much a reality today as it was in the past, although it is hidden today. Even here in Ireland there are men and women enslaved to others - in the sex industry, in family homes working for little or nothing and held captive by their employers. As we pray for those afflicted we should also keep our eyes open, for all we know someone could be enslaved not very far from us.

The Problem Of Slavery

It's amazing how, despite the many many changes which have take place in the world in the last thousand years, how very little things actually change. Yes, we are technologically more advanced, and yes, we have lost many skills, particularly artistic skills; and yet the structure of society has changed in many places. Yet human nature has not changed very much, and neither have many human problems.

Reflecting on yesterday's post - on St Raymond's work among the slaves and his assisting St Peter Nolasco to found the Mercedarians,  I see that slavery is as big a problem today as it was in their's. No longer officially approved by society, and hidden away, slavery continues to be a scourge around the world, even in the technologically advanced democracies of the west. This means that the Church must continue to include in her pastoral ministry those being trafficked and oppressed in a slave trade which is as insidious as ever, but perhaps more advanced in nature. The work of our two Orders founded to help and free slaves - the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians, is still vital in the life of the Church, carrying out the original intentions and plans of their founders. 

Today you might say a prayer for all those who are enslaved, remembering that you may well have met someone who is a slave and not too far from you. Let us also remember the members of the two Orders who continue to work in this area, and all who are dedicating their lives to liberating those enslaved today.

Slavery: It Hasn't Gone Away

The feast of St Josephine Bakhita!  And what a wonderful Saint she is.  If you do not know the story of her life Wikipedia offers a good summary.  Pope Benedict speaks of her as a witness to hope in his encyclical Spe Salvi.  His words are worth quoting in full:

Yet at this point a question arises: in what does this hope consist which, as hope, is “redemption”? The essence of the answer is given in the phrase from the Letter to the Ephesians quoted above: the Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were “without God in the world”. To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope. 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. The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually 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; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. 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.” 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 did not wish to be separated again from her “Paron”. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, 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.

Later this morning at Mass, we will venerate a relic of St Josephine, as we pray for those who today live as slaves - and I am not speaking in a metaphorical sense.  Slavery continues today, and it may come as a surprise that there are people who are enslaved in Ireland. 

We all know of those poor women who have been trafficked and forced to work as prostitutes – sex trafficking is a serious problem in the world today.  But the more “traditional” practice of slavery also continues as men and women are “owned” by people and families and forced to work without pay, hidden away from the general population.  The recent case of the travellers in the UK is one such example, but  there are many other cases, perhaps not very far from us.  “Respectable” people have brought foreign workers into Ireland with promises of work and good conditions; their passports have been taken and they are forced to work for little or no pay while living in dreadful conditions.  This is a side of modern Ireland which rarely gets coverage: it is hidden like a dirty little secret. 

It has been almost two centuries since William Wilberforce and his colleagues finally managed to rid slavery from our country - Ireland and the UK were one State then.   Yet the scandal of this injustice continues.  St Josephine is a worthy patron of those still enslaved, but she also urges us to do what we can to rid the world of this evil, to respect all people, to give them what is due to them, and to ensure that all can live their lives in freedom.

In The Image of God

I was hoping to get a post in yesterday to reflect on the first reading of the Mass from Genesis with the feast of the day the lovely St Josephine Bakhita, but I did not get the time.  However that won't stop me.  I have a few minutes now.  I might get another post in later about today's readings.

Yesterday's first reading brought us the second part of the Creation week story culminating in the creation of human beings and then the Sabbath day - the day of rest.  There is a lot which can be said, but taking the cue from the feast of the day our minds have to turn to the nature and dignity of the human person.  St Josephine Bakhita was born in the Sudan around 1868/1869.  When she was around seven she was kidnapped by Arabs and sold into slavery, like so many Africans at the time.  Her early years remained somewhat of a mystery and in the trauma of the experience she even forgot her own name - a young slave with neither history or an identity.  The slave traders called her Bakhita which means lucky, though how they could conclude she was lucky at that point in time is a mystery.  According to one biographer she was forcibly converted to Islam.

Providence, however, led her to a good Italian family who brought her to Italy and her encounter with the Church.  She found her freedom, was baptised into the Church and then entered the Canossian Sisters of Charity where she lived a life of great holiness.   Though she bore physical scars from her years of slavery, including over a hundred marks scored into her body, her suffering did not prevent her from finding her freedom from the pain and traumatic memories through her faith in the love of God - she was a woman of great serenity and joy.   When she was being baptised she chose Josephine as her name - in this she reclaimed her identity - but now it was an identity firmly centred in Christ.

St Josephine's story is one of a human being, created in the image and likeness of God, forced by other human beings into a life of degradation, but set free to find the breath of God living within her, and relying on that, discovering the life of grace and the presence of her loving Redeemer.   Every human person, at every stage of life, regardless of the status society puts on them or the state of their health is worthy of the profound respect due to one created in the image and likeness of God and within whom the breath of God is alive. The attempt to categorise human beings is offensive to their dignity.  

The efforts of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and her eugenics movement which inspired such disciples as Adolf Hitler and company, have managed to create a hierarchy of value when it comes to human persons.  For Sanger, like the Arabs who kidnapped St Josephine, race determined whether one was fully human or not, whether you possessed the full rights and privileges of humanity or not: it even decided whether you were free or a commodity.  Sanger's ideas inspired Hitler who murdered Jewish people because they were less human, and today her sons and daughters use the same criteria in murdering unborn children.  These people perish because others fail to see, or to acknowledge, that they are created in the image and likeness of God.