Saints Josephine Bakhita and Maria Goretti can teach us (me especially) a lesson in mercy.
I’ve been told I hold a grudge. I don’t carry it around for very long, it’s true, but when a grudge is squarely within my care, I will coddle it like a puppy. The hurt will dissipate—as will my need to “get even”—but while I’m bruised, I’m bitter. It’s very human to feel hurt. But how we handle that hurt is what divides adults from children. And sometimes it takes a child to show us the way.
Maria Goretti was, in many ways, a typical Italian preteen of the early 20th century. She squabbled with her siblings; she could be headstrong and willful. But she was not immune to demanding work, the sting of poverty, and sacrifice for her family. Or to the unwanted attention of men. On July 5, 1902, a neighbor, Alessandro Serenelli, made sexual advances toward 11-year-old Maria, who refused. Serenelli stabbed her 14 times. Maria died the next day, but not before forgiving her attacker.
In the century to follow, the Catholic world would focus, at times too enthusiastically, on Maria’s defense of her chastity, but that is only one part of the story. What makes her life truly resonant was that she, in her final hours of life, pardoned the man who took it from her. “I forgive him,” Maria is reported to have said, “and [I] want him to be in paradise with me someday.”
Her sister-in-faith, Darfurian Josephine Bakhita, was kidnapped by slave traders in 1877 at age 8 and forced to trek 600 miles to Southern Sudan. There she faced horrors too barbaric to be believed, but one indignity certainly stands out: Enduring hundreds of cuts to her back, shoulders, and chest with razors, salt was added to the wounds to ensure scarring. Over 100 patterns were carved into her flesh when it was over. She was also forced to convert to Islam and faced countless beatings from various owners.
But God saved Josephine. She entered the Institute of St. Magdalene of Canossa in 1893 and made her profession three years later. The sisters in their Verona convent provided Josephine with three things: protection, agency, and love—essentials that had been absent from her life since childhood.
And though Josephine Bakhita was plagued with emotional and physical complications from her ordeals, she had this to say of her enslavers, “If I were to meet those slave traders who kidnapped me . . . I would kneel and kiss their hands, for if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian and religious today.”
Josephine Bakhita and Maria Goretti: Our Guides
In our own time, when spite is treated like sport, when anger is omnipresent, looking to luminaries like Josephine Bakhita and Maria Goretti before we fire off an angry text or needless vitriol online is step one. The second is to offer a prayer of thanks to God for loving them—and us—into being.
These two saints continue to inform me. When I am quick to anger, Maria inspires me to consider the ramifications of that anger. She encourages me to be, as the quote says, “to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” In her brief life—again only 11 years on this planet—she has much to teach those of us much older than she ever was.
From Josephine, I learn grit and grace. When my problems seem legion, her life shows me that, ultimately, they’re manageable. Given the state of the world currently, they may even be desirable. When she was robbed of her name, she knew who she was; when she was beaten, she understood that her spirit was unbruised. God bless this remarkable woman!
