نقلا عن الراي العام : يحي العوض و "الشتات السوداني: مفاجآت البحث عن الجذور..!"

Quote: Sunday, February 8, 2009February 8: Feast of St. Bakhita of Sudan Today,February 8, is the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita of Darfur, Sudan, canonized by Pope John Paul II in the Jubilee Year 2000. It is an optional memorial on the General Roman Calendar, which means it can be celebrated anywhere in the Church throughout the world. This year the feast is superseded by the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, because as Vatican II reminds us, Sunday is the Lord's Day, the Feast of feasts and the primordial holy day for Christians. Still, because of her continuing significance for Sudan and the Church, it is important to remember her today. St. Bakhita fell victim to human traffickers and was sold multiple times in the slave markets of northern Sudan. She was treated cruelly and inhumanly, scourged and tortured, in a way that left her physically scarred for life. The experience of her kidnapping and enslavement was so traumatic that she forgot her own name, and was renamed Bakhita, "the favored one," by her captors. She was eventually sold to Italians, taken to Venice, catechised, baptized, set free and became a religious sister. St. Bakhita is cited by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent encyclical Spe Salvi as an extraordinary witness of Christian hope. I quoted the words of the Holy Father, illustrated by images of the life of St. Bakhita painted in the chapel of the Diocese of Torit in its compound in Lokichoggio, Kenya in a posting last July. Today, in the wake of the re-eruption of violence in Darfur, I wanted to share a few more photos of her, and a quotation from an article in the December 2008 issue of Traces, the magazine of Communion and Liberation, "Face to Face with His Tenderness," by Antonio Socci. "That day, her owner was bored, so she decided to have the three black girls she'd bought as slaves tortured; they were 10 or 11 years old. Bakhita was held down on the ground while they cut her with a razor 114 times, then filled the wounds with salt. Just like that, for fun, because her Muslim owners considered her a thing. When she was 7 years old, in 1876, she'd been abducted from her Sudanese village and then sold as a slave four times. The only thing she'd ever known was ferocity. "Such is human history without Jesus. Joseph Ratzinger, in his Jesus of Nazareth, explains that before the coming of the Savior, the world was infested by demons. Ferocity and inhumanity dominated everywhere. Then, one day, these words sounded forth: 'I have witnessed the affliction of my people... and have heard their cry... so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore, I have come down to rescue them' (Ex 3:7). 'He showed Himself. He, personally,' 2,000 years ago. And from then on, every day,'in a phenomenon of a different humanity,' Fr. Giussani tells us. Even that unfortunate girl, Bakhita, 'runs into and discovers there a new sentiment of life...We would never have expected it. We never would have dreamed of it. It was impossible.' "Bakhita couldn't have dreamed of it. Through chance circumstances, when she was 16, her owners brought her to Venice, where she met the Canossian sisters. She was struck by their humanity and by the goodness of ta true Christian, a 'man with a heart of gold' (a relative of the man who would become Pope Saint Pius X), who gave her a crucifix. 'In giving it to me,' the girl remembered, 'he kissed it with devotion, and then explained to me that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for us.' Bakhita was dazzled. He died for her? Could it be possible that someone loved her? Yes. She saw it in the faces of 'those saintly mothers who lead me to know God,' especially the sister who instructed her. 'I can't remember her care for me without crying.' When her owners came back for her, Bakhita, who didn't want to lose God, refused for the first time to follow them. On November 29, 1889, the Patriarch of Venice had the Kings' Magistrate intervene, declaring Bakhita free from slavery. She remained in Italy, was baptized, and asked to become a sister; she lived to the age of 78, 'during which time I knew more and more God's goodness to me.' She died in 1947, and was proclaimed a saint in 2000." There is a remarkable correspondence between the story of St. Bakhita, particularly as Antonio Socci recounts it, and the readings for today's Mass. Job emphasizes the misery, the drudgery, the slavery of life without Christ. And the Gospel depicts Jesus in the very act healing us, setting us free, restoring the freshness and newness of life - as he did for Bakhita. This is the transforming power of the Gospel that Paul is obliged to preach, and cursed if he doesn't. Cursed because one cannot possess a message with such liberating force and not share it without horribly diminishing one's own humanity; it would be a betrayal and a contradiction of the very message you guard. It would be like having the cure for AIDS and keeping it to yourself! The reward of which Paul speaks is the incandescent joy of sharing that message with others and watching its regenerative power take effect in their lives. Such joy is so overwhelming and superabundant that there's no room for any other recompense - it would be an insult. That's why Paul can freely make himself the "slave" of those who enable him to experience it. Posted by Fr. Herald Joseph Brock,