Saint Josephine Bakhita Medal Necklace – Patron Saint of Human Trafficking Survivors & Sudan

Saint Josephine Bakhita, Patron Saint of Human Trafficking Survivors and Sudan

Josephine Bakhita was born around 1869 in Darfur, Sudan, and kidnapped by slave traders at age seven, who gave her the name Bakhita, meaning "fortunate one," a cruel irony given what followed. She was sold and resold several times before an Italian consul purchased her in 1883 and brought her to Italy two years later. Placed with a family whose daughter she accompanied to a convent school run by the Canossian Sisters in Venice, she was drawn to Catholicism and baptized in 1890. When her former owners tried to take her back to Africa, Italian courts ruled that slavery had been illegal on Italian soil even before her arrival, and freed her outright. She entered the Canossian order in 1893, professed vows in 1896, and spent the rest of her life at their convent in Schio, cooking, sewing, and caring for the community. She was canonized in 1998, and in 2015 Pope Francis designated her feast day as the International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking.

A Gift For...

• A survivor of human trafficking or modern slavery
• Someone who works in anti-trafficking advocacy or victim support
• A person who found freedom or safety later in life than they should have
• Immigrants and refugees rebuilding a life in a new country
• Anyone from Sudan or of Sudanese heritage
• A person who chose their faith deliberately, as an adult, with nothing forcing their hand

A Confirmation Gift for Josephine

Engrave her medal with a confirmation name and date, or a short phrase like "Free Indeed." Bakhita suits confirmation especially well for a candidate choosing faith on their own terms, the same way she did as an adult with no one making the choice for her.

The Saint Josephine Bakhita Medal

The medal shows Bakhita in her Canossian habit, haloed, holding a cross and a spray of flowers. The natural gold or silver of the metal forms the illustration itself. Black ink is applied to the pendant surface and the metal shows through as the image. A shatterproof liquid glass coating seals the surface. The result has a depth and precision that printed medals don't achieve.

Personalization and Engraving

Reverse engraving available in Tangerine cursive, 2 lines, 20 characters max each. Well-suited pairings: a name with "Free Indeed," or a freedom or citizenship date paired with "Fortunate One."

Saint Josephine Bakhita's feast day is February 8th, now observed worldwide as a day of prayer against human trafficking. She spent nearly fifty years in the same convent, a woman once sold as property who died free, in a place she'd chosen for herself.

Related Devotions for Freedom Found Later

Saint Moses the Black Medal. Moses was also enslaved as a young man before the violent path his life took afterward, and his eventual conversion in the desert makes him one of the few saints in this catalog who shares Bakhita's starting point, even though their stories diverge sharply from there.