St Josephine Bakhita. "In my Encyclical Spe Salvi, I wished to present St Josephine Bakhita, the Sudanese saint, as a witness of hope (cf. n. 3) in order to show how the encounter with the God of …More
St Josephine Bakhita.
"In my Encyclical Spe Salvi, I wished to present St Josephine Bakhita, the Sudanese saint, as a witness of hope (cf. n. 3) in order to show how the encounter with the God of Jesus Christ can transform every human being in depth, even in the poorest conditions — Bakhita was a slave — to give him or her the supreme dignity of being a child of God. Rightly, “through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed’, no longer a slave, but a free child of God” (ibid.) And the discovery of Christian hope inspired in her a new and irrepressible desire: “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” (ibid.). The encounter with Christ gives the drive to surmount even those difficulties which seem the most insurmountable." – Pope Benedict XVI. Mosaic from the Trinity Dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.
Source: Lawrence OP on Flickr
"In my Encyclical Spe Salvi, I wished to present St Josephine Bakhita, the Sudanese saint, as a witness of hope (cf. n. 3) in order to show how the encounter with the God of Jesus Christ can transform every human being in depth, even in the poorest conditions — Bakhita was a slave — to give him or her the supreme dignity of being a child of God. Rightly, “through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed’, no longer a slave, but a free child of God” (ibid.) And the discovery of Christian hope inspired in her a new and irrepressible desire: “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” (ibid.). The encounter with Christ gives the drive to surmount even those difficulties which seem the most insurmountable." – Pope Benedict XVI. Mosaic from the Trinity Dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.
Source: Lawrence OP on Flickr