St. Josephine Bakhita

Kidnapped from Darfur as a child, so frightened that she forgot her own name, she was sold several times and scarred by a master's wife before an Italian consul bought her in Khartoum and took her to Italy. Under instruction with the Canossian Sisters in Venice she refused to leave when her owner came for her, and in 1887 the court ruled she had always been free; she was baptized in 1890, entered the Canossians and spent fifty years as cook, sacristan and doorkeeper at Schio. In the account she dictated in 1910 she recalled asking as a child, at the sun, moon and stars, who their master could be, and she said she would kneel and kiss the hands of the slavers, since without them she would not have known God.

Why he matters: The first saint of modern Sudan and the Church's patron for victims of trafficking; Benedict XVI made her story the opening image of hope in Spe Salvi.