A Sudanese girl captured and enslaved by Arab Muslim slavers in the Darfur province circa 1869 A.D.  She was forcibly converted to Islam and given the name "Bakhita" which means "lucky" in Arabic.  She was sold and resold several times and was brutally treated by all her owners.  One Muslim owner whipped her to tattoo her as "his".

Her last owner, an Italian Christian, moved her (escaped more like it) to Italy where she eventually won her freedom through the Italian courts because Catholic Italy didn't recognize the institution of slavery.  She left her owner and joined the Canossians, a religious order.



During her time in Italy she was befriended by a village priest and converted to Catholicism.  After being freed from slavery she entered the Canossians as "Josephine Margarita Afortunada" in 1890 A.D., receiving Holy Communion for the first time from the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice himself.

Saint Bakhita's life as a slave was always that of giving and charity with gentleness and a smile.  She continued these virtues as a religious.

Her legacy was that of transformation that is possible through suffering. Her story of deliverance from physical slavery also symbolizes all those who find meaning and inspiration in her life for their own deliverance from spiritual slavery.  Reflecting her own material life of being forced to convert to Islam and finding peace and love in the arms of Christ as a Catholic.

Hat Tip: Carl Olson of Ignatius Insight Scoop

CVSTOS FIDEI FRIDAY EDITION Early Morning Update Thanks to the Young, Tide Still Turning To Catholicism - Dave Hartline, Am Cth Bishops Want Changes to Health Bill, Will Oppose Bill - Michael O'Brien, The Hill Re-Evaluating US Health Policy: A Catholic Dems Perspective - Eric Brown, Am Cth The Lefts Hostility To Catholicism On Display - Dc. Kandra, The Deacon's Bench Lepanto - Donald R. McClarey, American Catholic Relativism in Europe Has Created Demographic Crisis - Hilary White, LSN Bp Girardeau Blames 'Mentality of Sterility' for Family Life Crisis - Cth Nws Agncy Fr Corapi on the Cause of Todays Meltdown of Western Civ - Steve Jalsevac, LSN Abp Tlhagale: Africa at Risk of Wave of Colonization by Liberalism - Cth Nws Agncy Catholicism Flourishes in Kerala - Tito Edwards, American Catholic Abortion Activist Renewing Bid to Kick Vatican Out of UN - Steven Ertelt, LN Football Player Flagged For His Faith After TD Celebration - Tito Edwards, Am Cth Bonus Commentary and Analysis: Obama Spokesman Falsely Claims Hyde Amendment Stops Abortion - S. Ertelt, LN Notable Commentary and Analysis: The Pope, The Clown and The Cross - Donald R. McClarey, American Catholic Excessive Health Care Profits - Blackadder, American Catholic "Closed Door Session" on Catholic Blogs - Joe Hargrave, American Catholic

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CVSTOS FIDEI MORNING EDITION Send Me Your Poor... - DarwinCatholic, American Catholic SSPX bishops & Mass at Lourdes, Re: The Excommunications - Fr. Z, WDTPRS? Episcopalian Gene's Gay (Catholic) Get-together - Patrick Archbold, CMR Fr. Andrew Greeley: Racism Will Make Obama Lose - Warner Todd Huston, NB Catholic Church Is Falling Into a Muslim Trap - Damian Thompson, Holy Smoke Vatican Won't Open Pope Pius XII Archives For 6-7 Years - Intrntnl Hrld Trbn Obama's Abortion Stance Repels Evangelicals - Julia Duin, Washington Times Shameless Blog Plug of the Day: RealClearReligion Bonus Commentary: Bishop Finn of Kansas City On Fire! - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS? Archbishop Nienstedt of Minneapolis on FOCA & Voting - Fr. Z, WDTPRS? Obama Loving Nuns Blast Archbishop Chaput - Matthew Archbold, CMR Notable Commentary: On These Slippery Slopes - Ryan Harkins, American Catholic Out of Division, a Greater Unity? - David Mills, Inside Catholic Palin, Jesus and Witches??? - Brian Fitzpatrick, NewsBusters Political Intimidation and Persecution - Tito, American Catholic Bonus Video: Gianna Jessen Responds to Obama - Donald R. McClarey, American Catholic Secular News: McCain Slams LA Times for Withholding Obama-Khalidi Tape - Fox News What Is The LA Times Withholding? - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic Checks on 'Joe' More Extensive - Randy Ludlow, Columbus Dispatch France Boosts Military Spending - Edward Cody, Washington Post (Biretta Tip: Lucianne)

CVSTOS FIDEI MORNING EDITION Did the U.S. Commit "Terrorism" in Syria? - Christopher Blosser, American Catholic Cardinal Egan: Abortion Support Equal to Nazism - Catholic News Agency Card. Castrillon Responds to Questions on the TLM - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS? ...more by Shawn Tribe of the New Liturgical Movement... Fr. Geoff Farrow Meets Episcopalian Gene Robinson - David Benett, Per Christum Beyond the Fairness Doctrine - Jesse Walker, Reason God in the Belly - John Zmirak, Inside Catholic Bonus Commentary: Can a Bishop Forbid Ad Orientem - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS? Archbishop Naumann Defends Life - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS? Being Reasonable Doesn't Always Work - Chris Burgwald, American Catholic Political Intimidation and Persecution - Tito, American Catholic All Sacrifices Will Cease But One - Brant Pitre, Singing in the Reign Gobekli Tepe, Worlds First Temple? - Andrew Curry, Smithsonian Secular Commentary: Why Did Neanderthals Have Such Big Noses? - Ewen Callaway, New Scientist (Biretta Tips: Kevin Knight, RealClearReligion, & Lucianne)

The American Catholic blog is the blogosphere's newest entry in the political and cultural dialogue of American. Twelve faithful Christians have joined together to participate in the American experiment by actively and positively engaging in the public square for the betterment of the common good. You say there are already a few Catholic blogs out there that does that? Yes, but what distinguishes us from all the rest is that we will provide thoughtful postings with charity on a daily basis. With fidelity to Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, we hope to positively enhance the dialogue on politics and culture. What about the separation of Church and state? It behooves us to help create a more perfect union, as per the preamble of the constitution. What better way than to bring the teachings of Jesus for the betterment of America? We do not want a theocratic state. What we want is a civilization of charity for our fellow man. Whom better than Jesus to provide the framework for this! Chris Blosser, Chris Burgwald, Walter Cole, Dr. David Curp, myself, Ryan Harkins, Brendan Hodge, Donald R. Mclarey, Peter Park, Joe Potillor, Zach C., and Rusty Tisdale are the faithful Christians serving our Catholic Church by responding to the Second Vatican Council's call for positive engagement to the world. We hope you take the time to visit the blogosphere's newest member, American Catholic. For American Catholic click here.

CVSTOS FIDEI AFTERNOON EDITION The Coptic Conundrum - Raymond Ibrahim, American Thinker An Interview With A Crusader - Deborah Solomon, New York Times Homeschool Victory - Wall Street Journal We Want Real Catholic Schools to Help Form Saints - R. Kumpel, SJVB Polyphonic Propers, Chanted Ordinary - Jeffrey Tucker, New Lit Mov A Tale of Two Parties - Matthew Archbold, Creative Minority Report In Communist China, Echoes of Nazi Berlin - Michael Barone, RCP History's Back - Robert Kagan, The Weekly Standard Colorado To Vote on 'Personhood' - Ted Holteen, Durango Herald Bonus Video: Chinese Christians Arrested in Beijing - Leticia, Cs Nstr Ltt Bonus Commentary: Ukrainian Orthodox Parish turns Greek Catholic - Carlos A. Palad, RC Fr. Ernie Davis Sings Of His Conversion - Matthew Archbold, CMR Friday Abstinence - A Simple Sinner, The Black Cordelias $2M Award Against Planned Parenthood Doctor - T. Baklinski, LSN Bonus News: Christian Schools Demand College Credit - Susan D. James, ABC News Robert Downey Jr. A Papist? - Thomas Peters, American Papist Bonus Apologetics: Hitler's Pope: The Urban Legend - BFHU, The Black Cordelias Religious Commentary: The Sham of Women's Rights Under Shari'a - D.L. Perry, Amrcn Thnkr Secular Commentary: Chinese Root, Root, Root for the Away Team - Francesco Sisci, WaPo 'Path to 9/11' Release Blocked by Clintons - Rick Moran, Amrcn Thnkr Liberal Silence on Georgia - Jacky Kelly, Toledo Blade Hawaiian Extremists Occupy Iolani Palace - Suzanne Roig, Hon Advtsr (Biretta Tips: RealClearPolitics & Lucianne)

I am fascinated by the language of Latin. I don't know it at all except when I attend the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite (Gregorian Rite). It is part of our Christian heritage and I plan (if time allows) to try to teach myself rudimentary Latin someday. Enough can be said that it is the sad state of the public (and Catholic) school system that Latin was eliminated as a core curriculum. Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things, wrote about this fact in today's feature article of First Things: Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua If you took an opinion poll, you’d probably find that the large majority of America’s Latin professors are fairly standard-issue liberals, politically indistinguishable from the rest of the nation’s academics. But, somewhere along the line, the public praise of Latin seems to have become mostly the province of curmudgeons and grumblers. Of romantic conservatives and hopeless nostalgics. Of the fussy old men who stroll along the beach and conjugate, alone, stray tenses of the Latin verbs—amatus sim, amatus sis: I should have been loved, you would have been loved. Amavi, tamen non amatus sum: I loved, but I was not loved. Ah, yes, there’s a picture that expresses the pointlessness of classical languages these days: Latinity as a consolation prize for Victorian bachelors whose unrequited loves are pressed, like faded violets, in one of those nineteenth-century copies of Catullus, bound in limp, purpureal leather. Except, of course, that some of the things that Catullus wrote about weren’t much talked about by the Victorians, unless they used such Latin phrases as peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominandum. And that’s to say nothing of the elegies of Ovid and even less of the epigrams of Martial. In truth, the nineteenth-century translations of ancient writers were not as bad as twentieth-century caricature would paint them. Whenever the narrative of Petronius’ Satyricon got a little too racy, the book would simply switch to the untranslated text—on the principle, I suppose, that if your Latin were good enough to catch what was going on, you were too well educated to be corrupted by it. That’s a principle I wish were still imposed, when I see the magazines in the back rack at the convenience store. But, then, I find I am becoming more and more of a curmudgeon as the years go by. Besides, think of the increased enrollment in classics courses if all sex ads had to read something like tutela valui, the Latin phrase reportedly sported as a belly tattoo by the meretrix honesta with whom Eliot Spitzer recently passed some time in a Washington hotel room. The decline and fall of Latin is so nearly complete that it’s hard to remember just what it is that we have lost. In a radio interview this spring, Silvio Berlusconi remarked, “My Latin is good enough that I believe I could even have a lunch with Julius Caesar.” It’s appropriate, I suppose, that the prime minister of Italy has luncheon-level Latin. The pope’s command of the language is pretty good, too, I hear, despite the fact that he started out life as a German. But outside of this pair in Rome, does anybody else still know the language of the Caesars? I mean, anybody on a prominent public stage? There was a time, and not so long ago, when knowledge of Latin was taken as a fundamental mark of culture: that which distinguished genuinely educated people from, say, journalists and sociology professors. But those days are as gone as gone can be. When Rudyard Kipling published descriptions of Latin classes in his school stories, Stalky and Co., in 1899, he was writing of a time when the entrance exams for the British imperial service and officer corps still gave thousands of marks for the mandatory Latin section. Nobody is held back now for anything by a lack of classical languages. Which is good, I suppose. And yet, Latin was dropped from Western culture’s picture of education for a number of reasons, none of which seem to have turned out particularly well. Thus, for example, practicality was often claimed as a reason to drop the Latin curriculum, but, in the end, concentrating solely on practical things turns out not to be particularly practical. Algebra isn’t practical for most people—when was the last time you were asked to derive the quadratic formula?—but without it in the notion of general education, we’d lose large swaths of the people who go on to higher math. Latin was dismissed, as well, in the name of democracy and anti-elitism, though the objective standards of a classical education actually provided a path for social mobility. Latin was dismissed, for that matter, as unnecessary in the great advance of liberalism that would free us from the dead weight of the past. Something like this seems particularly to have infected Catholic schools, which preserved the Latin curriculum longer than the public schools—only to fling it overboard in the 1960s and 1970s with even greater abandon than some public schools. There’s a superior command of English granted by the study of Latin, but even to make that argument is to admit that Latin requires some practical result. For that matter, there’s plenty to learn from the ancient world’s experience of politics, social life, and art, and yet, again, that’s not, in itself, a reason to demand that students study Latin. Translations will do as well, if that’s all we want, and the real argument for Latin runs deeper than mere practicality. In fact, Latin was a measure of education, not a portion that could be added or dropped. Admittedly a somewhat arbitrary measure, though it kept us tied to the continuity of Western civilization. But without some such measure, the entire idea of education becomes vulnerable to the skeptic’s relativistic question of “Who’s to say?” Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Who’s to say what’s true or false? Who’s to say what knowledge we should share?

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CVSTOS FIDEI EVENING EDITION P. Z. Myers Must Be Fired for Desecrating Our Faith - Jimmy Akin PZ Myers Knows Not What He Does - Patrick Archbold, Crtv Mnrty Rprt Responding to Blasphemy With Love - Margaret Cabaniss, Inside Blog NBC Marches in Lockstep with Gay Agenda - Robert Knight, NwsBstrs The Well-Sheltered Catholic - Steve Skojec, Inside Catholic Humanae Vitae Not Going Away - Musings from a Catholic Bookstore Reflecting on Benedict's WYD Australia Trip - John Allen, ATC Janet Rivera Allowed to Receive Food & Water - Steven Ertelt, LfNws Advice for Wymynpryst Wannabe - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS Anglican Agonies - William Murchison, Washington Times Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Veep - Jay Anderson, Pro Eclessia Bonus Commentary: Is Anti-Catholicism Dead? - Margaret Cabaniss, Inside Blog Traddy Anglicans on Christian Unity - Patrick Archbold, CMR Happy Birthday Humanae Vitae - Hugh McNichol, PewSitter Bonus News: 2011 WYD Spain to Help Christian Identity of Europe - CNA Jeff Miller Celebrates Six Years of Blogging - Jeff Miller, Curt Jester Where are the Feminists on Sex-Selection in America? - LifeSiteNews South Dakota Remains First Abortion-Free State - Chrstn Nws Wr (Biretta Tips: Kevin Knight, The Curt Jester, PewSitter, & Lucianne)

CVSTOS FIDEI EVENING EDITION The Vindication of Humanae Vitae - Mary Eberstadt, First Things McDonald's: Christian View of Marriage "Motivated by Hate" - Reg Guy Bastille Day: Baptism by Blood - John Zmirak, Inside Catholic Remembering the Vendee - Dale Price, Dyspeptic Mutterings McCain Against Gay Adoption Before He Was For It - M. Archbold, CMR Canterbury: Christian Doctrine Offensive to Muslims - B. Farmer, Tlg Aussie Journos Turn Cynical Towards Chaste Catholics - M. Balan, NB McCain Plans "Aggressive" Outreach to Catholics - Jay Anderson, PE A Latin Among Easterners: What Gives? - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS Stick the Knife Into Dr. Rowan Williams - Damian Thompson, Hly Smk Bonus Commentary: From Soccer to Seminary - Matthew Archbold, Creative Minority Report When Does the "Clerical State" Begin? - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, WDTPRS The Catholic Left Meets in Philadelphia - Deal Hudson, Inside Catholic The Lambeth Conference Wafflathon - Damian Thompson, Holy Smoke Bonus News: Faith & Family - Jeff Miller, The Curt Jester (Biretta Tips: Pro Eclessia & Lucianne)

CVSTOS FIDEI EVENING EDITION Portrait of a Young Catholic - Rachael Patterson, Sydney Herald The Impending Suicide of a Great Nation - Fr. John Corapi, LfStNws Next Implosion: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - Blck Crdls Aussies Give Pope Kitten to Keep Him Company - Phlppn Dly Inqrr What Does the Pope Do On His Day Off? - Victor Simpson, AP Catholics Pour Into Sydney - ABC The Pope Factor Hits Sydney - Greg Ansley, New Zealand Herald Obama's About Face on Undivided Jerusalem - Rick Moran, AmThnkr An Open Letter to Doug Kmiec from Me - Deal Hudson, Insd Blg Cardinal Pell: No God, No Children - Tito, Custos Fidei Anglicans at Lambeth: What’s at Stake - Jordan Hylden, 1st Thngs Official 2008 World Youth Day Website Bonus Commentary: The Sorry Sport of Pope Bashing - Gerard Henderson, Sydney Herald Notre Dame Alums Behind Catholics for Obama - Deal Hudson, IB Obama's Lack of Catholic Outreach - Jay Anderson, Pro Eclessia Obama Re-invents his Trinity Church History - Ed Lasky, Am Thnkr Liberal Theologians Unleased On Each Other - Sandro Magister, Chs Bonus News: WYD: Transcript of Pope's Press Conference - John Allen, NCRep Kansas Gov. Sebelius eyed for Dem VP - UPI (Biretta Tip: PewSitter)