Book Review: Benedict, Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher

BENEDICT, BALTIMORE AND THE BARBARY PIRATES: The untold, true story of an African slave who became a Christian wonder-worker, by Patrick Noonan OFM. Choice Publishing. 2025. 82pp.

In his new book, Franciscan Father Patrick Noonan promises to take us on “trails that few have travelled before”, presumably referring to the world of literature. That trail leads to the amazing story of St Benedict Manasseri, also called St Benedict the Black, who was born a slave in Sicily of African parents. He was our Saint of the Month in the April 2025 issue.

Before the reader gets there, Fr Noonan provides a brief overview of slavery in the second millennium. The Transatlantic slave trade, the human trafficking from Africa to the Americas, has been extensively covered. Christians were at the forefront of that evil, including those of Catholic nations like Spain and Portugal.

Less well-known is the Trans-Saharan slave trade. Fr Noonan notes that the Arab enslavement of Africans lasted longer and more extensive than its European counterpart, but left fewer traces because most male slaves were castrated and therefore could not procreate.

Africa was not the only source of slaves; unfortunate people were abducted from anywhere — Europe, India, China, Kurdistan and so on. The only restriction was that no Muslim was allowed to be captured. This may explain, at least in part, the mass conversions to Islam in regions along the African slave route.

Fr Noonan also tells the story of Protestant Irish from the southern town of Baltimore, near Cork, who were kidnapped and enslaved by Barbary pirates from North Africa. They were part of an industrial scale of trafficking of Europeans, usually for ransom. One of them was St Vincent de Paul, who in 1605 was captured and enslaved for two years in modern-day Tunisia.

Concurrently, the trade in slaves stolen from Africa involved European colonialists, Arab traders and, often forgotten, African agents.

The enslaved people of Baltimore were not the only Irish slaves. An element of Oliver Cromwell’s anti-Catholic genocide of the Irish in the mid-17th century was the transport of 500000 Catholics to the Caribbean as forced labourers. They were treated brutally there, as a Vatican envoy noted in a report.

Along the way of Fr Noonan’s journey we encounter well-known saints like Martin de Porres and Peter Claver, and less famous people like St  Peter Nolasco (1189-1256), to whom Our Lady of Ransom appeared in his work of buying poor Christians out of Arab slavery, inspiring the founding of the Mercedarian order. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, the order ransomed about half a million slaves. The Trinitarians, founded by John of Matha in 1198, topped that number, ransoming 900000 slaves between the 13th and 17th centuries.

A saint born a slave

The heart of Fr Noonan’s book is St Benedict Manasseri, the son of African slaves in Sicily who received his freedom at the age of 18. He went on to become a Franciscan leader in Sicily, and a well-known confessor and miracle worker. Fr Noonan compares Benedict’s impact with that of Padre Pio in the 20th century.

After his death in 1589 at the age of 63, Benedict’s tomb became a popular site of pilgrimage. He was canonised in 1807, almost 200 years before another former slave, St Josephine Bakhita, was raised to the sainthood.

“God used [Benedict] to disturb the consciences of the business elite of his day. In this sense he was an influence at the coalface for bringing historic slavery to an end,” Fr Noonan notes. “Benedict remains a model of spiritual possibilities — not only for the black diaspora throughout the world but for all the people of the world. He is, in a special way, a beacon of light and encouragement for all those who wish to be healed from the poison of growing racism. A sign of reconciliation in a world divided between North and South.”

Shooting history’s breeze

Fr Noonan stresses that his book is not an attempt at academia. Indeed, there is no footnote in sight. Noonan himself describes his narrative as “disjointed”, with many digressions and side references, some of which lead nowhere. But that is also a strength: Fr Noonan engages the reader in the way he might if he sat with you over a bottle of wine, shooting the breeze of history. And many of these digressions reveal little nuggets of knowledge for which the reader may be grateful.

His book raises the important point that slavery and colonialism impoverished Africa, while the economic power of the enslavers and colonialists was built on that exploitation of Africa’s human and mineral resources.

Fr Noonan rightly notes that the slave trade “instilled in Europeans and Arabs a belief in their racial superiority, and in Africans a sense of worthlessness and shame (shame that African rulers were involved in that too) which may still colour and shape the mind of the continent today”. The still widespread racism in Europe and the United States is also a legacy of that history.

One is left to wonder: What would Africa be like today had it not been violated so brutally by slavery and colonialism?

Benedict, Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates is available via the Pauline Bookshop in Johannesburg (revonline.co.za/paulinesaonlineshop/)

Published in the August 2025 issue of the Southern Cross magazine