St. Maria Goretti, Virgin Martyr
(1890-1902)
She was born to poor. illiterate peasant parents in the province of Ancona, Italy, on October 16th, 1890. Shortly afterwards, owing to extreme poverty, the family migrated to a small village in the neighborhood of Anzio.
Her father went into partnership and shared a house with another man, one of whose two sons, a young man of twenty, developed a passion for Maria Goretti, who would appear to have been an exceptionally beautiful child.
About a month before the final tragedy, the young man, Alessandro Serenlli, made serious sexual advances, which the child rebuffed, upon which Alessandro assured her that he would quite certainly kill her if she mentioned the matter to her mother (her father had died rather more than a year previously).
The crisis came on July 5th, 1902, when Alessandro had engineered that they should be alone in the house. He made a passionate assault upon the child, threatening her with death if she refused to gratify his desire. Maria's answer was: 'No, no, no! God does not wish it. If you do that you'll commit a sin, you'll go to hell.' Alessandra was as good as his word: in his frenzy, he stabbed the poor child no less than fourteen times, both back and front. The surgery of the time was unable to save her life; and, after great suffering, she died a day later, having specifically forgiven her murderer, after admission to membership of the Children of Maria, and reception of the Last Sacraments.
She was beatified on April 27th, 1927, and canonized on June 24th, 1950. Her murderer was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment, but by 1910 he had repented, and is now working as a gardener in an Italian monastery.
What reason is there for canonizing a peasant girl who met her death, as the result of a crime passionel, before she reached the age of twelve? It is possible to object that Maria Goretti acted almost reflexly in a state of acute panic to the kind of situation which she had been conditioned to regard as the most terrible that could be imagined, and that no heroic virtue could possibly have been realized. This is not borne out by the facts: it will be remembered that Alessandro made advances to Maria on two previous occasions, and on the third time gave her plenty of time to choose between death and rape. Moreover, even one's least reflective conduct at any given moment depends upon the dispositions that have been laid down in the past; in other words, 'virtue' is much more a matter of habit than an isolated instance. People like Maria Goretti--and martyrs for purity, even those who are willing to experience a little momentary emotional discomfort on its behalf, are few and far between--have an ever-present realization that lightly to surrender one's bodily integrity, even to the most compelling needs of the moment, upsets the whole rhythm of the universe.
Perhaps that is the chief reason why the
canonization of Maria Goretti at the height of the splendors of the last Holy
Year strikes one as being particularly significant and timely. It came as a
clarion call of protest against the hopeless dreariness of base personal
standards: this saint was canonized for our benefit, not for hers.
Courtesy of
Catholic Information Network
(CIN)