Saint Maria Goretti

People who tell her story often start with the knife and the painful death. But to really meet Marietta, we have to go back to the days before, when she was busy with countless small chores by the wood fire and had a whole future ahead of her that should have unfolded in peace.

Her holiness did not make her childhood need any less shelter and protection. Precisely because she was a child God loved with all His heart, what happened to her must be looked at with deep compassion and plain honesty.

Her father was Luigi Goretti and her mother Assunta Carlini, both farmers who worked the soil with their hands. She was baptized the very next day and grew up in a large family rich in faith and poor in everything else. On October 4, 1896, Maria received the sacrament of Confirmation.

As it grew harder and harder to make a living, the family left their home region with their children, moving first to Colle Gianturco and then, in 1899, to the marshes of Ferriere di Conca, now part of Borgo Le Ferriere in the province of Latina. It was then a low, damp land plagued by malaria all year round, where poor sharecroppers from all over central Italy came to clear and farm land rented from great landowners. The Gorettis farmed as tenants and shared a damp farmhouse with the Serenellis, a father and son.

For the poor, leaving home is rarely a promising adventure. It is usually a last resort: leaving the place where you were born because staying means not having enough to eat. Maria’s parents hoped to find a better life for their children, but the work was still back-breaking and deadly illness waited at the door.

A child can learn early to take care of others. That does not mean she stops being a child. Beneath all that capable maturity was still a young girl who badly needed a father, needed her mother’s arms, needed to go to school, learn to read and play like other children her age.

To an outsider it might have looked like an ordinary feast day in a poor parish. For Marietta it was the holiest meeting of her life. She welcomed the Lord into a life with no treats or presents of its own. The days that followed went on as hard as before: lighting the fire, washing clothes, carrying the little ones. Holy Communion did not lift her out of her poor home, but it lit a steady flame in her: her life belonged entirely to God, and even the hardest chores could be done with love.

That picture is very close to the eldest daughters of poor Vietnamese families, who at ten are already taking their mother’s place: cooking, minding the little ones, toiling at housework. Faith should bring them gentle support, not burdens beyond their strength. God’s love always calls adults to open their arms and protect the childhood of the young.

A child who is threatened may choose silence out of terror, out of fear that her family will be dragged in, and out of confusion about whether anyone would believe a child like her. That tearful silence calls on adults to notice and care, and never, ever to blame the victim.

Enraged at being refused, Alessandro pulled out a knife and stabbed her fourteen times. Maria collapsed in a pool of blood. She was rushed to the hospital in Nettuno, a few kilometers away, where the doctors fought to save her, operating for hours without proper anesthesia.

This matters for anyone who has suffered sexual violence: no one loses the purity of their soul because of what someone else forced on their body. Remembering Saint Maria Goretti should stir the conscience of all of us to stand with those who have been hurt, to listen to them, protect them and help them heal.

That forgiveness does not make murder a small thing. It did something no blade could ever undo: with her body torn by pain, she refused to give her heart over to the poison of hatred.

No one can force a victim to forgive as quickly as Maria did. Forgiveness is not a form of words that others have the right to demand of the wounded, as if saying them settles everything. For her, it was a grace that flowed from her deep union with Jesus on the Cross.

When he had served his sentence, the first thing Alessandro did was to go and find Assunta — the mother whose eldest daughter he had taken. He fell at the poor old woman’s feet and pleaded:

“Signora, will you forgive me?”

Assunta, in tears, raised him up and said:

“If my daughter forgave you from her hospital bed, who am I not to forgive you?”

The next day the two of them went to church together and received Communion side by side, and the whole congregation was deeply moved. The forgiveness of an eleven-year-old girl had rescued a soul from ruin. Alessandro spent his last years as a Capuchin lay brother, quietly working in a friary until his death.

On April 27, 1947, Pope Pius XII beatified Maria Goretti. On June 24, 1950, she was canonized in Saint Peter’s Square as her mother Assunta looked on in tears. It was the first time in the history of the Church that a mother lived to see her child canonized. Her feast is July 6 each year. Her remains now rest in the Shrine of Our Lady of Graces in Nettuno, which welcomes thousands of pilgrims every year, many of them young families and schoolchildren.