St. Maria Goretti

St. Maria Goretti was born on October 16, 1890, at Corinaldo in the Italian Marches, one of the children of a poor farming family. Seeking work, the family moved to Ferriere di Conca, near Nettuno south of Rome, where they shared a house with another family, the Serenellis. When Maria's father died of malaria in 1900, her mother worked the fields while Maria, though barely ten, kept house, cared for her younger siblings, and prepared with joy for her First Communion. On July 5, 1902, Alessandro Serenelli, the twenty-year-old son of the family sharing their home, tried to force himself on her. Maria resisted, crying out that it was a sin and that God did not want it, and Alessandro stabbed her fourteen times. She was carried to the hospital at Nettuno, where surgeons could not save her. Before she died the next day, having received Communion, she forgave her attacker and expressed her desire that he would one day be with her in heaven. She was eleven years old. Alessandro was sentenced to thirty years in prison, where he remained bitter until, by his own account, Maria appeared to him in a dream offering him lilies. He repented, and after his release he sought out Maria's mother, Assunta, and begged her forgiveness, which she gave; he spent his last decades as a lay brother in a Capuchin monastery. His conversion is inseparable from Maria's story, a living witness to the power of her forgiveness. Maria was beatified in 1947 and canonized on June 24, 1950, by Pope Pius XII before one of the largest crowds ever gathered for a canonization; her mother was present, the first mother known to attend the canonization of her own child. Pius XII held her up as a martyr of purity and a model for youth. Her relics rest in the Basilica of Our Lady of Grace and St. Maria Goretti in Nettuno, a place of continuing pilgrimage, and her feast is celebrated on July 6. She is invoked as a patroness of young people, of purity, and of victims of assault — and, with her forgiveness of Alessandro, as a witness of mercy.