Feast day: July 6
St. Maria Goretti
An 11-year-old Italian farm girl who died resisting assault — and forgave her attacker on her deathbed, wishing him with her in heaven.
Maria Goretti was born in 1890 to a poor farming family in central Italy. After her father's early death left the family destitute, they shared a house with another family, the Serenellis, and Maria — barely more than a child — kept house and cared for her younger siblings while her mother worked the fields. She was known for her piety, cheerfulness, and purity in a hard and joyless poverty.
In July 1902, when she was eleven, Alessandro Serenelli, the nineteen-year-old son of the other family, tried to force himself upon her. Maria resisted with all her strength, crying out that it was a sin and that God forbade it, more concerned, she said, for his soul than for herself. Enraged, he stabbed her many times and left her dying.
She lingered in agony for some twenty hours in the hospital. Before she died she forgave her attacker freely and completely, saying she wanted him with her in heaven, and so passed away with the name of Jesus and Mary on her lips. She was twelve years old.
Alessandro was sentenced to prison, where for years he was hardened and unrepentant — until, he later testified, Maria appeared to him in a dream, gathering lilies and handing them to him. He was utterly changed, repented, and after his release went to beg forgiveness of her mother, who granted it; the two knelt together at Mass. He lived to see Maria canonized in 1950 as a martyr for purity, with her mother present — the first mother ever to witness her child's canonization.
Her murderer repented after a dream of her in prison, attended her canonization in 1950, and sat in the crowd beside her mother.
“I forgive him, and I want him with me in heaven forever.”
— St. Maria Goretti
Image: Giuseppe Brovelli-Soffredini (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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