Saint Maria Goretti

Maria Goretti was born in Corinaldo, in the Marche, on October 16, 1890, the third of the seven children of Luigi and Assunta, farmers. The family had to leave their land and ended up as sharecroppers in the Pontine Marshes, near Nettuno, sharing a farmhouse with another family, the Serenellis. Her father died of malaria in 1900. Maria was ten, and it fell to her to look after her brothers and sisters while her mother worked in the fields. Her life, until the murder, was that of so many farmhands’ children of the time: illiteracy, little food, hard work from childhood. There are no photographs of her that are certainly genuine. On July 5, 1902, Alessandro Serenelli, who was twenty and lived in the same house, tried to rape her. She fought him off, and he stabbed her fourteen times with an awl. She died the next day, in the hospital at Nettuno, after saying that she forgave him. Alessandro was sentenced to thirty years. In prison, after some years, he changed: he said he had dreamed of Maria holding out lilies to him. Once released, he went to her mother to ask her forgiveness, on Christmas Eve, and Assunta gave it; the next morning they received Communion in the same church, in front of the whole town. Alessandro died in 1970 in a Capuchin friary, where he had been taken in as a gardener. Pius XII canonized her in 1950, and her mother was there in Saint Peter’s Square — the first time a mother had attended her daughter’s canonization. If your name is Mary, today is your name day.