SAINT MARIA GORETTI

Born October 16, 1890, in Corinaldo, a little town in Ancona, a province of Northern Italy on the Adriatic, the third of seven children of Assunta and Luigi Goretti. Luigi became a share-cropper of Count Mazzoleni at Ferriere and lived with his family in the cascina antica, the old cheese factory. However, malaria was taking its toll and Count Mazzoleni brought two men to help: Giovanni Serenelli and his 18 year old son, Alessandro.
Fortunately, a good harvest was gathered and, during the weeks of the heavy work, all
went well. But with winter the men were confined indoors and Giovanni spent his money on
wine and became irritable and overbearing. Already weakened by the malaria that would sap his life, Luigi Goretti could not stand up to them. And life in the cascina antica deteriorated.
Luigi died May 6th, the feast of the Beloved Apostle before the Latin Gate, his last words were for Assunta: “Go back to Corinaldo. Take the children and go – Assunta mia.”
In June, 1902, Alessandro changed toward Maria. He became increasingly aware of
her loveliness and, his mind inflamed with the pornography with which he had surrounded
himself, he began first to flatter her and then urge her to give in to him. It came quickly. Alessandro planned it well. Her mother in the fields and his father asleep in the shade beside the house. Maria, trapped alone in the kitchen, struggled to avoid sin; finally, forced to choose between death and sin, she chose death, and it was a terrible death. Alessandro ripped her body fourteen times with a sharp blade and left her bleeding and unconscious. The next day she died.
It was not just the uncomplaining acceptance of long hours of hard labor daily and of
the substitution of the Serenellis’ snarling domination for the loving concern of
Luigi for his wife and children, that helped her prepare, but her additional, unasked
sacrifices: giving her own portions of food to her mother and brothers and sisters, trying
to keep the children joyful at all times, relieving her mother of every possible chore she
could, teaching the children the Bible stories Assunta had taught her, that they might
grow in love and understanding of Jesus – on these Maria’s sanctity fed.
In June, 1900, although she was only ten, and twelve was the accepted age for First Holy Communion, Maria desired to receive her Lord, and began a preparation that lasted eleven months. Since she could neither read nor write she could not learn the Catechism.
On the beautiful Feast of Corpus Christi, 1902, Maria received her First Holy
Communion. The priest spoke to the children on Purity, on avoiding sin, and added: “A
Catholic will always rather die than sin against God. Only days after Corpus Christi. Maria was stabbed on the afternoon of the Vigil of the Precious Blood and died on the Feast Day.
Probably only a saint of Purity and Charity and only a saint who was still a child
could have prayed from the heart that Alessandro be with her in Heaven. Yet, in this strange drama of the 20th Century child saint, Alessandro plays finally the penitent. He suffered and did penance for sixty-seven years after he murdered Maria Goretti.
In1908, six years after her death, Maria came to Alessandro in a dream or a vision. His prison cell was transformed into a beautiful garden filled with fragrant flowers and surprising masses of lilies. A figure in white was gathering the lilies. She turned to him and he cried out: “Maria! Oh, Mariettina!” and she came to him, carrying an armful of white lilies, which she handed to him, one by one, each representing a wound he had inflicted on her. And she repeated her dying wish that one day his soul would reach her in Heaven.
From that time Alessandro was a model prisoner, who served twenty-seven of this thirty
years. He retracted his story of the killing, swore that Maria was not only entirely innocent and died protecting her Virtue, but that during the attack she was concerned with the soul of her attacker. It was his testimony that cleared the way for her beatification.
In 1950, at her canonization, Pope Pius XII spoke of the “conspiracy of evil
practices” then damaging youth and urged the young to turn to Maria for help and
inspiration.