St. Maria Goretti

Maria Goretti is the most modern of the child-martyrs, and her story involves a violence that should be handled without sensationalizing. She was eleven years old when Alessandro Serenelli attacked her in their shared farmhouse in the Pontine marshes south of Rome in 1902. He stabbed her fourteen times when she resisted. She died in hospital the following day, asking that Alessandro be forgiven, expressing her hope that he would one day be with her in heaven.

What Maria actually said in her final hours, and what happened to Alessandro in the years that followed, matter more than the crime itself. After more than a decade in prison, Alessandro underwent a conversion he dated to a dream in which Maria appeared to him offering flowers. He was released, found her mother and asked her forgiveness, and eventually became a lay brother in a Capuchin friary. At the canonization in Rome in 1950 — the largest canonization crowd ever assembled up to that point — both Alessandro and Maria's mother were present in the piazza. Pius XII, in the ceremony, saw in Maria a modern parallel to the early martyrs, a young girl who chose death rather than dishonor, and this is accurate as far as it goes. But what made Maria herself also deserves attention: the poverty of the household, the labor of running it at eleven years old after her father's death, her preparation for first communion, the ordinary piety that shaped her before the crime that ended her life.