St. Maria Goretti

Maria Goretti was born on October 16, 1890, in Corinaldo, a small town in the Marche region of Italy, into a poor farming family. She was the third of six children of Luigi Goretti and Assunta Carlini. When Maria was still young, the family moved to the Pontine Marshes near Anzio, in search of better agricultural land, settling in the village of Le Ferriere. Life was marked by hardship: her father died of malaria when Maria was nine, and the family depended on older siblings and seasonal work to survive. Maria herself did not attend school and only received First Communion a few months before her death, around the time of the local mission preached by the Passionists in 1902.

In Le Ferriere, the Goretti household shared a property with Giovanni Serenelli and his son Alessandro. Maria's beauty and her family's poverty drew the unwanted attention of Alessandro, who was eighteen at the time. On July 5, 1902, while Maria was alone in the house and her mother and siblings were working in the fields, Alessandro made sexual advances. Maria refused him, reportedly saying, "No! It is a sin! God does not want it!" Enraged, Alessandro stabbed her fourteen times. She was rushed to a hospital in Nettuno but died the following day, July 6, 1902, after enduring her wounds for about twenty hours. Her final words to a magistrate are remembered as: "I forgive Alessandro and I want him to be with me in Heaven."

Alessandro Serenelli was captured, tried, and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was reportedly unmoved for years, until 1922, when a vision of Maria appeared to him in his cell, according to accounts from the Passionist Fathers. He converted, and after his release in 1929, he sought out Maria's mother, Assunta, who herself became a model of Christian mercy: at a gathering, she embraced Alessandro and reportedly said, "If my daughter can forgive him, who am I to refuse?" Alessandro eventually became a lay Capuchin and lived quietly in a monastery until his death in 1970.

Maria's cause for canonization moved forward rapidly in the twentieth century. She was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1947, and canonized on June 24, 1950, in a ceremony at St. Peter's Square in which her mother, Assunta, was present. The same ceremony saw the canonization of another young Italian saint, Pierina Morosini. Maria's feast day is celebrated on July 6, the anniversary of her death. Her mortal remains are venerated at the Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie e di Santa Maria Goretti in Nettuno, where her incorrupt body lies visible in a side chapel.

Today St. Maria Goretti is one of the most invoked saints for victims of sexual violence and for young people striving to live chastely. She is the patron of youth, young women, purity, forgiveness, and victims of assault, and her story is often used in catechesis on Christian forgiveness and the dignity of the human person. Her image—typically a young girl in a white dress holding a lily—remains a familiar presence in Italian parishes and Catholic schools worldwide.