Maria Goretti
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
virgin
Consecrated virgin
In the Catholic Church a consecrated virgin is a woman who has been conscrated by the church to a life of perpetual virginity in the service of God. Consecrated virgins are to spend their time in works of penance and mercy, in apostolic activity and in prayer, according to their state of life and...
-martyr
Christian martyrs
A Christian martyr is one who is killed for following Christianity, through stoning, crucifixion, burning at the stake or other forms of torture and capital punishment. The word "martyr" comes from the Greek word μάρτυς, mártys, which means "witness."...
of the Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, and is one of its youngest canonized
Canonization
Canonization is the act by which a Christian church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints. Originally, individuals were recognized as saints without any formal process...
saint
Saint
A saint is a holy person. In various religions, saints are people who are believed to have exceptional holiness.In Christian usage, "saint" refers to any believer who is "in Christ", and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or in earth...
s. She died from multiple stab wounds inflicted by her attempted rapist
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
after she refused him.
Early life
Goretti was born Maria Teresa Goretti on October 16, 1890 in CorinaldoCorinaldo
Corinaldo is a town and comune in the Province of Ancona, within the Marche region of central Italy. As of 2005 it had a population of 5,187 inhabitants...
, in the Province of Ancona
Province of Ancona
The Province of Ancona is a province in the Marche region of central Italy. Its capital is the city of Ancona. The province has an area of 1940 km² and a 2006 population of 465,906 in 49 comuni , see Comunes of the Province of Ancona....
, then in the Kingdom of Italy
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)
The Kingdom of Italy was a state forged in 1861 by the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was its legal predecessor state...
, to Luigi Goretti and Assunta Carlini. She was the third out of six children. Her sisters were named Teresa and Ersilia; her brothers were Angelo, Sandrino, and Mariano.O'Grady, Desmond. Maria Goretti: A Rush to Judgment?, February 25, 1985 in The Age newspaper of Melbourne, Australia. Accessed April 11, 2010.Crusz, Noel. Maria Goretti - Saint Under Siege, July 7, 2002, The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
. Accessed April 11, 2010.
By the time she was six, her family had become so poor that they were forced to give up their farm, move, and work for other farmers. Soon, Maria's father Luigi became very sick with malaria, and died when Maria was just nine. While her brothers, mother, and sister worked in the fields, Maria would cook, sew, watch her infant sister, and keep the house clean. It was a hard life, but the family was very close. They shared a deep love for God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and the faith. She and her family moved to Le Ferriere
Satricum
Satricum , an ancient town of Latium, situated some 60 km to the SE of Rome, in a low-lying region to the south of the Alban Hills, to the NW of and at the border of the former Pontine Marshes. It was accessible direct from Rome by a road running more or less parallel to the Via Appia, to the...
, near modern Latina and Nettuno
Nettuno
Nettuno is a town and comune of the province of Rome in the Lazio region of central Italy, 60 kilometers south of Rome. It is named in honour of the Roman god Neptune...
in Lazio, where they lived in a building, "La Cascina Antica," they shared with another family which included Giovanni Serenelli and his son, Alessandro.
Maria's martyrdom
On July 5, 1902, finding eleven-year-old Maria alone sewing, Alessandro Serenelli came in and threatened her with death if she did not do as he said; he was intending to rape her. She would not submit, however, protesting that what he wanted to do was a mortal sinMortal sin
Mortal sins are in the theology of some, but not all Christian denominations wrongful acts that condemn a person to Hell after death. These sins are considered "mortal" because they constitute a rupture in a person's link to God's saving grace: the person's soul becomes "dead", not merely weakened...
and warning Alessandro that he would go to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
. She desperately fought to stop Alessandro, a 19-year-old farmhand, from abusing her. She kept screaming, "No! It is a sin! God does not want it!" Alessandro first choked Maria, but when she insisted she would rather die than submit to him, he stabbed her eleven times. The injured Maria tried to reach for the door, but Alessandro stopped her by stabbing her three more times before running away.
Maria's little sister Teresa awoke with the noise and started crying, and when Serenelli's father and Maria's mother came to check on the little girl, they found the bleeding Maria and took her to the nearest hospital in Nettuno. She underwent surgery without anesthesia
Anesthesia
Anesthesia, or anaesthesia , traditionally meant the condition of having sensation blocked or temporarily taken away...
, but her injuries were beyond the doctors' help. Halfway through the surgery, Maria woke up. She insisted that it stay that way. The pharmacist of the hospital in which she died said to her, "Maria, think of me in Paradise." She looked to the old man: "Well, who knows, which of us is going to be there first?" "You, Maria," he replied. "Then I will gladly think of you," said Maria. The following day, twenty hours after the attack, having expressed forgiveness for her murderer and stating that she wanted to have him in Heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...
with her, Maria died of her injuries, while looking at a very beautiful picture of the Blessed Mother.
Writing in 2002 based on his own interviews with Alessandro Serenelli and Maria's sister Ersilia in 1952, journalist Noel Crusz provided a more detailed account:
- On July 5 in 1902, exactly a hundred years ago, at 3 p.m. whilst
[Maria's mother] Assunta and the other children were at the threshing floor, Serenelli who persistently sought sexual favours from the girl approached her. She was taking care of her infant sister in the farm house. threatened her with a 10 inch dagger, and when Maria refused, as she had always done, he stabbed her 14 times.
- The wounds penetrated the throat, with lesions of the pericardium, the heart, the lungs and the diaphragm. Surgeons at Orsenigo were surprised that the girl was still alive. In a dying deposition, in the presence of the Chief of Police, Maria told her mother of Serenelli's sexual harassment, and two previous attempts made to rape her. She was afraid to reveal this earlier since she was threatened with death.
A third account of the assault was presented by Italian historian Giordano Bruno Guerri in 1985. He asserted that, while in prison, Alessandro Serenelli stated that he did not complete the assault and Maria died a physical virgin. Guerri identifies the weapon as an awl
Bradawl
A bradawl is a tool with a blade similar to that of a straight screwdriver and a handle made from wood or plastic. A bradawl is used to make an indentation in wood or other materials in order to ease the insertion of a nail or screw...
rather than a dagger.
Serenelli's imprisonment and repentance
Alessandro Serenelli was captured shortly after Maria's death. Originally, he was going to be sentenced to life, but since he was a minor at that time the sentence was commuted to 30 years in prison. He remained unrepentant and uncommunicative from the world for three years, until a local bishop, MonsignorMonsignor
Monsignor, pl. monsignori, is the form of address for those members of the clergy of the Catholic Church holding certain ecclesiastical honorific titles. Monsignor is the apocopic form of the Italian monsignore, from the French mon seigneur, meaning "my lord"...
Giovanni Blandini, visited him in jail. Serenelli wrote a thank you note to the Bishop asking for his prayers and telling him about a dream, "in which Maria Goretti gave him lilies, which burned immediately in his hands."
After his release, Alessandro Serenelli visited Maria's still-living mother, Assunta, and begged her forgiveness. She forgave him, saying that if Maria had forgiven him on her deathbed then she could not do less, and they attended Mass together the next day, receiving Holy Communion side by side. Alessandro reportedly prayed every day to Maria Goretti and referred to her as "my little saint." He attended her canonization in 1950.
Serenelli later became a laybrother of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin
Order of Friars Minor Capuchin
The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin is an Order of friars in the Catholic Church, among the chief offshoots of the Franciscans. The worldwide head of the Order, called the Minister General, is currently Father Mauro Jöhri.-Origins :...
, living in a monastery and working as its receptionist and gardener until dying peacefully in 1970.
Beatification and canonization
Beatification
Beatification is a recognition accorded by the Catholic Church of a dead person's entrance into Heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his or her name . Beatification is the third of the four steps in the canonization process...
ceremonies in the Saint Peter's Basilica, April 27, 1947, Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII
The Venerable Pope Pius XII , born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli , reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958....
walked over to Assunta. She almost fainted. "When I saw the Pope coming, I prayed, Madonna, please help me. He put his hand on my head and said, blessed mother, happy mother, mother of a Blessed
Beatification
Beatification is a recognition accorded by the Catholic Church of a dead person's entrance into Heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his or her name . Beatification is the third of the four steps in the canonization process...
!" They both had eyes wet with tears.
Three years later, on June 24, 1950, Pius XII canonized Goretti as a saint, the "Saint Agnes
Saint Agnes
Agnes of Rome is a virgin–martyr, venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, and Lutheranism. She is one of seven women, excluding the Blessed Virgin, commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass...
of the 20th century." Assunta was again present at the ceremony, along with her four remaining sons and daughters. Some sources assert she was the first mother ever to attend the canonization ceremony of her child. However, at least one source identifies her as the second, after Luigi Gonzaga's mother attended his canonization in the sixteenth century, in spite of the fact that Gonzaga was canonized in the eighteenth century, long after his mother's death. Alessandro Serenelli was also present at the canonization.
Owing to the huge crowd present, the ceremonies associated with the canonization were held outside of Saint Peter's Basilica, in the Piazza San Pietro. Pius XII spoke, not as before in Latin, but in Italian. "We order and declare, that the blessed Maria Goretti can be venerated as a Saint and We introduce her into the Canon of Saints". Some 500,000 people, among them a majority of youth, had come from around the world. Pius asked them: "Young people, pleasure of the eyes of Jesus, are you determined to resist any attack on your chastity with the help of grace of God?" A resounding "yes" was the answer.
All three of her brothers would claim that she intervened miraculously in their lives. Angelo heard her voice telling him to emigrate to America. Sandrino was reportedly miraculously given a sum of money to finance his own emigration to join Angelo. Sandrino died in the United States in 1917, and Angelo died in Italy when he returned there in 1964. The third brother, Mariano, said he heard her voice telling him to stay in his trench when the rest of his unit charged the Germans in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Mariano, the only survivor of that charge, lived until 1975 and had a large family.
Her body is kept in the crypt of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie e Santa Maria Goretti in Nettuno
Nettuno
Nettuno is a town and comune of the province of Rome in the Lazio region of central Italy, 60 kilometers south of Rome. It is named in honour of the Roman god Neptune...
, south of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. It has been often reported that her body is incorrupt
Incorruptibility
Incorruptibility is a Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox belief that supernatural intervention allows some human bodies to avoid the normal process of decomposition after death as a sign of their holiness...
but this is not the case. Her remains are kept inside a statue which is lying down beneath the altar, which has been mistakenly believed by some to be her entire body.
Feast day
Goretti's feast day, celebrated on July 6, was inserted in the Roman Catholic calendar of saintsRoman Catholic calendar of saints
The General Roman Calendar indicates the days of the year to which are assigned the liturgical celebrations of saints and of the mysteries of the Lord that are to be observed wherever the Roman Rite is used...
for the first time when it was revised in 1969. Maria is the patron saint of chastity
Chastity
Chastity refers to the sexual behavior of a man or woman acceptable to the moral standards and guidelines of a culture, civilization, or religion....
, rape victims, youth, teenage girls, poverty, purity and forgiveness.
In art
Goretti is represented in art as a wavy-haired young girl in farmer clothes or a white dress, with a bouquet of lilies in her hands, and she is sometimes counted among the ranks of the PassionistPassionist
The Passionists are a Roman Catholic religious order founded by Saint Paul of the Cross . Professed members use the initials C.P. after their names.-History:St...
order since her spiritual formation was guided by the Passionists. Both lilies and white garments are traditional icons of virginity in Catholic iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
.
In media
Santa Maria Goretti is an Italian film based on the true story of Maria Goretti.Cielo sulla palude (Heaven over the marshes) is another Italian film based on her life, filmed in 1949 and directed by Augusto Genina. Ines Orsini plays Maria and Mauro Matteuci plays Alessandro.
Marcel Delannoy
Marcel Delannoy
Marcel Delannoy was a French composer and critic. He wrote operas, ballets, orchestral works, vocal and chamber works, and film scores.-Life and career:...
wrote a radiophonic opera, Maria Goretti, in 1953.