Maria Goretti

Maria Teresa Goretti was born on 16 October 1890 in Corinaldo, in the Marche region of Italy, to Luigi Goretti and Assunta Carlini, a poor farming family. She was the third of seven children. Seeking work, the family left Corinaldo and moved first to Colle Gianturco near Paliano and later to a farm at Le Ferriere in the Pontine Marshes of Lazio, where they lived as sharecroppers and shared a house with another laboring family, the Serenellis. In 1900 Luigi Goretti died of malaria, leaving Assunta to raise the children in severe poverty. Maria, still a child, took on cooking, mending, and the care of her younger siblings while her mother and older brothers worked in the fields.

Though she remained illiterate and the family could scarcely spare her from labor, Maria was remembered for piety and a strong desire for the sacraments. She received First Communion after learning her catechism, an event she had long awaited. Those who later testified in her cause described her as obedient, modest, and careful to avoid sin. Household life at Le Ferriere was difficult: Giovanni Serenelli, the co-tenant, drank heavily, and his son Alessandro, about twenty years old, made repeated sexual advances toward Maria, which she refused.

On 5 July 1902, while the others were threshing, Alessandro Serenelli found Maria at home minding her infant sister and attempted to rape her. She resisted, telling him that the act would be a mortal sin. He stabbed her repeatedly with an awl. She was taken to the hospital in Nettuno and operated on; she survived about twenty hours. After receiving the last sacraments she forgave her attacker and said she wanted him to be with her in heaven. She died on 6 July 1902, at the age of eleven.

Alessandro was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison. For a time he remained unrepentant; later accounts describe a conversion after a dream in which Maria appeared to him. Released in 1929, he asked pardon of Assunta Goretti, who forgave him, saying that Maria had already done so. He spent the rest of his life in penance, living as a gardener and Capuchin lay brother, and died in 1970. Maria was beatified by Pope Pius XII on 27 April 1947 and canonized by him on 24 June 1950 in Saint Peter’s Square before a very large crowd. Assunta was present, widely noted as the first mother to attend her child’s canonization; Maria’s surviving siblings and Alessandro Serenelli also attended.

The Catholic Church venerates Maria Goretti as a martyr of chastity. Her feast is kept on 6 July. She is invoked as patron of youth, girls and young women, chastity and purity, victims of rape and sexual violence, and forgiveness. Her remains are enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Graces and Saint Maria Goretti in Nettuno. Twentieth-century devotion presented her as a model of resistance to sexual violence and of Christian pardon. Her life is also inseparable from the social conditions of rural Italy around 1900: landlessness, malaria, child labor, and the vulnerability of poor girls.