Santa Scorese

Santa Scorese was born on 6 February 1968 in Bari, in the Apulia region of southern Italy. She was given the baptismal name Santa, a traditional Italian given name rather than a title of sanctity. She grew up in a Catholic family in Bari and received a standard Italian education there. As an adolescent and young adult she took part in parish life and became associated with the Focolare Movement (the Work of Mary), the ecclesial movement founded by Chiara Lubich. Through that milieu she sought to live the Gospel in ordinary circumstances of study, work, and family. Those who later testified about her described a serious, prayerful temperament and a desire to put Christian teaching into practice in friendships and daily conduct. She remained a laywoman and never entered a religious order.

In the late 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s Scorese was a university student in Bari. During this period a man began to pursue her with unwanted attention. She refused his advances and made clear that she would not enter a relationship with him. The harassment continued and, according to later accounts of the criminal case, took on an obsessive character. Scorese went on with her studies and her religious commitments while trying to keep her distance from the man who was following her. She was unmarried and had no children.

On the evening of 19 March 1991, the feast of Saint Joseph in the Roman calendar, she was attacked near her home in Bari and stabbed repeatedly. She was taken to hospital but died of her wounds the same day, at the age of twenty-three. The assailant was identified, arrested, and later convicted of her murder. In Catholic circles the killing was soon interpreted in light of her refusal of sexual advances, and she began to be spoken of as a possible martyr of purity, in a line of popular comparison sometimes drawn with Saint Maria Goretti. The juridical determination of martyrdom, however, belongs to the Church’s later process and has not been concluded.

After her death, local remembrance of Scorese developed in Bari and among members of the Focolare Movement. The Archdiocese of Bari-Bitonto opened a cause for her beatification, and she received the title Servant of God. She has not been beatified or canonized, and no universal feast day or official patronage has been assigned to her. Her memory remains that of a late twentieth-century Italian laywoman whose death was bound up with the defense of personal dignity and with a youthful form of Christian witness lived outside the cloister.