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St. Maria Goretti Note: Saint Maria Goretti, whose feastday we observe on July 6, is a special patron saint of the Miles Jesu Domus women.
What makes this little girl, whose path to holiness Butler’s Lives of the Saints calls “unique in hagiography” a patron for consecrated laywomen? Though still only a child, Maria Goretti reached a level in her spiritual life where she could practice chastity, courage, forgiveness, and selflessness even when the stakes were the absolute highest. That was why, when the moment came, she was ready and able to give up life itself. Maria had long been known around the countryside as exceptionally cheerful, helpful, and generous. Her mother testified that she could not remember Maria ever being disobedient or voluntarily displeasing her parents. Maria’s father died of malaria when she was eight; her mother assumed his farm work and the little girl stepped into her mother’s shoes as cook and housekeeper for the Goretti and Sarenelli families. Maria had made her First Communion in May of 1902, only a few weeks before her death. At that Mass the priest had spoken to the children on the theme of “purity at all costs.” As Maria sat there among the other children, wearing borrowed shoes and her mother’s only good necklace, she could not have foreseen that the coming weeks would subject her to lewd advances from a young neighbor whom she had thought of as a brother, or that they would end in her own frightening and painful death. Surely Our Lord inspired the priest that day, speaking through him to encourage Maria in her upcoming trial. Obviously the value Maria placed on the virtue of purity is the clearest sign of her heroic virtue. We really can’t say she chose death rather than committing a sin; many women are innocent victims of similar assaults through no fault and certainly no desire of their own—no one sins by being raped. What we can say is, that by protecting her purity with her very life, Maria chose something even higher than “merely” avoiding sin. In answer to her mother’s anguished question, when she came and found her little girl lying in a pool of blood, Maria said, “Alessandro wanted me to do wrong and I would not.” As for a spirit of forgiveness, the next day, in her lingering death agony, Maria said of her assailant, “I want him to be with me in paradise. May God forgive him. I already have.” Maria lived almost in our own times. Surely there are still people alive today who knew Maria’s mother, her sister and brothers, her assailant. At the dawn of our own contemporary age, where purity is so often either mocked or simply forgotten, Our Lord raised up this special model of innocence and chastity. And so Maria Goretti is also the special patron of our consecrated women members. Like Maria, Miles Jesu’s domus women are immersed in the world, yet called to something far beyond it. Their ideal is, like Maria, to practice heroic virtue while working in the world, to practice authentic selflessness, to be guided by love of Jesus as completely as Maria was. May Maria Goretti intercede for the Miles Jesu domus women, and for us all, so that we too may have the love and the courage to put Jesus first, no matter what. |
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Copyright 2012 Miles Jesu. All rights reserved. | |
You probably already know about Maria Goretti. Born in Italy in 1890, she chose death rather than giving in to a would-be rapist when she was only 11 years old. On a hot summer afternoon while everyone else was at work in the fields, Maria had stayed behind to babysit her infant sister and catch up on some mending. A neighbor, nineteen year old Alessandro Sarenelli, came upon her and dragged her into a closed room, throttled her, and demanded that she comply with his desires. When she struggled against him, begging him not to commit such a sin, he pulled out a nine and a half inch dagger which he had specially tapered and sharpened and stabbed her to death, delivering at least 14 major wounds. Maria’s screams were finally heard off in the fields but by the time her mother and others came running it was too late. Although they rushed her to the hospital and three doctors all worked to save her, Maria died about 24 hours after the attack. 