Saint Maria Goretti

Maria Goretti was born in 1890 to a poor farming family near Ancona, Italy. Her father died when she was nine, leaving her mother with six children. They shared a farmhouse with another family, the Serenellis. The father, Giovanni Serenelli, was a heavy drinker; his son Alessandro, nineteen, had a growing interest in Maria. On July 5, 1902, while Maria was mending clothes and watching her baby sister, Alessandro attacked her, trying to force himself on her. Maria, only eleven, fought him and cried, 'No! No! It is a sin! God does not want it! You will go to hell!' In a rage, he stabbed her fourteen times. She survived twenty hours in the hospital. Before she died, she forgave Alessandro and said she wanted him with her in heaven. Alessandro was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Hardened and unrepentant at first, he had a dream six years into his sentence — Maria appeared in a garden of lilies and gave him fourteen flowers, one for each wound. He converted. After his release, he went to Maria's mother and begged her forgiveness. She gave it. On Christmas Day they received Holy Communion together, side by side. Alessandro later became a lay brother in a monastery, where he died in 1970. He testified at Maria's canonization in 1950 — one of the only times a canonization was attended by the saint's killer. Maria's mother was present too, the first time in history a mother lived to see her child canonized.