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# The story of Maria Goretti, killed in 1902 and canonised 48 years later
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/odnoi-iz-liubimykh-sviatykh-shkolnogo-kursa-u-menia-byla-mariia-goretti/
- Published: 2017-07-07T07:36:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:09:37.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Observations, People

One of the favourite saints of my school syllabus was Maria Goretti. Children always regard her with great reverence and love, which is understandable: she is one of the few who belong specifically to a children's pantheon. A saintly girl who, we may be certain, really existed, and was not miraculously encased in ice in the second century or torn apart by ferocious elephants in the Colosseum. Heroes and ideals ought to be intelligible. The life of eleven-year-old Maria, from the Italian village of Conca near the town of Nettuno, is simple and touching. The family lived in poverty: her father and a partner were buying out a house from Count Mazzoleni, working the count's land in return. Luigi Goretti died of malaria. His widow had a hard time of it: the partners and housemates, the Serenelli family, persecuted the woman in every way, infringing her right to joint ownership. It was 1902, and Maria's time had come to receive Holy Communion, which she longed for above all else. And what a beautiful ideal of faith it is, that a girl who had seen nothing but hardship should have reached for God with her whole heart and dreamed, in all naivety, of a white dress, a veil and little shoes for her First Communion. And in the end, almost miraculously, though in fact through the immense efforts of her mother, the girl got the coveted outfit and received Communion. Just a month later, twenty-year-old Alessandro, their neighbour and the elder Serenelli's son, tried to rape Maria, threatening her with a stiletto; the girl resisted and did not allow herself to be violated, and was stabbed. She died in hospital from 14 stab wounds. The murderer was sentenced to 30 years. Forty-eight years later Maria was canonised, and her family, her aged mother and the murderer, by then released from prison, were present at the procession in Saint Peter's Square. Alessandro, incidentally, became a Capuchin monk, but that is without comment. The Catholic Church venerates Maria as the patron saint of victims of violence. Her feast day is 6 July.