Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr

Maria Goretti was born in 1890 at Corinaldo in the Marche into a poor farming family. Seeking work, the family moved to Le Ferriere, in the marshes near Nettuno, where her father died of malaria in 1900, and they shared a farmhouse with another family, the Serenelli.

On 5 July 1902 the twenty-year-old Alessandro Serenelli, who had pursued her, tried to rape her; she resisted, and he stabbed her fourteen times. She died in hospital the next day, aged eleven, after saying she forgave him. Sentenced to thirty years, Alessandro said in prison that he had seen her in a dream; after his release he asked her mother’s forgiveness, and spent the rest of his life as a gardener with the Capuchins. Maria was canonized in 1950.