Alex was about 20, a strong young man from a troubled family. His mother, who tried to drown him shortly after he was born, died in a mental asylum. His older brother had been committed to an asylum, where he, too, had died. His father, unable to hold down a steady job because of alcoholism, finally joined with another man to work as sharecroppers on a farm. The two men settled their families in a house, Alex and his father in one part of the house, the other family living in the other part of the house.
The other man died, but the two families continued to work on the same farm. Alex had only his father for family, but there were several children in the other family, with the mother working in the fields and the younger children cared for by the oldest girl named Mary.
Mary was 11 when Alex began making passes at her, along with lewd jokes. With her father dead, and her mother always working, Mary could only try to avoid him. The day came when he managed to trap her alone. She refused his demands and resisted his advances, and he attacked her with an awl. The resulting puncture wounds brought about her death 24 hours later.
Of course, I am talking about Alessandro Serenelli and St. Maria Goretti.[1] Unlike many abusers, Alessandro used no subtle grooming techniques in his pursuit of Maria. Maria did not reveal Alessandro’s advances because he had threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
When we study his actions, we see that Alessandro showed several traits common to abusers: “At his trial, he blamed Maria for her own death claiming that he was defending himself from a sexual attack that she herself instigated. In prison he was locked in isolation as his anger would lead to outbursts of physical violence against other inmates.”[2]
In our previous article, we studied the “spirituality of power” and we saw that abusers make power their “god,” seeking to possess and master power. The typical abuser seeks to gain power and control because they feel powerless. [3]
What about Maria? As Alessandro tried to force himself on her, she cried out, “No, no, God does not want it. If you do this, you will go to hell.”[4] Her first thought was not for her physical danger but for the spiritual danger: this action is wrong, sinful! Yet she was not speaking from any sense of guilt; it was he, not she, who stood in danger of hell. Her concern was not for her physical safety, nor for her own spiritual salvation, but for his. To think of the spiritual well-being of the person who is trying to rape you shows something very unusual that calls for serious investigation.
Maria was certainly the victim of Alessandro’s abuse — a child assaulted and killed by a man who held power over her household. What is striking is where her attention went even as she lay dying: not to herself, but to others. Her union with God was so deep that, at the threshold of death, she could still think of the well-being of others, and even of the man who had attacked her. When the surgeon who operated on her asked her to remember him in paradise, she replied simply, “Then I will gladly think of you.” Even more, when she was asked if she forgave Alessandro, she replied, “Yes, for the love of Jesus I forgive him… and I want him to be with me in Paradise.”
A character in a novel commented, “A Christian doesn’t need any defenses because he has a Defender.” Maria resisted Alessandro’s attempted rape, but she does not give any sign of being on the defensive. In spite of her physical vulnerability, she speaks from a state of assurance. Maria had made her first holy communion a month before the attack. A comment about Jesus shows how close was her union with him: “He loves, He hopes, He waits. Our Lord prefers to wait Himself for the sinner for years rather than keep us waiting an instant.”[5] St. Paul said that “Whoever is in Christ is one spirit with Him.”[6] Maria didn’t need to think of herself because she and Jesus were one.
The effect of Maria’s union to God was made clear some six years after her death. Alessandro was sentenced to 30 years in prison — he escaped a life sentence only because Italian law at the time set the age of majority at 21 — and he spent the first few years in solitary confinement. In 1908, he “dreamed he was in a garden where he saw Maria picking flowers. She started to come over to him. She was not afraid of him, but now he was terrified of her. Fortunately for him, there was no escape. When she came near, she began handing him white lilies one at a time, 14 in all, one for each stab wound he had given her. Each one burst into a little flame in his hands. He could feel her love and forgiveness, and through this the mercy of God.”[7] When he awoke, he called for a priest and confessed his sins, taking full responsibility for his crime. His change of heart remained firm, and he was released from prison in 1929. He went to Maria’s mother and begged her forgiveness. She replied, “Alessandro, Maria has forgiven you. God has forgiven you. How can I not forgive you.” He was welcomed into her house and they went to Mass and received communion together. He spent the last decades of his life as the doorkeeper in various Capuchin monasteries.
When he was 80 and suffering from a broken leg that could not be operated on, he wrote a letter. It began:
“Looking back at my past, I can see that in my early youth, I chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself.
My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried.
There were a lot of generous and devoted people who surrounded me, but I paid no attention to them because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life.”
It ended:
“Little Maria was really my light, my protectress; with her help, I behaved well during the 27 years of prison and tried to live honestly when I was again accepted among the members of society. The Brothers of St. Francis, Capuchins from Marche, welcomed me with angelic charity into their monastery as a brother, not as a servant. I’ve been living with their community for 24 years, and now I am serenely waiting to witness the vision of God, to hug my loved ones again, and to be next to my Guardian Angel and her dear mother, Assunta.
I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life.”[8]
Maria was a member of a deeply devout family. She knew with an unshakable knowledge that she was loved by God. That knowledge gave her what Alessandro lacked: integrity. Integrity doesn’t sound like something very important, and people will object that it didn’t protect her from being attacked and killed. But it gave her something Alessandro’s violence could not take: the freedom to refuse what he was asking of her. Her unshakable knowledge that she was loved by Jesus gave her an interior peace that no stiletto could pierce.
Abusers try to draw their victims into a distorted view of reality, to make them complicit or ashamed. Alessandro’s seduction sought to make Maria share his outlook — and on this point, by God’s grace, it failed. This is not to say that those who are manipulated or broken by abuse have failed in faith; abusers are skilled, and they prey above all on the trusting and the devout. It is to say that in Maria we glimpse the freedom God’s love can give. Alessandro describes himself as acting “because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life.” But he admits that this is because he “chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself.” His choices and his actions were his own, Maria’s choices were her own and yet more than her own, for she could not have said and done what she did by herself. God’s love and wisdom shone through her from within her deepest self. She was not only holy; she was whole.
In his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV speaks of the “culture of power.” He counterposes it with the civilization of love.[9] In our series of articles on Fr. Hans Zollner’s talk on Safeguarding, we have studied his statements about the “spirituality of power.” The culture of power and the spirituality of power are inseparably linked. The proponents of the culture of power choose power to give them “meaning, purpose and connection to something bigger than themselves.”[10] In our study of Maria Goretti, we have caught a glimpse of how to withstand the culture of power: by the wholeness, the integrity, given by union with God. To know with deep conviction that God loves me changes me and enables me to love and change others and bring them also to wholeness and holiness.
Notes
[1] https://mariagoretti.com/the-murderer/
[2] https://mariagoretti.com/the-murderer/
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/toxic-relationships/201706/the-truth-about-abusers-abuse-and-what-to-do
[4] https://www.vaticanstate.va/en/state-and-government/general-informations/saint-of-the-day/2209-july-6-saint-maria-goretti-virgin-and-martyr.html
[5] https://catholicfaithpatronsaints.com/2522-2/
[6] 1 Cor 6:17
[7] https://serenelliproject.org/our-patrons/
[8] https://universeoffaith.org/alessandro-serenelli-letter/
[9] Mag. Human. Chap 5
[10] https://wherepeteris.com/the-weakness-of-safeguarding/
Image: “Open White Lily” (CC BY 2.0) by irio.jyske
Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.
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