Imitate the saint’s virtues, but not their actions. What’s the difference, you might ask? There was once a saint during the Roman persecutions who, when threatened with death by fire if she did not renounce Christ and her consecrated virginity, jumped into the fire prepared by her persecutors. While we are not called to imitate her in jumping into the fire, we are all called to imitate her in resisting the temptations put before us. While we are not all called to fast in the way the Desert Fathers did, we are all called to imitate the virtue of temperance which they practiced. In Saint Maria Goretti’s case, however, both her actions and the virtues which were their source were all, arguably, entirely imitable. Saint Maria Goretti was a humble young girl - always obedient to her parents in everything, valuing purity above worldly pleasures, avoiding sin at all costs. Her modesty cost her her life.
In a swampy village outside of Rome, Maria and her family rented a farm with another man and his son, Alessandro. Alessandro repeatedly made advances to Maria who resisted them always, hiding in the barn or in a field for hours so as to avoid the occasions for sin. One day, while everyone else was out working in the fields and Maria was alone in the house with her baby sister, Alessandro came and again solicited her to sin with him. Maria struggled and adamantly refused. Alessandro, angered, proceeded to stab her fourteen times with a knife, and then left her for dead. By the time her family found her, it was too late to save her, and Maria died in the hospital after receiving Viaticum and professing her forgiveness for Alessandro.
Eight years later, in prison, Maria appeared to an unrepentant Alessandro and presented him with fourteen lilies, one for each of the wounds he had inflicted on her. As he took them from her, they became like candles and burned. The next day, he asked for the priest and was reconciled to God. After serving his prison sentence, he sought out Maria’s mother, Assunta Goretti, to ask her forgiveness, which she readily bestowed. In 1950, the two of them stood together in Saint Peter’s Square as Maria was canonized.
While it comes as no surprise that Maria Goretti was declared the patroness of Youth, and Purity, it is perhaps slightly less well known that she is also the patron saint of forgiveness. Her purity would have been meaningless without the true heroic charity she demonstrated in her forgiveness of her murderer. The virtues of purity and modesty are never for their own sakes but always the fruit of one’s relationship with God - a rightly ordered love of God, self, and neighbor. Modesty could, perhaps, be defined as being a good steward of one’s beauty. Each and every one of us is created beautiful by God, and if we receive that gift with gratitude and tend to it, as did the servants with their talents, we practice good stewardship of the gift God has given us. Saint Maria Goretti did this - she knew her beauty, both inward and outward, that she had received from God. In the practice of her virtues, that beauty only grew. Modesty has nothing to do with diminishing your beauty and everything to do with veiling it in a way that only enhances it. For each person this will be different to a certain degree, just as everyone receives different talents from God. Saint Maria Goretti’s intercession is a wonderful aid to growing closer to God in this way.
Saint Maria Goretti, Pray for us!
