Her last words were, “I forgive Alessandro Serenelli …and I want him with me in heaven forever.” St. Maria Goretti forgave the man who, after trying to rape her, stabbed her fourteen times and killed her. She was eleven years old, the youngest person to be canonized.
St. Maria was the eldest of six children, born into poverty, but deprived of her father at the age of nine by malaria. Because she was the oldest, she had to take care of her siblings while her mother worked in the fields. Serenelli was her next-door neighbor. Alessandro began to harass St. Maria, trying to get her to give into his lustful desires. He stated: “After the second attempt, in my mind was formed more than ever the intention to succeed in the vent of my passion and I conceived the idea to kill her if she continued to resist my cravings.” On July 5, 1902 he confronted St. Maria. She refused, protesting that what he wanted was a mortal sin: “No! It is a sin! God does not want it!” He served 27 years of a 30-year prison sentence and wrote when he was 79 and a Capuchin lay brother: “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.”
In the same letter, Alessandro wrote: “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.” Words to live by from a penitent, saved by a saint.
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