Saints With The Best Stories

[Rev. Rye]

This may not be of the badass variety, but the story of Maria Goretti stuck with me since I found myself reading a book of saints at my Grandpa's.

To put it in a nutshell, Maria Goretti was a peasant girl. And even though she was only 11, through a possible combination of early puberty and living a hard life, she looked a lot older. This caught the eye of a local delinquent named Alessandro Serenelli, a boy of about 20, who repeatedly sexually harassed her and even tried to rape her three times. The third time was on 5 July 1902, and she told him she'd rather die than submit. Serenelli took an awl and obliged her. 14 times. She survived for about 24 hours, and, among many things (including telling the cops the fact that this wasn't the first time Serenelli tried shit like this) she prayed for Serenelli, saying she hoped he would join her in Heaven. I'm not sure this is a sign of wisdom beyond her years or severe naivete. Then she died.

This is where I'd normally use my Jesse Custer "mercy killing" meme, but the story doesn't end there.

Due to several factors, from Serenelli being a minor at the time, being immature even for that age, having an extremely toxic family, a mother apparently having a heartfelt plea for mercy that saved him from dying, to Italy's notoriously fucked-up legal system, he was only sentenced to 30 years in prison and only served 27 of them. About six years into his prison term, a bishop visited him and he lashed out. A few days later, he had a vision of Goretti in prison, surrounded by lilies, giving him some, which burned in his hands. From that day on, he was a model prisoner, and even wrote an apology/thank you note to said bishop, describing this about face. He prayed for her intercession every day. When he was finally released, he went to Maria Goretti's mother Assunta, begging her for forgiveness (note: do not try this at home, sex offenders.) And, since Maria herself forgave him on her deathbed, Assunta did the same, and they attended Mass together the next day. If Serenelli ever relapsed, nobody could ever find any evidence. In 1950, the two of them attended Maria's canonization, and Serenelli became a Capuchin lay brother, living in a monastery, cultivating the garden, before dying in his bed in 1970.

I'd be lying if I said that some of the attitudes in the narrative weren't questionable, but it had a profound effect on the six-or-seven-year-old Rev, and I think this may have helped me empathise towards even the bad people, and sure enough, within about a decade, eventually this snowballs into a teen who sees his mother watch Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell and can only think of it as "two hours' hate", and whose favourite movie is A Clockwork Orange, and it's less because of the famously "Ultraviolent" first act, and more for the third act once he gets out of the joint.