The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [78]
One can trace the muting of these women by looking at the way the church has chosen to describe them. The early narratives about the virgin martyrs have a remarkable vigor that later theologizing about them lacks. An early account of the sixth-century slave Mahya, for example, has her running through the streets of her south Arabian town of Najran, after her owners and family have been put to death, shouting, “Men and women, Christians, now is the moment to pay back to Christ what you owe him. Come out and die for Christ, just as he died for you. . . . This is the time of battle!” But by the ninth century, Methodius of Sicily, preaching about the third-century martyr Agatha, said, “She wore the glow of a pure conscience and the crimson of the Lamb’s blood for her cosmetics.” While this imagery may have impressed Agatha’s bravery upon Methodius’s original congregation, to us it just seems sick.
We live at the end of a century sickened by violence. Any claim we make to an enlightened modernity must be weighed against the fact that child prostitution is big business on a global scale; that most marriages in the world are arranged, as they were in ancient Rome, for economic and/or social advantage (the most advantageous being the selling of a young daughter to an older, wealthier man); that female infanticide and genital mutilation are still commonly practiced in many cultures; that in more civilized countries, the stalking, rape and/or murder of young women are staples not only of the nightly news but of dramatic entertainment. Maybe it’s time to reclaim a point vierge and try to hear what the virgin martyrs are saying.
The best-known twentieth-century virgin martyr to be officially sanctified by the church is Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old who was stabbed to death during an attempted rape in 1902 by a man we would now term a “stalker.” Maria Goretti was an Italian peasant from a town near Anzio, a girl in a vulnerable position, both economically and socially. Her father had died when she was ten, and reading between the lines of the Roman Breviary (“she spent a difficult childhood assisting her mother in domestic duties”), we can assume that both child and mother were at the extreme margins of a marginal culture. For a young man to take advantage of such a situation is not unusual, nor is his resorting to violence when he is rebuffed. We understand these facts all too well from similar events in our own day.
Maria Goretti, canonized in 1950, was the first virgin martyr declared such by the church for defending her chastity rather than her faith, and it’s easy to see this development in a cynical light; a perfect expression of a sexually uptight era. Indeed, a popular pamphlet of the time, written by an American priest, dubbed her “the Cinderella Saint.” But our cynicism blinds us to a deeper truth: a martyr is not a model to be imitated, but a witness, one who testifies to a new reality. And our own era’s obsession with sexual “liberation” blinds us still further, making it difficult to see the true nature of Maria Goretti’s witness, what it might mean for a peasant girl to “prefer death to dishonor.” We may make fun of someone so foolish—a male friend recalls with shame how he and his schoolmates snickered over Maria Goretti in the playground of his parochial school, not long after she was canonized—but such joking is a middle-class luxury.
For Maria Goretti, the issue was not a roll in the hay. The loss of her virginity in a rigidly patriarchal peasant culture could have had economic and social consequences so dire that it might well have seemed a choice between being and nonbeing. And is it foolish for a girl to have such a strong sense of her self that she resists its violation, resists being asked to do, in the private spaces of her body, what she does not want to do? When I was fifteen, and extremely naive, I was attacked by a young man, a college student, who I’m sure remembers the evening as a failed attempt at seduction. What I remember