The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [93]
Hagiography is one of humankind’s more strange endeavors. That a child, an illiterate peasant at that, should become of such importance to the Roman Catholic church in the mid-twentieth century that it expanded its official definition of martyrdom in order to canonize her seems ironic to skeptics but to the faithful is evidence of grace. Thomas Aquinas had opened the door back in the thirteenth century, writing that “human good can become divine good if it is referred to God: therefore, any human good can be a cause for martyrdom, in so far as it refers to God,” but until Maria Goretti’s canonization in 1950, martyrs were considered by the church to be those who had clearly died for their faith. As Kenneth Woodward explains in Making Saints, the church decided that “technically, [Goretti] did not die for her faith. Rather, she died in defense of Christian virtue—a significant though by now routine expansion of the grounds on which a candidate can be declared a martyr.”
Goretti thus earned herself a place in the history of hagiography, paving the way for other twentieth-century martyrs such as Maximilian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz. She also exposed a fault line in the church’s historical treatment of the virgin martyrs, young girls who were executed during the persecutions of Christians in the second to sixth centuries. That they had died because they were Christians was never in dispute, but in accounts of their martyrdoms from the fifth century on, it is their commitment to preserving their virginity that is emphasized. Many of the stories relate the miraculous interventions that occurred when Roman officials sentenced the girls to be sent to brothels. Butler’s 1880 edition of Lives of the Saints typically praises St. Agnes for her “voluntary chastity,” for “purity,” and for “joyfully preferring death to the violation of her integrity.”
That “joyfully” rankles these days, and maybe always did. But in terming Goretti “the St. Agnes of the twentieth century,” and in expanding the definition of martyrdom to include Goretti as a “martyr of purity,” Pope Pius XII laid to rest the old ambiguity surrounding the virgin martyrs. His use of Goretti proved not ambiguous at all; as Woodward relates, the church immediately set about to make her “the heroic embodiment of the church’s sexual ethics.” And, as Scott Hoffman notes in a recent essay on Goretti, the church intended this concept of purity to embrace “not only chastity, but [many] other virtues in opposition to the modern world.”
Maria Goretti’s canonization process was remarkably swift. Her canonization was, in the words of one hagiographer, “unique in the history of the church,” because her mother, brothers, and sisters were able to be present. To the modern mind, Goretti seems suspiciously convenient. The Catholic church had need of a young saint who could promote traditional values in the wake of post-war modernism, and as Kenneth Woodward relates, Goretti soon became, in Italy, at least, “the church’s most popular icon of holy virginity after the Virgin herself . . . a saint whose story had become symbiotic with the church’s teachings on sexual purity.” The purposes to which the Catholic church wished to put Goretti are made abundantly clear in the address given by Pius XII at her beatification in 1947, when he criticized the press, the fashion and entertainment industries, and the military (which had begun to conscript women) and termed Goretti “a ripe fruit of the domestic hearth where one prays, where children are educated in the fear of the Lord, in obedience of parents, in the love of truth, and in purity and chastity.”
Maria Goretti, cipher, was well on her way toward becoming a media event. The sermon preached in Union City, New Jersey, on the day after she was canonized, and covered