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by the New York Times, sounds eerily familiar in mid-1990s America. The priest, echoing Pope Pius XII, called Goretti “a saint of the Christian home” who stood for divinely ordained family values and against “parental absenteeism and juvenile delinquency.” He blasted Hollywood movies, and the popular press in general, for “lurid descriptions of sex crimes and of the lives of notorious murderers,” and even took a stab at comic books, which he termed “the marijuana of the nursery.” As Scott Hoffman notes, dryly, “St. Maria Goretti had arrived on the Jersey shore.” Maria Goretti comics were apparently all right; they were a staple of the small industry that Goretti became in America during the 1950s. She was promoted with such fervor by the American church, held up so insistently as a model for the first generation of post-war baby-boomers and their parents, that Hoffman wonders, “Did [Goretti] die for Christ, or the middle class?”

Reading the devotional literature about Goretti that was aimed at American Catholics in the 1950s, one is tempted to say that she died for whatever purpose one wanted her to. In Helen Walker Homan’s smarmy Letters to the Martyrs, for example, Goretti becomes a beacon of anti-Communism. As the martyred St. Agnes stood against the Roman Empire, Homan finds that Maria Goretti represents the “Christian principles not compatible with those of a totalitarian State.” Another of Goretti’s hagiographers, Monsignor James Morelli, makes Goretti an American patriot. In his book about Goretti, entitled Teenager’s Saint, he writes that now that the world is “drawing itself into two enemy camps, Communism and Christianity. . . . Our church and our country have no use for weak, lukewarm souls who are always ready to give in to evil. . . . The hour has come for hardy, tough fighters who loyally and openly live a fully Christian life under the banner of the Church.”

Several writers stop just short of praising Goretti for her illiteracy. “Heaven forbid that anyone think . . . that the key to sanctity is illiteracy,” Mary Reed Newland writes in The Saints and Our Children: “What God is showing us . . . with the life of this saint is that He alone can be quite enough.” While this has interesting theological implications, particularly for liberation theology, such subtleties are lost on the hagiographers of the 1950s. Devotional pamphlets, such as “The Cinderella Saint,” tended to romanticize Goretti’s poverty. And Monsignor Morelli, in a chapter entitled “The Little Madonna,” takes the opportunity, over Goretti’s dead body, to complain about educated women. “Look at all the ‘career girls,’ ” he writes, “who can’t even mend a torn dress, or cook a simple meal, let alone manage a household.” (Goretti’s selfless dedication to domestic responsibilities, especially after her father died, is much praised in all the accounts of her life.) The career girls, the monsignor finds, “don’t compare to the little unlettered Italian girl who had a better way of writing.”

Taking a quick turn into the darker corners of 1950s Catholic spirituality, Morelli continues: “With her way of writing, Saint Maria Goretti wrote in letters of blood a page of history which is her undying glory. Perhaps some of our modern educated girls, who seem to have spent all their wisdom attending to trifles and serving self, could reflect on the great lesson of Maria Goretti.” One must ask: What lesson? Better unread, and dead?

Several of Goretti’s hagiographers found the saint useful for teaching children about chastity in an age in which, as Mary Reed Newland writes, “the devil [has so] successfully convinced the world that God made [sex] for pleasure alone.” Writing of Goretti as a “model of chastity,” Newland finds her murderer to “stand for all the boys and girls whose minds and souls have been ravished by dirty literature, pornographic pictures, suggestive movies,” and the like. “Like so many young people,” she writes, “he became preoccupied more and more with passion and lust because no one had turned his mind in a different direction.” This, of course,