The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [95]
The passage that follows, a dizzy mixture of sanctimonious prudery and sound practical advice on sex education, culminates, predictably, by reminding girls that they must be careful to dress modestly and explaining that the pain of menstruation is “part of the great privilege that goes with being a girl, whom God has given the gift of life-bearing.” The grain of truth in all of this—that the ability to bear a child is wondrous and mysterious, not to be taken lightly—is overshadowed by the sheer bizarreness of Newman’s prose. Her essay typifies what is wrong with the standard hagiography of St. Maria Goretti; its excesses of masochistic piety cloud whatever genuine religious value the work might have for the reader.
Newland speaks, for instance, of the considerable insults that Maria and her mother, Assunta, suffered at the hands of the more well-to-do Serenellis, father and son, as “the means by which [the women] died their daily death to self . . . the purification . . . that God permitted in order that these two souls be prepared for the gift of martyrdom.” To the modern reader this suggests nothing more than the woman-as-doormat school of theology, which is still used in the most conservative Christian churches to keep women from leaving abusive marriages. Appallingly, Newman continues: “The mother must willingly surrender the child who would wear the crown.”
Newland even projects onto Goretti a sophisticated awareness of her upcoming death. Given that her assailant had threatened her in the past, the terror of his presence in that household should not be minimized. But what Newman does with it is obscene, an unappealing blend of Jansenism and gnosticism. She suggests that what Goretti knew of the sacraments—a priest preparing himself to “give his body to God to do His holy will,” or a married couple planning “to beget with God’s help the souls He has known forever”—helped Maria Goretti prepare for her own martyrdom, being “willing to die rather than sin, [even] willing to die rather than permit her neighbor to sin.” This is a lot of weight to put on an innocent eleven-year-old, but where Maria Goretti is concerned, the hagiographers have shown no shame.
The sickest use of Maria Goretti is found in Monsignor Morelli’s Teenager’s Saint, in which he gives a clinical description of the cause of her death, telling his young readers that Serenelli’s knife had “penetrated the thorax and penetrated the pericardium, the left auricle of the heart and the left lung . . . the abdomen, the small intestine and the iliac.” He follows this with a strangely enthusiastic description of each of the eighteen stab wounds and its location on Goretti’s body, adding that “victory was hers. Doctors testified in their statement that her virginity emerged from the fight absolutely unsullied.” Morelli here does violence to the tradition of the early virgin martyrs, for whom virginity was not centered in their genitals but in their souls.
Presumably, Morelli’s visceral overkill was designed to take a teenager’s mind off sex. Unless, of course, that teenager were a budding sexual psychopath; then the passage would have the opposite effect, appealing to the worst prurient interests. The appalling mix of sexual repression and fascination with Goretti’s wounded body makes her not only a cipher but a version of the Story of O, a perfect model of pornographic surrender. A Catholic friend recalls that a statue of Goretti was placed at the foot of the stairs at his boys’ school. “I guess on our way out the door every day,” he says, “she was supposed to remind us where sex could lead.”
Girls often got a milder version of Goretti’s significance. One friend recalls, “If you had an impious thought, you were supposed to pray