The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [96]
What possible relevance does Maria Goretti have today? I was pleased to find Eileen Stenzel’s article about her in a book about violence against women, less pleased by its densely ideological prose, its air of preaching to the converted. At first glance, Stenzel seemed to be just one more person using Goretti to promote her own political agenda, identifying Goretti as “a challenge to the current position of Rome that women cannot be ordained because women cannot represent Christ on earth.” But the delicious irony in Stenzel’s calling Goretti a “pastoral testimony to the priesthood of women” is that she is concentrating, far more than Goretti’s conventional hagiographers, on the truly religious elements of her sanctity, which is centered on forgiveness.
Witnesses have testified that as Maria Goretti lay dying, she forgave her assailant and expressed the desire to see him in paradise. Several years later, when he was in prison, she appeared to him in a dream, and caused him, finally, to repent. That a mere girl could have the power to so change a man is a challenge to the patriarchal status quo. And as Stenzel points out, there is considerable theological significance to this aspect of Goretti’s story. “Maria did not urge [Serenelli] to seek out a priest for forgiveness,” Stenzel writes. “She forgave him. God did not send angels to a sleeping prisoner; Maria appeared to him and forgave him.” Goretti, then, may be seen to represent Christ, much as St. Barbara, a virgin martyr of the second century, the saint one invokes when in danger of sudden death.
Much of our difficulty with Maria Goretti comes from the fact that her hagiography is of the nineteenth century, but she is a twentieth-century martyr, one with great significance in an age when violence against women is increasingly rejected as a norm, and properly named as criminal violence. Ironically, it is the overload of devotional material and sappy titles such as “Lily of the marshes” or “Lily of Corinaldo,” designed to prove Goretti’s sanctity, that make it so difficult for people to take her seriously today. The real child, whoever she was, was quickly and thoroughly encased in the stereotypes of conventional hagiography. Like almost all young saints, she is said to have been “without whims, a saint, an angel,” whose “unusual piety had an almost adult quality,” and who, despite her destitute circumstances, had “a natural grace and a certain inborn refinement” and practiced “the everyday virtues with perfection.”
Unfortunately, it is precisely this kind of language that obscures for modern people what is most believable about Maria Goretti: that as a pious child of a peasant culture she may well have resisted rape in religious terms (“No, it’s a sin! God does not want it!” is what her would-be rapist reported that she had said to him). It is also conceivable that she would have forgiven him on her deathbed, again for religious reasons.
Something about Maria Goretti must have struck a spark with the women of the village who tried in vain to stop her bleeding, the ambulance drivers who carried her by horse-drawn cart to the nearest hospital, the doctors, nurses, and priests who attended her on her deathbed. In the traditional manner of saint-making, it was local acclamation