The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [97]
Maybe it was no more than the need to believe that a brutal, needless death might be somehow useful, and have religious meaning. Who can blame them, if they exaggerated? Or if Maria Goretti’s mother in her grief declared that her daughter, “in all her short life had never been disobedient,” and suddenly recalled that Maria had responded to her first communion by promising, “I shall always be better.” Maybe those around Maria Goretti as she died were struck by the courage of someone deemed by society to have no significance at all. Peasant cultures are notorious for not valuing girls, except as cheap labor with a potential for motherhood.
In his book On the Theology of Death Karl Rahner speaks of martyrdom in terms of Jesus’ declaration in John 10:18: “I have the power to lay down my life and to take it up again.” Rahner remarks, “This is particularly true at that moment when we seem most fully under the domination of external forces: ‘nobody takes my life; I myself lay it down.’ And this is exactly what happens in the martyr’s death; it is a free death.” Rahner emphasizes that he is speaking of an extreme situation, and a liberty that cannot be obtained by any other means: “In that death which is violent,” he writes, “which could have been avoided, and which is, nevertheless, accepted in freedom, the whole of life is gathered in one moment of ultimate freedom.”
I don’t find it hard to believe that Maria Goretti is a martyr in the classic sense, that she died for her faith, after all. To say anything less is, I believe, to continue to relegate her to the status of a cipher. In our age, virginity seems little enough to make a fuss over; many girls see it as a burden to be shed as soon as possible. It is difficult for us to conceive of a girl refusing to allow a violation of what she surely saw as her God-given bodily integrity, even though it cost her life.
Why should Maria Goretti be so hard for us to understand, and accept? A recent Newsweek contains a grim account of a married couple in Canada who habitually kidnapped, tortured, raped, and sometimes murdered teenage girls. Because they videotaped their victims, the defiance of one fifteen-year-old, Kirsten French, is on record. “Ordered to perform a particular sex act,” the article notes, “she refused, insisting, ‘Some things are worth dying for.’ ” The girl never gave in, even when her tormenters showed her the videotaped death of another of their victims.
I am not suggesting that this young girl is better off “pure” and dead than raped and alive. I am stating emphatically that in this extreme situation, no doubt having realized that her death was inevitable, she had every right to act as she did. To choose a free death. Of course it’s sad to think of this as freedom, to imagine an adolescent having to make such a choice. But the wisdom of the world tells us that girls are targets. In several countries in Asia girl infants are sold to brothels to be raised as prostitutes. In the civilized West, they’re stalked, raped, and murdered, if not on the streets, in the movies and on television. If one dares say to her attacker, “Some things are worth dying for,” there is nothing joyful about it, except possibly deep within, some inner defiance, some inner purity and strength that defies the sadist, and the power of his weapons.
The mystery of holiness infuses such defiance. I am haunted by the idea that Kirsten French’s killers may have responded to this spark of holiness in her. They had dismembered the corpse of a fourteen-year-old girl they’d killed the year before. It was a videotape of her death that they showed to Kirsten French