20th century
Feast: July 6
Her attacker spent twenty-seven years in prison and was released a changed man — he showed up at her mother's door on Christmas Eve and asked her forgiveness. She gave it.
Maria Goretti's story has been told badly so many times that the real one gets lost. She was not a plaster saint. She was an eleven-year-old girl living in crushing poverty in the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, doing adult labor — cooking, cleaning, and caring for younger children — because her father had died of malaria and her mother worked the fields. Alessandro Serenelli, a twenty-year-old neighbor, had been making sexual advances toward her for weeks. On July 5, 1902, he attacked her with an awl — a pointed leather-working tool — when she resisted his assault. He stabbed her fourteen times. She was carried to a hospital, where she lingered for twenty hours. Before she died, she said she forgave Alessandro and wanted him in heaven. He was convicted and sentenced to thirty years. In prison, he was violent and unrepentant for years — until he had a dream of Maria offering him flowers. He converted, served out his sentence, and upon release went directly to Maria's mother, Assunta, on Christmas Eve. He knelt before her and asked her forgiveness. 'If Maria forgave you,' Assunta said, 'how can I not?' The next morning, they received Communion together. Alessandro spent the rest of his life as a gardener at a Capuchin monastery. He was present at Maria's canonization in 1950.