Christmas Every Day

St Maria Goretti

How does an 11-year-old peasant girl get to be a saint? Consider the life of Maria Goretti, an illiterate Italian peasant child born in 1890. The Goretti family was poor and lived as agricultural labourers, sharing their house with another family, the Serenellis. One of the Serenelli boys, 20-year-old Alessandro, had fixated on Maria and on July 5, 1902 threatened her with a knife and tried to rape her. When she resisted he stabbed her fourteen times. In hospital the next day, before she died, she forgave Alessandro and expressed the wish that they would meet in heaven. Alessandro was convicted of her murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison; he was spared a harsher penalty only after the pleading of Maria’s widowed mother. In prison he had a religious conversion and dreamt that he was visited by the spirit of Maria who gave him lilies (symbol of her purity) which burned in his hands. On his release he was reconciled with Maria’s mother [see photo below] and became a lay Franciscan brother, living to a ripe old age.

The story of Maria’s martyrdom and miracles procured when she was prayed to led to Pope Pius XII declaring her a saint in 1950. 500,000 people filled Rome on the day of her canonization. Her mother was there — the first mother to attend the canonization of a daughter — as was the repentant Alessandro. Maria Goretti is the patron saint of chastity, rape victims, girls, youth, teenage girls, poverty, purity and forgiveness.

Serenelli wrote the following in his old age:

I’m nearly 80 years old. I’m about to depart.

Looking back at my past, I can see that in my early youth, I chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself.

My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried.

There were a lot of generous and devoted people who surrounded me, but I paid no attention to them because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life.

When I was 20 years-old, I committed a crime of passion. Now, that memory represents something horrible for me. Maria Goretti, now a Saint, was my good Angel, sent to me through Providence to guide and save me. I still have impressed upon my heart her words of rebuke and of pardon. She prayed for me, she interceded for her murderer. Thirty years of prison followed.

If I had been of age, I would have spent all my life in prison. I accepted to be condemned because it was my own fault.

Little Maria was really my light, my protectress; with her help, I behaved well during the 27 years of prison and tried to live honestly when I was again accepted among the members of society. The Brothers of St. Francis, Capuchins from Marche, welcomed me with angelic charity into their monastery as a brother, not as a servant. I’ve been living with their community for 24 years, and now I am serenely waiting to witness the vision of God, to hug my loved ones again, and to be next to my Guardian Angel and her dear mother, Assunta.

I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life.

Alessandro Serenelli, May 5, 1961

1187

The True Cross is lost

The knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 and went on to establish four states on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem were precarious Roman Catholic, feudal outposts in an alien landscape. Their subjects were mainly Eastern Christians of one sort or another and Muslims; their neighbours were hostile Islamic powers. The First Crusade had arrived at a time of Muslim disunity but would soon face a stronger and more united set of enemies. Edessa fell in 1144 and the Second Crusade failed to recover it. By the 1180s the great Saladin was the sultan of a great swath of territory surrounding the crusader states and he was determined to bring them down.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was an elective monarchy, dependent on the armies of quarrelling barons and the fighting monks of the Knights Templar and Hospitallers. In 1186 the hapless Guy de Lusignan (1150-94) became King. A weak man, he was bullied into leading an army against Saladin the following year rather than relying on the strength of the crusader castles to sap the sultan’s strength. Trapped in the desert, far from water, at a location known as the Horns of Hattin the Christian army was soundly defeated by Saladin. Though Guy was spared, most of the prisoners, including all of the Templars and Hospitallers were massacred. A Muslim observer described the scene:

Saladin ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics, each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais, the unbelievers showed black despair.

Guy was taken in golden chains as prisoner to Damascus. The True Cross, Christendom’s holiest relic which was always carried in front of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s armies, was paraded before jubilant Muslim crowds and then disappears from history. Many crusader castles which had been stripped of troops for Guy’s armies soon fell to Saladin and Jerusalem itself was captured. This calamity promoted the Third Crusade which, though it recovered some of the lost territory, was never able to retake Jerusalem.

Guy, after being released by Saladin, was given Cyprus as a consolation prize — the island had been captured from the Byzantines by Richard Coeur de Lion of England. The Kingdom of Jerusalem continued to cling to a strip of coastal cities until the last stronghold fell in 1291. The title of King of Jerusalem continued to be claimed by many European royal houses in France, Spain, Germany and Italy and today the strongest claimant is likely Philip VI of Spain.