The Cloister Walk (31 page)

Taking a quick turn into the darker corners of 1950s Catholic spirituality, Morelli continues: “With her way of writing, Saint Maria Goretti wrote in letters of blood a page of history which is her undying glory. Perhaps some of our modern educated girls, who seem to have spent all their wisdom attending to trifles and serving self, could reflect on the great lesson of Maria Goretti.” One must ask:
What
lesson? Better unread,
and
dead?

Several of Goretti's hagiographers found the saint useful for teaching children about chastity in an age in which, as Mary Reed Newland writes, “the devil [has so] successfully convinced the world that God made [sex] for pleasure alone.” Writing of Goretti as a “model of chastity,” Newland finds her murderer to “stand for all the boys and girls whose minds and souls have been ravished by dirty literature, pornographic pictures, suggestive movies,” and the like. “Like so many young people,” she writes, “he became preoccupied more and more with passion and lust because no one had turned his mind in a different direction.” This, of course, is the role of the Catholic parent, and Newland challenges them all to do as Goretti's parents did, “parents
who knew they were supposed to raise saints but had no way of knowing they would.
They knew little else but that to do God's will in all things is the secret of sanctity. How well they taught this child!” (Emphasis Newland's.)

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 to her, but I never understood why. Somehow she was supposed to help you to be good.” She comments that a picture of Goretti, “looking demure, crouched in a corner while a man in the foreground held a knife,” was merely confusing to her. “I never understood just
why
he was attacking her. It was never explained to us.” The real girl, of course, was as lost in all of this as any rape victim caught in the system between a politically ambitious D.A. and a media-savvy defense attorney determined to make a saint of the assailant by castigating his victim. It comes as no surprise that Giordano Guerri, the Italian journalist who in 1985 published a book accusing the church of having invented Goretti's martyrdom, suggested that Goretti was not so innocent, that she had intended to give in to Serenelli all along.

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 that brought Maria's case to the attention of the Vatican. I like to think that somehow she touched hard people in a hard time and place: her innocence; the radical fact that a young girl had dared to resist a man, the appalling consequences she faced as a result. Apparently there was something in the child's recounting of the attack, and in her mother's grief, that compelled her neighbors, the police, the nurses, to keep retelling the story.

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 in an attempt to intimidate her into submission. This may signify nothing at all, but it is the stuff of hagiography. The body of Kirsten French they buried intact.

I am haunted also by the countless women whose names we'll never know, who have faced their rapists with a holy resistance, and possibly even forgiveness, known only to themselves and God. Rapes reported and unreported in so many societies such as our own, which paint themselves as respectable and deny the commonplace, daily reality of rape. It is always something that happens to “someone else.” It is always something she did, or didn't do: she wore blue jeans, or a skirt, she took a walk through the woods behind her house, she walked down a city sidewalk, she had the wrong uncle, or boyfriend, clergyman, or neighbor. Maria Goretti as cipher allows us to cling to our lies, our illusion of goodness. But Maria Goretti as saint can free us, a symbol of resistance to evil temin her life, “is the only commandment I ever obeyed.”