Is Maria Goretti The Patron Saint of Boundaries?

Saturday, February 8, 2025.This is for GK, the repentant sex-offender.

I was raised Roman Catholic. My favorite saint is Maria Goretti.

Not because of what the Church says about her, but because she reminds me that sainthood is often just another word for being failed by everyone who was supposed to protect you.

Maria Goretti, the Patron Saint of Chastity. Because when a child is brutalized, what matters most is that she remained "pure."

An eleven-year-old girl, murdered because she said no.

And she’s the one we turn into a saint. Not her mother, who had to carry on. Not her siblings who suffered in the shadow of what happened.

But the girl. The girl who died. Because we love dead girls. Especially the ones who go quietly.

The facts of the case are simple:

Maria lived in poverty. Her father was dead, and her mother was raising too many children with too few resources. They were, by all definitions, powerless.

Alessandro Serenelli was twenty years old. He lived in the same house. He had made advances before. He had decided that what he wanted, he would take.

On July 5, 1902, he attacked. Maria screamed. She fought. She cried out, "No, Alessandro, it is a sin! God does not want it!" And for that—he stabbed her fourteen times.

She lived for twenty-four more hours, long enough to forgive him. Because of course she did.

She was eleven, and eleven-year-olds still believe in the magic of words. That if you say something with enough force, the world will change.

It did not change.

Instead, the Church changed the story. They made her a symbol of chastity, a moral ideal. They framed her as a girl who "chose death over sin."

No.

She did not choose death. She chose to live. She fought. She screamed.

She clawed at life with everything she had, and when it was clear she wouldn’t win, she did the only thing left to her: she forgave.

Because that’s what little Catholic girls do. We forgive the men who destroy us.

And what did the Church do? They made it about purity. They made it about the body, not the soul. They turned a brutal, horrifying act of violence into a lesson for young girls everywhere: If you are attacked, fight hard enough to die, and we will call you a saint.

But if you live?

If you live… well?

Then you have to carry it. And no one’s building statues for that.

The Patron Saint of Saying No?

Maria Goretti should not be the Patron Saint of Chastity. She should be the Patron Saint of Saying No.

She should be the saint of every woman who has had to fight for her own boundaries, for every person who has ever stood their ground against an overwhelming force, for every child who has ever been told that their resistance was not enough.

Maria was not an object lesson in morality. She was a child.

A child failed by a system that left her vulnerable, by a family too poor to leave, by a world where power meant a man could do what he wanted and still be the one offered redemption.

Serenelli

We don’t like to talk about what happened to Alessandro. But we should.

Because unlike the story the Church likes to tell, forgiveness is not an instant fix. It does not wipe away blood. It does not stitch up wounds. It is not magic. It is a door, and you still have to choose to walk through it.

Alessandro Serenelli spent twenty-seven years in prison. He was violent. Unrepentant. Then he had a dream: Maria, handing him 14 lilies, one for every stab wound. A horror movie disguised as a miracle.

When he left prison, he sought out Maria’s mother. He begged for her forgiveness. She gave it. He spent his last years as a humble maintenance man in a monastery.

Serenelli’s story tells us that transformation is possible, but it is not free. It is not granted. It is earned, day by day, in sweat and in suffering and in doing the work of becoming a person who no longer harms.

The Real Miracle?

Maria Goretti did not die to teach us about purity. She died because she lived in a world where men like Alessandro existed, and no one stopped him.

But what if we let her be something else?

What if we made her the Patron Saint of Boundaries? Of Fighting Back? Of the Right to Say No?

What if we told her story as it truly was—not a parable about virtue, but a tragedy about power? What if we made her legacy not about what was taken from her, but about what she refused to give?

What if we told the truth?

Then, maybe then, she wouldn’t just be the Patron Saint of Dead Girls.

Maybe she could be a Patron Saint of Survivors.

And God knows, we need more of those.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.