Remembering Saint Maria Goretti
At the Shrine of St. Maria Goretti, Nettuno In every age, the saints of God have proven that they were God’s servants by their lives of faith and purity of soul. During my time in Rome recently I had the opportunity to visit the shrine of St. Maria Goretti, where she is buried and where many pilgrims come to ask the intercession of this child-saint. The story of St. Maria Goretti is the story of a martyr-saint and a young one at that. It does not make for easy reading. In 1950, she was canonized in a ceremony attended by twenty-five million people, including her mother, the first mother ever to see her child canonized, and Alessandro Serenelli, her killer. Her feast day is the 6th of July so I thought it would be good to share her story on this day. The Holy Father observed during her canonization that Maria longed "to ascend to heaven by the only road that leads there, which is religion, the love of Christ and the heroic observance of his commandments." The shrine