Saint of the Day, July 6

Saint Maria Goretti (1890–1902), an eleven-year-old peasant girl of Le Ferriere in the Pontine Marshes, was stabbed fourteen times by a young farmhand, Alessandro Serenelli, when she resisted his attempted assault. She lived for twenty hours, forgave her killer aloud before dying, and asked that he be brought one day to share heaven with her. Eight years into his thirty-year prison sentence Alessandro saw Maria in a dream giving him fourteen lilies; he repented completely, and after his release went on a pilgrimage to her mother to beg forgiveness, then entered a Capuchin lay community where he lived to old age. Pius XII canonized Maria in 1950 in the largest crowd ever to attend a canonization until that time.