What Can We Do to Honor Saint Maria?

We got through the feast of Saint Maria Goretti, again.

My longtime readers don’t need to be told my history of posts about Saint Maria Goretti. I insist every year that she was a beautiful, generous soul whose perseverance and forgiveness are a great example for us all, and that her hagiography has been exploited to shame rape victims in nasty ways. Being the victim of sexual violence is never impure. If Alessandro had succeeded in raping her and THEN stabbed her to death, she’d be every bit as innocent. The way certain Catholics talk about her and other Virgin Martyrs is extremely hurtful to people who have suffered sexual abuse. It’s also a dangerous thing to say to children because children can’t consent to sex anyway.  And, every year, somebody insists that I’m slandering the virtue of a saint and indeed the whole notion of chastity. I’m beginning to dread the first week of July.

I used to be inundated with trolls yelling at me every time I wrote about Goretti. But I’m very pleased that this year, there was only one troll who objected. A lot of people, Catholic and not Catholic, jumped on her to tell her how wrong she was. I think the tide is really turning and we’re beginning to be able to honor this courageous little girl for who she is. Everyone knows that adage about “repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth.” That’s usually an adage about people who propagate lies, but it’s good to know that it works for telling the truth as well. Insist on repeating the truth every seventh of July for seven years, and eventually people will actually start to realize it’s true. Cultures can change if enough people tell the truth.

It got me thinking about how we ought to honor Goretti’s legacy without hurting people.

And I’ve decided that the best way to honor her, would be to help people like her.

Goretti was murdered by a pedophile she lived with and had to stay home alone with, because her family was desperately poor. They couldn’t afford to move away from the pedophile. Maria’s poor mother had to work all day and couldn’t afford to stay home and watch her daughter. Her daughter was afraid to tell her she’d been threatened; she didn’t seem to have anyone she could talk to. This horrendous tragedy would never have happened if Goretti had had people to look out for her. Similar tragedies do happen to other poor kids with nobody to look out for them all the time. Poor children are extremely vulnerable.

So I think the very best way to honor Saint Maria Goretti, is to look out for poor children.

What can you do, in your own community, to help keep poor children safe?

You could volunteer to read stories to children after school at the Rec Center– and not the Rec Center in the nice neighborhood, but the one in the trashy neighborhood. You could make a donation to that rec center if you don’t have time to volunteer.

You could start an after school program making crafts, helping with homework and having a snack with local children at your church– or you could volunteer for such a program that already exists at another church. Steubenville has a really nice one.

You could get together with neighbors and the help of City Council, and turn the ugly vacant lot into a community garden with a gardening club that the neighbor kids can join.

There’s a nice Protestant church on the other side of the river near me, where the churchgoers took a Bible verse about “visiting orphans” to heart, and now they have an outreach mentoring foster kids and coming to their court dates to speak for them to the judge and make sure they’re in the best situation they can get. You could do something like that.

You could befriend the exhausted single mom at your parish, and invite her child to your own child’s birthday party at Chuckie Cheese. Maybe that child has never been to Chuckie Cheese before and would love it.

You could donate a scholarship for a poor kid to go to horseback riding camp or an excellent ballet school.

You could make a point of being really nice to the annoying poor kids who wander over to your yard and ask to pet your dog or look at your vegetable patch.

You could, God forbid, get politically active and fight for an improved social safety net so that more poor families could have more time to spend with their children.

All of these things could help a poor kid not end up meeting a horrible fate like Saint Maria.

All children need supervision and places they can go to be safe. All children need not only good parents, but a network of trustworthy grown-ups. You can be that grown-up. You can be someone who helps provide a safe place for a child to go, so that child doesn’t wander into a dangerous place. You can be an adult that makes that child feel safe, so that child will confide in you if there’s a scary secret they’ve been forced to keep.

In honor of Saint Maria, let’s help all the Marias and Marios in our community.

Let’s start today.