Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
This is the Saints' Day of St. Maria Goretti,
who, at the age of 12 or 13, chose to put everything aside
and follow Christ on the road to Calvary.
All the things that she could have desired as a young girl,
her desire to be with her family and to help them in their poverty,
which she did every day,
her desire to grow up and follow the vocation that God had given her,
her desire to be alive
and to experience what every young person desires to experience,
she chose to set all of these aside
and follow Christ on the road to Calvary.
And at the beginning,
at the beginning of the 20th century,
became the icon, one of the great icons and patrons of our age of impurity.
Her murderer, Alessandro, was into pornography.
And at the end of his life,
after he had converted through an extraordinary experience of Maria Goretti,
she had appeared to him in his jail cell after he had been in prison for many years.
And had been bitter and actually had lied under testimony
and said that Maria Goretti had consented to his advances.
St. Maria Goretti appeared to him and gave him 14 lilies,
one lily for each time he stabbed her.
And he was converted instantly and retracted all of his false testimony
and told the whole story.
And after his release from prison,
he ended up going on Christmas night shortly after he was released
to the town where St. Maria's mother continued to live.
And there he attended Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with Maria Goretti's mother
and went down to communion with her mother.
Her mother completely forgave him.
After that, he spent the rest of his life doing penance.
Toward the end, he joined the Capuchin friars.
He wasn't a friar,
but sort of an extern oblate.
And they let him live there and he worked.
But at the very end of his life,
he wrote a testimony about pornography
and said that pornography was the reason for his perversion
and for his bloodlust,
his lust and his bloodlust that led to the murder of St. Maria Goretti.
And he begged that young men would stay away from it.
And Maria Goretti chose the Way of the Cross
before anything else in this age of impurity
because she loved God more than anything else
and was willing to trade anything rather than to lose his friendship.
And she didn't want Alessandro to lose God's friendship either.
She kept telling him that what he was doing was a sin,
that he was offending God.
She didn't beg him for mercy.
She begged him not to offend God.
Extraordinary in a young child.
That's what she did.
And God wants to give us all the strength to do that as well,
to struggle and strive against impurity
and to persevere until the end.
It's only through his grace that we can do that.
But with his grace, as we see in this life,
in the life of this little girl,
all things are possible with God.
God chooses the weak and makes them strong,
chooses these young girls like St. Maria Goretti and St. Agnes.
And St. Agatha, to make it clear to us
that there is no excuse really in the end
for our willingness to compromise with sin.
A little girl can overcome in the battle
and continue to fight to the very end
and be victorious with Christ.
The rest of us can as well.
We have to humble ourselves and ask for the grace of God.
Recognize, as we say here in the Gospel today,
that what we have been given
is the pearl of great price
and everything else can be cast aside
in order to obtain it, and should be.
May we have this grace
to the intercession of St. Maria Goretti.
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