Our Incorruptible Dead Girls

by The Awl

Maria Goretti haunts my television. Though the Catholic saint was murdered in 1902, long before television was invented, her presence is still felt. The eleven-year-old was stabbed fourteen times by twenty-year-old Alessandro Serenelli when she refused to submit to his advances. It wasn’t the first time that she had refused Serenelli, but this time, he came determined and armed with a knife. According to her voyeuristic hagiography, Goretti screamed and fought, “No! It is a sin! God does not want it!”

As she languished in a nearby hospital bed, Goretti forgave her murderer, clutched her crucifix, gazed at the Virgin Mary and died. Goretti had little — she was but one of many children in a poor Italian family — but, like a good Catholic girl, she had her virginity, and to have it stolen or lost would have been a mortal sin. It was perhaps the only valuable thing she possessed, so valuable that she took it to her grave. And it was in death — her body laid out before mourners — that Goretti found a kind of value that she never had during her short life. For her troubles, in 1950 she was canonized while her mother looked on, made the patron saint of rape victims.

Catholicism is filled with saintly women like her whose incorruptible bodies — especially virgins — insist on veneration, preserved in altars, patiently awaiting the Last Judgment. There’s Imelda, whose heart burst from the rapture of her first communion; Saint Rita of Casica, who endured a life of abuse at her husband’s hands; Agatha of Sicily who, after being forced into prostitution, had her breasts severed; and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, who once told a fellow nun, “My job is to be ill.” The bodies of these dead women litter Europe. Their lives, like most saints, were marked with violence and tragedy. But, laid in altars or specially constructed chapels, their miraculous flesh welcomes the meditative gaze of pilgrims of have come seeking the guidance of the dead, even though dead women do not speak.

Read the rest at The Awl.