St. Maria Goretti

Please forgive me, again, for using personal experiences to write about a great Saint of Mercy, St. Maria Goretti.
One day in the early fifties, all three of us siblings, Tom, Gerry and Susan, had raging colds. Mom took us to Dr. Bugg, one of Raleigh’s great pediatricians. He examined us and gave Mom something and sent us on our way.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck as all three of us came down with polio, which was ravaging the world at this terrible time. Dr. Bugg later apologized profusely that he had had a polio victim in his office at the same time we were there.
Through Mom’s unceasing prayer, care and love, I, the oldest and strongest was able to escape this killer. Also, my brother Gerry, younger and strong enough, was able to escape.
Susan, the baby and the weakest, did not escape and for the rest of her life had polio that shrank her right leg, making her unable to walk without wearing a clunky brace.
Susan must have known daily hardships, both physically and psychologically. Getting out of bed and going to the bathroom in the morning began the struggle, and everywhere she went, people, especially children her own age, would stare at her and not understand or be afraid or, in the worst case, view her as some clanking metal monster.
Susan never gave up trying to make the best of her horrible situation. She was President of her middle school; she was a class officer in high school, I believe, and she was accepted and went to Duke University.
Unfortunately, at Duke, she suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. She recovered, but was more fragile than before.
Here is a picture of Susan with my daughter Jackie, now 29, sitting on my Mom’s front steps.

Susan was a good aunt to my three children, and my oldest son even followed her to Duke, many years later.
Yet Susan’s life was a hard life of daily suffering and potential humiliation due to her polio. In this way I compare her in my mind to St. Maria Goretti, who also had a hardscrabble life of daily suffering because of her hard work as a dirt farmer without a father and her potential humiliation because of her poverty and vulnerability.
Here is the only known photograph I could find of St. Maria taken in her lifetime:

 

Her face looks one of care and concern; her clothes seem simple. In any case, evil caught up with her poverty and vulnerability and killed her.
In my sister’s case, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer, attacked her, which she heroically fought for two years.
Then one evening in her apartment she fell, bumped her head, bled abundantly and the sheer evil of acute leukemia came and took her.
All the family was devastated, Mom most of all, but Susan’s death hit me as nothing before.
All her life, Susan had known daily suffering. God didn’t seem to be fair. Death seemed too harsh a judgment for one so young who had already endured so much.
It was a crisis of faith for me, one on the most serious of my life.
We had the Memorial Service. So many wonderful people from her work at the University of North Carolina Library were there, so many from our old neighborhood in Raleigh, so many of Mom’s friends.

Even my pastor, Father Pat Posey and music director Dan Day, drove all the way down from Falls Church only to turn around at the end of the service and drive right back. Unbelievable!
Yet of all these special people, the one who made the most difference, who turned on the light for me, was a one-legged woman whom I had never met before and whose name I couldn’t tell you today.
Susan was the best swimmer in the family, swimming nearly every day with such ease and grace. When I came home, she swam with me at the North Carolina State Swimming Pool, but normally she swam at the YWCA pool. This I knew, but what I didn’t know was that at the YWCA, her best friend was this delightful lady born with one leg.
She had asked to speak at the Service, and we had said yes. She said beautiful things about Susan, but most of them I knew until she casually noted a conversation they had one day about their both being “maidens.”
I don’t think I had heard this word spoken in my lifetime, and it struck me like a lightning bolt. My sister was a virgin, and this horrible evil struck an innocent, just as it had struck St. Maria Goretti, a virgin martyr.
My sister died on July 6. St. Maria Goretti died on July 6, her Feast Day.
When I made this connection, a peace, joy and consolation came over me. I knew Susan was in good hands.
I have never stopped praying with peace in my heart to St. Maria Goretti for my sister Susan and for the world, particularly the innocent.
More than that, as Christ was hanging on the Cross, he asked forgiveness for his killers. So St. Maria died asking forgiveness for her killer. Because of St. Maria, I ask Jesus daily for forgiveness for all who harm us, especially harm the innocent.
I beg you to bring St. Maria into your prayer life as well. Innocence is so precious and fragile!. Forgiveness is not so easy to give when we or those we love are offended.
St. Maria Goretti, pray for us.
St. Maria Goretti, pray for us.
St. Maria Goretti, pray for us.
We pray in Jesus’ name.

Deacon Tom Bello, O.F.S.

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LINKS

Saint of the Day – St. Maria Goretti (Franciscan Media)

St. Maria Goretti – US Tour – Pilgrimage of Mercy & Resources about “The Little Saint of Great Mercy”