The Martyrdom They Cannot Name
Three German theologians have argued that St Maria Goretti should no longer be described as a “martyr of purity”. Their concern that victims of sexual violence must never be blamed is entirely just. Their conclusion is not. It rests upon the very confusion Catholic theology has always rejected: the confusion of bodily violation with moral consent.
On 6 July, the feast of St Maria Goretti, the German Catholic portal katholisch.de published an “intervention” by three theologians of the University of Regensburg: Philippa Haase, Judith König and Ute Leimgruber. Their declared purpose was to challenge the traditional veneration of the eleven-year-old saint as a “martyr of purity” or “martyr of virginity”. They concluded that the category was “no longer tenable”, particularly in the light of the experiences of women and girls sexually abused within the Church.¹
Their argument deserves to be presented seriously. The theologians do not deny that Maria was a saint, nor do they defend Alessandro Serenelli, the twenty-year-old man who attempted to rape her and stabbed her repeatedly when she resisted. They argue instead that the manner in which Maria’s story has sometimes been told can burden victims with a terrible and false comparison. Maria resisted and died; another victim froze, dissociated, submitted physically or survived. The latter may therefore ask whether she failed to defend her innocence, whether she was insufficiently pure, or whether survival itself proves that she did not resist enough.
Such fears are not imaginary. The Regensburg theologians cite testimony from abuse victims who were taught Maria’s story in ways that intensified shame and self-accusation. They are also correct that terror does not always produce active resistance. A person under assault may freeze, become psychologically detached, comply mechanically or do whatever appears most likely to preserve life. None of these involuntary reactions signifies moral consent. Any catechesis which tells a victim otherwise is not merely pastorally clumsy; it is theologically false.
The error begins when the theologians move from condemning a distortion of Catholic teaching to condemning the Catholic category itself. Their case depends upon the assumption that calling Maria a martyr of purity means that rape would have made her impure, that an assaulted woman must preserve bodily “untouchedness” even at the cost of death, and that a victim who survives has somehow participated in the sin committed against her. Yet these are not implications of Catholic doctrine. They are repudiations of it.
St Augustine addressed precisely this question after Christian women had been raped during the sack of Rome. He established what he called an “unassailable position”: virtue has its throne in the soul, and while the will remains firm, nothing another person does to the body can become the fault of the person who suffers it. “If the body is violated,” he concluded, the purity of the soul is not lost. The sin belongs to the violator, not to the violated.²
St Thomas Aquinas gives the same doctrine scholastic precision. Virginity considered as a virtue does not consist merely in anatomical integrity. Its formal element lies in the purpose of the mind and the ordering of the will. Bodily violation suffered through force and without consent does not forfeit virginity, even where the body undergoes involuntary physical reactions.³ Catholic theology therefore distinguishes bodily integrity, which an aggressor may injure, from chastity and moral purity, which no aggressor can seize.
The Regensburg intervention invokes Augustine as an alternative to the traditional reading of Maria Goretti. In reality, Augustine supplies the distinction by which that reading must be understood. He does not prove that Maria was not a martyr of purity. He proves that her purity did not depend upon Serenelli’s failure to complete his assault. Had Maria been overpowered, she would have remained innocent. Had she frozen in terror, she would have remained chaste. Had she survived, she would have remained pure. Another man’s violence could wound her body; it could not annex her will or convert his lust into her sin.
This is also the doctrine expressed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Rape is a forcible violation of another’s sexual intimacy which gravely wounds the victim’s freedom and physical and moral integrity. It is always intrinsically evil. The moral guilt belongs to the perpetrator.⁴ The Church has never taught that the victim becomes a participant merely because the attacker succeeds, or that unsuccessful resistance constitutes consent.
The decisive distinction is therefore not between a victim who dies and a victim who survives. It is between violence suffered and evil freely chosen. The traditional maxim associated with the martyrs is not “rape is worse than death”. It is “death is better than sin”. The Regensburg theologians repeatedly slide from one proposition to the other, but they are not equivalent. Rape is the sin of the rapist. It is not the sin of the person raped.
Maria’s martyrdom does not mean that she was morally obliged to overcome a stronger attacker or die in the attempt. It means that, when confronted by Serenelli, she made a conscious refusal grounded in her faith and was killed because of that refusal. She recognised what he intended as a grave offence against God, against her dignity and against his own soul. She resisted; he punished her resistance with death. The martyrdom consists not in the preservation of an anatomical condition, but in fidelity of the will under mortal threat.
Pius XII expressed this clearly at her canonisation in 1950. He called Maria the “little and sweet martyr of purity”, but did not reduce her sanctity to bodily untouchedness. In her purity, he said, appeared “the perfect dominion of the soul over matter”; together with it shone obedience, sacrifice, prayer, Eucharistic devotion, fortitude and, finally, the heroic charity by which she forgave her murderer.⁵ Purity was not presented as a fragile object destroyed by physical contact. It was the integrity of a person whose soul remained ordered to God when another attempted to subject her to his appetite.
Pope John Paul II later explained the title in equally unambiguous terms. Maria was called a martyr of purity “because she did not break God’s commandment in spite of being threatened by death”. He connected her witness with human dignity, interior freedom, reciprocal respect and the Christian understanding of sexuality as involving the whole person.⁶ Whatever criticisms may be made of sentimental or imprudent presentations of Maria’s life, the papal explanation cannot honestly be reduced to the proposition that a raped child becomes morally unclean.
Nor is martyrdom limited to those killed because a persecutor explicitly announces his hatred of a credal formula. Benedict XVI recalled the Church’s traditional definition of martyrdom as the voluntary endurance of death for the faith of Christ “or for another act of virtue referred to God”. He noted that persecutors increasingly conceal or do not consciously formulate hostility to Christianity, while nevertheless killing because of conduct inseparably connected with Christian virtue.⁷ Maria was not conducting a theological disputation with Serenelli. She was killed because her faith-formed conscience stood between his lust and its object.
The heroism of her refusal does not create a universal test by which every other victim is condemned. Canonising a martyr means that the Church recognises the supreme action of grace in a particular soul; it does not mean that every person who fails to reproduce the same heroism commits the opposite sin. The martyrs who remained silent under torture do not condemn those who broke beneath it. St Maximilian Kolbe’s voluntary death does not condemn the prisoners who did not offer themselves in another man’s place. Missionaries who remained among plague victims do not condemn every frightened person who fled. Heroic virtue reveals the heights to which grace can raise human freedom; it does not abolish fear, coercion, diminished responsibility or the ordinary limits of human strength.
The theologians are right that Maria must never be employed as a weapon against the abused. A victim must never be asked why she did not fight harder, scream louder, escape sooner or risk death. She must not be told that involuntary arousal, paralysis, dissociation or physical compliance constituted consent. She must not be pressured to forgive before she is capable of understanding what forgiveness means, nor instructed that forgiveness requires renewed contact with an offender, the abandonment of justice or silence about the crime.
Yet none of this requires the removal of Maria’s title. It requires accurate preaching. The authentic doctrine of Maria Goretti is that bodily violation does not create moral guilt; that the human person cannot be reduced to the condition of the body; that chastity belongs to the freedom of the person; and that violence cannot transform its victim into an accomplice. The aggressor cannot possess the conscience, convert terror into consent or turn the victim’s suffering into the victim’s sin.
The criticism of Maria’s forgiveness is equally misplaced. The Regensburg theologians argue that the traditional narrative appears to demand of the victim that she resist, remain pure, forgive and, if necessary, die, while making no comparable demand of the offender. But Christian doctrine places the first and most terrible demands upon the offender. He must cease the evil, acknowledge his guilt, submit to justice, repent, perform penance, repair what can be repaired and seek conversion. Maria’s forgiveness did not declare Serenelli innocent, prevent his prosecution or cancel his punishment. He was convicted, imprisoned and required to confront the crime he had committed.
Pope John Paul II expressly warned that forgiveness does not mean “moral relativism or permissiveness”. It demands full recognition of sin and the assumption of responsibility. Serenelli’s eventual repentance did not arise because his offence was minimised, but because its horror was finally understood.⁸ Maria’s prayer for his salvation was not the sentimental absolution of an unrepentant abuser. It was an act of supernatural charity which desired that a murderer should cease to be a murderer and become, through grace and penance, a converted man.
Neither is the expression “martyr of purity” an isolated relic of a supposedly obsolete pontificate. In 2018, under Pope Francis, Anna Kolesárová was beatified as a martyr after being killed while resisting the sexual demands of a Soviet soldier. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints explicitly associated her with St Maria Goretti and St Agnes, describing her death as martyrdom in defence of chastity and affirming that the Church continued to propose purity as a Christian ideal.⁹ The category is not a dogma and its devotional expression is capable of misuse, but it is neither the accidental invention nor the theological embarrassment imagined by its critics.
The Regensburg intervention thus begins with a necessary truth and ends by drawing an unnecessary conclusion. The necessary truth is that rape never contaminates its victim, that survival is not consent, and that the traumatised must never be measured against an heroic act they were unable to perform. The unnecessary conclusion is that the Church must therefore cease to recognise martyrdom suffered in defence of chastity. That conclusion does not protect victims. It merely deprives the Church of the language needed to distinguish sexual violence from sexual consent, coercion from choice, and bodily violation from the freedom of the soul.
There is a revealing modern instinct at work here. When a Christian ideal is abused, the proposed remedy is no longer to explain it correctly, discipline those who pervert it and restore its proper meaning. The remedy is to remove the ideal. Because obedience has been manipulated, obedience must be distrusted. Because forgiveness has been demanded prematurely, forgiveness must be redefined. Because purity has been preached without theological care, purity must be placed in quotation marks until the word itself becomes unspeakable.
But a Church which can speak of abuse while no longer speaking intelligibly of chastity will not have recovered the Christian understanding of the body. It will merely have conceded the body to the same culture which treats sexuality as appetite, consent as the only moral criterion and the person as an instrument of desire. Maria Goretti’s witness is not contempt for the body. It is the refusal to permit another person’s appetite to define what the body means.
St Maria does not stand above victims accusing them of failing to die. She stands among them as a child against whom appalling violence was committed. She does not teach that rape stains the victim. She teaches that the stain belongs wholly to the aggressor. She does not teach that every victim must resist as she resisted. She reveals what grace accomplished in her particular trial. She does not make survival shameful. She proclaims that neither survival nor death, neither injury nor fear, can make another person’s wickedness the victim’s guilt.
Serenelli could wound Maria’s body and end her earthly life. He could not command her will, possess her conscience or determine her moral identity. Her purity was not the prize he failed to steal. It was the freedom he failed to conquer.
That is why Maria Goretti remains a martyr of purity—and why the title must not be surrendered to those who have misunderstood it.
- Philippa Haase, Judith König and Ute Leimgruber, “Maria Goretti als Märtyrerin der Reinheit? Zeit für eine Intervention”, katholisch.de, 6 July 2026.
https://katholisch.de/artikel/69312-maria-goretti-als-maertyrerin-der-reinheit-zeit-fuer-eine-intervention - St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, I.18–19.
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120101.htm - St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 152, a. 1.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3152.htm - Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2356.
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_two/chapter_two/article_6/ii_the_vocation_to_chastity.html - Pius XII, Address to the Faithful Assembled for the Canonisation of St Maria Goretti, 24 June 1950.
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/it/speeches/1950/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19500624_santa-maria-goretti.html - Pope John Paul II, Message to the Bishop of Albano for the First Centenary of the Death of St Maria Goretti, 6 July 2002; Angelus, 6 July 2003.
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2002/july/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20020708_santa-maria-goretti.html
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/angelus/2003/documents/hf_jp-ii_ang_20030706.html - Benedict XVI, Letter to the Participants in the Plenary Session of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, 24 April 2006.
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20060424_cause-santi.html - Pope John Paul II, Message to the Bishop of Albano for the First Centenary of the Death of St Maria Goretti, 6 July 2002.
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2002/july/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20020708_santa-maria-goretti.html - Giovanni Angelo Cardinal Becciu, Homily for the Beatification of Anna Kolesárová, 1 September 2018.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/09/01/180901d.html
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Saint Augustine of Hippo, a key figure in Church history, was greatly influenced by his mother, Saint Monica, and Saint Ambrose. After struggling with scepticism and Manichean beliefs, he converted to Christianity, becoming a bishop and prolific writer. His works, especially “City of God,” were celebrated posthumously, showcasing his profound faith.
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