Saint Maria Goretti is certainly striking for her heroic virtue of chastity, but what is perhaps even more striking is her forgiveness. Maria was not just relieved to have died without losing her virginity. What makes her witness fully Christian is the forgiveness she showed to her attacker. Her forgiveness was contagious to the point that even her own mother was able to forgive the man who stabbed her daughter to death. We could even say that her forgiveness merited the conversion and sanctification of her attacker. The attacks on purity, on innocence, on the weak, on the young and the vulnerable are so deplorable and awful. What is even more awful, however, is when the disgust at these crimes leads to the impossibility of offering forgiveness. The attempted rape and murder of a child turns a human being into a monster. Is there any way to redeem a monster? It takes the heart of a child, of a young girl who says, “I want him to be with me in heaven.” How could she want such a thing? Because she has seen the brokenness of humanity with the eyes of faith, through the gaze of Christ, and her heart is filled with God’s love: “Those who are well do not need a physician, the sick do.” We will all die: some will die as virgins, some will die as monsters. God’s grace, His mercy and forgiveness is able to heal and save all who approach Him with humility, contrition, and hope. Our place in heaven will be as large as the forgiveness our hearts find for those who offended us.
Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
“Your sins are forgiven!” These words bring consolation to those of us who understand that we need forgiveness, and who understand that we have sinned. For someone who has not understood either sin or forgiveness, it could seem like mere words or like something unimportant. We don’t know exactly what thoughts passed through the mind of the paralytic because he remained silent, but Jesus’ first words to him were not about curing his paralysis. The man didn’t seem to ask for forgiveness, nor did he seem to come to Jesus looking for anything other than a cure. Certainly Jesus reads hearts and minds, however, and provides the man immediately with the treatment that corresponds to his greatest suffering. The physical suffering may have incited the man to ask to be brought to Jesus, then again, the man may have discerned the greater moral suffering he endured from his sins and relied on his physical disability to be brought by others to Jesus.
Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
The Gospel of Saint Matthew presents a fairly graphic account of the real effects of demons around us. It would be a false interpretation of this Gospel to consider Jesus’ action, or the story itself, as purely symbolic. Indeed, if demons were merely myth, Jesus would have had the moral obligation to stand clearly against such ideas. Instead, Jesus gives us a teaching on what the demons are capable of doing and what they are permitted to do. Swine represent what is filthy in the animal world. Demons seek out what is filthy, and so if they are obliged to leave one place, they seek out another place of filth. Spiritually, filth corresponds to vice, and vice is the place where the evil spirits like to take up residence. These two men, possessed of demons, live in the place of death: the tombs. Vice, like virtue, is a stable disposition – in other words, it is habitual and more difficult to change. The demons like to re-enforce and strengthen our vices so that we may be convinced they are impossible to overcome after we have made valiant attempts. Jesus shows us that it is possible to overcome these spirits by simply casting them out. Jesus even teaches us to cast out the demons in His name.