In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins,

and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother St. Joseph, my Father and Lord, my guardian angel,

in deceit for me.

Today the church commemorates the sanctity and martyrdom of the child Maria Grety.

Maria Grety died a brutal death, a violent death, through the hands of an 18-year-old young man who tried to seduce her

while she was just 11 years of age.

And she put up a heroic resistance.

And in the assailant's demonic frustration stabbed her 14 times, out of hatred for her resistance in frustrating his lustful cravings.

I recall a few years back running into someone in the airport

when I was returning to the states from Rome

and I was making small talk with this friendly woman,

and she wanted to know what I was doing in Rome.

I was heading a program for seminarians called the Rome Experience

and one of the excursions of this time together with the seminarians

consisted in going to Natuno, also a site of severe World War II battle, to pay respects to the mortal remains of St.

Maria Goretty. So I, in the course of the conversation, I mentioned that to this woman,

and she wanted to know why the seminarians chose that town and that saint,

I explained, because she died preserving her chastity.

And truth be told, with goodwill, but perhaps misbegotten goodwill, the woman felt that the resistance and the struggle to avoid being violated under those conditions, under those circumstances, was at best imprudent and at worst dead wrong.

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