You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute,

and joining me is Dr. Scott Hefflefinger, who is a moral professor of theology here.

And we're going to talk to you about the topic of forgiveness and how appropriate because

today is the feast of St. Maria Guretti.

And so there's a lot of forgiveness in that story, right?

So we just dive in.

Let's talk about forgiveness, Scott.

And of course we could just start with St. Maria.

Yeah, she's a beautiful saint.

So very young, a martyr.

And basically the story of St. Maria Guretti is she was born in 1890 into a poor family.

Her father was a farmer, an attendant farmer.

And so they ended up losing their farm and having to share a farm with another family that they lived with in a large building.

And her father then died when Maria was only nine. He died of malaria.

And Maria's tasks in the household then became to care for the household to watch her baby sister,

Teresa, while her mother and other siblings were out working in the field, trying to, you know,

make ends meet for a very poor family. And in Maria's time there, the neighbor that she lived with, this other family they were living with, one of the sons, Alessandro, had taken an interest in Maria.

And he later talked about how he was swayed by the culture of the world, the impurity of this culture.

And so he made inappropriate advances towards Maria Goretty.

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