Let me tell you a story about Alessandro Serenelli. Alessandro grew up in a poor family in Italy. By the time he was a young man, his mother and one of his brothers had already died in mental asylums. His father, an alcoholic, was hard-pressed to provide for his family working as a sharecropper. Alessandro’s father eventually met Luigi Goretti, who was a fellow laborer trying to provide for his own family. They decided to work together as a team, moving their families together to try to find work in the fields. When Alessandro was 16, they moved to a small town forty miles south of the city of Rome. Two years later, Luigi passed away of malaria and the Goretti children were left fatherless. Maria Goretti, Luigi’s daughter, became the caretaker of the house while the rest of her family worked in the fields.
Alessandro was 18 at this point and had begun to cultivate lust in his heart toward Maria. He took pleasure in making suggestive comments about her. Maria, wise beyond her years, avoided being alone with him. However, one day when Maria was just twelve years old, Alessandro tried to take advantage of her and she resisted with all her might. This threw Alessandro into a rage and he ended up stabbing her at least 14 times with a farm tool. Maria was rushed to a local hospital, mortally wounded.
As she lay in bed near death, Maria prayed for Allesandro and forgave him. Allesandro went to trial for his crime and was eventually sentenced to 30 years in prison. For the first six of those years, Alessandro was hard hearted and unrepentant. But one night, everything changed. He had a dream where Maria appeared to him in a garden. One by one, she picked white lilies from the garden and placed them into his hands. The delicate blooms seemed to burn him when they touched his palms. She handed him 14 white lilies, one for each of her wounds. Alessandro knew in his heart that this was a profound gesture of forgiveness and when he woke from the dream, his heart was changed.
He became a model prisoner and was released three years early. He sought out Assunta, Maria’s mother, and begged for her forgiveness. She forgave him, and the following day they attended Mass together and received Holy Communion side by side. Assunta not only forgave Alessandro, but she also took him in as an adopted son. Alessandro ended up joining a Capuchin friary and living out the remainder of his life quietly in prayer and service as a religious brother. He was present in the crowd of nearly half a million people in Rome the day that Pope Pius XII solemnly declared Maria Goretti a Saint. After Alessandro’s death in 1970, a handwritten note of his was found. He penned it nine years before his passing as a type of spiritual testament. Toward the end of the note, he wrote: “Now I look serenely to the time in which I will be admitted to the vision of God, to embrace my dear ones once again, and to be close to my guardian angel, Maria Goretti, and her dear mother, Assunta.”
There is power in the forgiveness which comes from God!
The Lord Jesus speaks to us today in the Gospel of the necessity of forgiveness from the heart. He gives us a parable of a servant whose master, with immense compassion, forgives his sizable debt. But then, this servant encounters a fellow servant who owes him a much smaller amount and refuses to extend the same compassion that has been shared with him. In consequence, the master hands the unforgiving servant over to torturers till he pays his debt in full.
Notice in the parable that the master forgives the debt because he is filled with compassion. He resists selling the servant into slavery and allows him time to pay back his debt. But when the servant goes his way, it is clear that the master’s compassionate patience has not rubbed off on him at all. When confronted with a much smaller debt against him, and the same plea for patience that he himself made, the servant chokes his debtor, demanding immediate payment. There is no compassion in his heart.
The lack of mercy on the part of this servant ends up costing him everything. He ends the parable worse than when he started because of his unforgiveness. The tragedy is that he had the opportunity to let his heart be filled with compassion, but he missed it. Although he had received an overflow of compassion and mercy from his master, the servant was so focused on himself that he moved on before that mercy could drench and fill up his own heart.
I am sure most of us can think of times where we have found ourselves in the same place of lacking forgiveness. In big or small ways, we have gotten to that point of spiritually choking out this or that person because of the debts they owe to us. When we are harmed, it is all too easy to let the wounds from those transgressions fester within. Unforgiveness can be like a cancer that grows and grows, slowly choking away life from our hearts.
But the beauty of our faith is that we trust that Jesus can work through us to bring us His forgiveness. Doing this involves opening our hearts to the Divine Mercy of Jesus that flowed from His heart as He died for all of us on the Cross. He wants to allow each of us to be able to say, with Him, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” This type of forgiveness doesn’t mean downplaying the wrong that was done, but it means being able to move forward from that wrong. It means, with Jesus, saying to the person who has harmed us: “In spite of the evil you have done to me, I choose to move on from that, to leave that hurt behind and be healed by God’s grace.”
The beauty of this type of forgiveness is that it can plant seeds which will grow into repentance in the hearts of those who have sinned against us. It would have been easy for Maria Goretti, as she lay on her deathbed, to curse Alessandro, but instead with God’s help, she allowed the love of Christ in her heart to overflow onto Alessandro. This eventually helped Alessandro realize the gravity of what he’d done and repent. Remember the flowers in his hands in that dream were burning. They reminded him of the sin for which he needed to ask forgiveness. And he did! When we forgive from a heart filled with God’s love, it allows us to be instruments of healing and conversion for others.
Forgiveness of this magnitude also allows our hearts to heal. Maria certainly died in the peace of Jesus’ love. Not only that, healing came to her mother, too! It would have been easy for Assunta, Maria’s mother, to be hardened by her daughter’s horrible murder. But she allowed the love of Christ in and found the strength not only to forgive her daughter’s attacker, but to shower motherly love and care upon him. That is what the Divine Mercy of Jesus can do! Praise be to God! It can heal us and others beyond what we could imagine!
So let us take some time to think of those who have harmed us and pray about ways we can forgive them through the Divine Mercy of Jesus. He sees how our hearts can become channels of His Mercy, flooding other souls with the grace they need to come to Him.
Maria probably didn’t have the foresight to know how her act of forgiveness would affect so many people, but she did have an abundant sense of Jesus’ Divine Mercy on her life, so she shared that mercy. I pray that we would open ourselves to Jesus’ love and mercy in the same way for those who have sinned against us. Who knows how many people might be touched and brought closer to Jesus by our cooperation with His Divine Mercy? I pray that we open our hearts to His Divine Mercy as we pray those words of the Our Father today and every day: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
+ Father, thank you for pouring out Divine Mercy on us through your Son. Jesus, thank you for allowing us, weak as we are, to be vessels of your Divine Mercy in forgiving one another. Holy Spirit, give our hearts the trust to turn to Jesus’ Merciful Sacred Heart when we are struggling to forgive. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +