Most of us know Saint Maria Goretti as one of the youngest canonized saint in the Catholic Church, a 11-year-old girl who chose death over compromising her purity.

But there is a shocking chapter to her story that often gets left out of the history books.

This is a detail that completely flips how we view forgiveness, and it happened decades after she drew her final breath.

As she lay dying in a hospital bed from 14 stab wounds, Maria knew her time was running out. Yet, with astonishing clarity, she realized there was someone who desperately needed the greatest gift she could give before dying. She looked past her own pain, and when asked about her attacker, she whispered: “I forgive Alessandro… and I want him [to be] with me in heaven!”

Her killer, Alessandro Serenelli, was sentenced to 30 years of hard labor. For years, he remained unrepentant and filled with rage. Until one night, he had a dream. He saw the little girl he had killed handing him lilies she had gathered, but they burned in his hands. He woke and he knew that the forgiveness she had given him was a power mightier than he could conceive, and that this power was at work in him. Alessandro’s heart broke open, and he began to accept the forgiveness of God.

When he was finally released from prison, the very first thing Alessandro did was travel to Maria’s mother to beg for her forgiveness. Her mother simply replied, “If Maria forgives you, and God forgives you, how can I not forgive you?”

In 1950, Pope Pius XII canonized this “20th century St. Agnes” in the presence of her mother, her siblings, and her erstwhile neighbor, who had killed her only to discover in her an intercessor, a sister and a friend.

Alessandro lived the rest of his life as a Franciscan lay brother in a monastery, dying a holy death.

In a letter, found after his death, he writes, “Maria Goretti, now a saint, was my good angel whom God placed in my path to save me. Her words both of rebuke and forgiveness are still imprinted in my heart. She prayed for me, interceding for her killer.”

As we celebrate her feast day, her life challenges us with a heavy question. If Maria found the strength to forgive the man who took her life, what grudge are we still refusing to let go of today?

Saint Maria Goretti, pray for us!