The Exorcist Files - The Spiritual Power of Forgiveness: St. Maria Goretti

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Fr. Martins talks about the power of forgiveness in spiritual warfare through the amazing testimony and life of St. Maria Goretti. Check out our sponsors!Wild Alaskan Co- Wildalaskan.com/exfiles for $35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company Check out miracles and answered prayer on Heaven Meets Earth. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Well, the next day they placed the man on top of the operating table and they had the saw ready to begin cutting into his foot. When they removed his bandaging, they discovered there was absolutely not a single thing wrong with his foot. There were no broken bones. There was no bruising. There was not a scratch on that man's foot. There was nothing wrong with his foot. He got up off the operating table and he went right back outside to work. He never missed a single day's work.

all because Maria chose to forgive. Because she chose to be a saint. Welcome back to The Exorcist Files. And as St. James Bond said, forgive and let die. Because today we'll be talking about St. Maria Gareti, forgiveness, and of course all the strangeness that you usually hear about on the show. And of course, there's no one I'd rather be talking about this bizarre supernatural journey we all find ourselves on. than the one and the only, Father Carlos Martin's.

Father, thanks for joining us today. Sure, yeah, good to be with you, Ryan. Absolutely. Well, we have had so much praise come in over the years about how people love when we read notes that we get. And I just today wanted to share briefly a very encouraging notes. So, Father, we had a letter come in today deeply moving. A young woman in the Middle East said that she is a huge fan of the show.

heard about the show when she was on vacation outside of her native country and came back, and it's difficult to actually find, but when she can, she actually loves it. She is a practicing Christian in a country where it is illegal to be a Christian, and her friends have been persecuted for that, but she wanted to encourage us and thank us for all the work we've done and how just blessed she has been by the teaching. So I hope you're listening out there, and just thank you, and we are praying for you, and hope that you can continue to find the show. And Father, it brought up an interesting question,

especially for Catholics, if you are living in an area of the persecuted church and you can't get to Mass, you can't get to church because there isn't one, what does the church say about this? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you're only obliged to do what you are able to do. And so if you are unable to get to Mass, then you don't have a mass obligation.

Now, that being said, you want to, avail yourself of the grace as if you were attending Mass. So what do you do? Well, a suggestion is you set aside the time for Mass, and you unite yourself spiritually to that. So you could listen to a Mass, that Sunday's Mass being broadcast, watch it if that's possible for you. If it's not, you just unite yourself to either the prayers of the Mass,

or some other spiritual activity. And the Lord understands. The Lord understands. And what you're doing there is availing yourself of grace, with which the Lord is going to be generous and imparting to you because you're trying as much as possible to unite yourself to him, to dispose yourself to him, to make yourself into a vessel that he can fill.

And the Lord, sure as heck, is going to respond to that. So that's what you do. You become a Christian, in a shrewd way, bypassing the limitations you have through other avenues that are nevertheless available to you. Yeah, and Father, I'm genuinely curious. In countries where Christianity is explicitly or even implicitly outlawed, or it's just difficult, are there underground Catholic churches, are there bishops in areas where it is permitted and they're sort of given providential governance over areas that they actually can't have a physical presence in? How does that work?

The church does have underground bishops. Naturally, most of the information surrounding that is going to be secret for their protection and for the protection of their communities. But there are underground bishops. The pope can consecrate a bishop in Pectore under papal secret so that, for example, no one might know that you were a bishop. They might know that you are a priest, for example, and you still are being called by your name, Father Steve, let's say, but the Pope has consecrated you a bishop, and so you have the authority and power of a bishop. In fact, there are people that, for all intents and purposes, publicly no one knows that they're even a cleric at all, but they are, and they've been consecrated a bishop for the purpose of providing for an underground church. Obviously, the underground church would know who and what they are. In fact, in the early church, this kind of secret system was practiced from the beginning. In fact, our practice of having a godparent for a baptism, like the notion of a godparent,

we generally have a godfather and a godmother, that in and of itself became an evolution to have one of each sex, one of each gender. But the notion of a god parent initially was somebody bringing you who you claim to want to be a Christian and for the safety of the church so that they wouldn't let in. a spy or somebody working for the secular government that wants to shut you down, working for the emperor or for the dictator that wants to just mow you down, you had to be brought in by somebody who vouched for you. And that person became known as the godfather or the godmother. Because this is a person who says, look, I know this guy. I know Charlie. Charlie is trustworthy. He's not a spy for the government. I've known him. This is the capacity in which I know him. And so you didn't get into the physical assembly of the Christian community unless you had a godfather.

And so then the physical purpose for a godfather, godmother, undertook a spiritual one then, too. What's good in the physical realm is also good in the spiritual. And the church adopted that. But that's kind of the order of operations in which that historically came about. As a godfather slash godmother, you were somebody who vouched for the integrity of this want-of-es. be Christian. And you were the one, because you were already into the community, you could bring him in. And without that, he wasn't going to get in. And Father, was there also, you know, we think of Godparents too as, oh, if something happens to you, is that because just the real prospect of martyrdom

and death was so prevalent in the early church? That was the other reason to have God parents. Oh, yeah. If a spy for the emperor could get in and see where the assembly happened or could anticipate where it was going to happen this Sunday. Well, guess what? They're going to bring in the army and mow everybody down. Boom, that's it. They've just destroyed

an entire community in one false woo. So the church had to be shrewd and prudent, had to protect itself. And godfathers, God mothers, are one of the ways in which it did that. Wow. Really just beautifully inspiring,

also sobering, though, so, Father, there's underground secret masses happening all over the world in places where it is against the law or just dangerous to be a Christian. That is correct. Wow. Very cool. We will pray for the believers out there in the persecuted church. So thank you, listener, for writing in.

And just so cool to know the X-S files has hit the global markets, for lack of a better term. So that's so cool. It's reaching those places. But today we are going to talk about something near and dear to our hearts, and especially Father Martins, who is a bit of our resident expert on this particular San Francisco. This saint has made numerous appearances throughout the show, and for good reason. It's an incredible story. Also has particularly relevance to a lot of exorcism, and Father Martin says some beautiful anecdotes involving this saint.

So Father Martins, we wanted to talk about St. Maria Goretty today, right? Yeah, certainly one of my favorite saints to whom I've been very close. She's been on my spiritual walk, and certainly has been one whose relics, whose presence has been part of my exorcist arsenal since I began. All right. So, Father, why do we do a quick little introduction? Just set the table for us. I know there's obviously many well-known saints,

but I have found even on this show that St. Mary Gretti is very popular among listeners. But what is it about her and her story? And why is she so relevant to us, especially today? Well, St. Maria Gretti is an astounding witness of Jesus Christ. and the person of Jesus Christ. And, you know, a well-intentioned undoing of her has been for many people in the church to focus on a dimension of purity,

her dimension of purity, and to make her this witness of sexual purity that is not untrue, but is the least amount of fruit on the tree that is St. Maria Grety, because where her greatness especially lies is in her complete imitation of Jesus Christ. She didn't just imitate Christ in his purity. She imitated Christ in his person. And so to kind of set this all up, St. Maria Greta died in 1902, so on the very start of the 20th century, the century that saw

more Christian martyrs than any other century in history. All other centuries, their deaths combined don't equal what happened in the 20th century. So Pope John Paul II called her the first martyr of that Christian Holocaust that was the 20th century. He drew attention to that. And so, you know, Maria, she was born in 1890, died in 1902, at the age of 11. She was born in Italy to a very poor family, and they had become sharecroppers, kind of by upbringing. Both her parents were farmers. And, you know, here's an interesting thing.

Her mother was born illegitimately. And so she was a turnstile baby. Churches had these turnstiles that people could leave an object in, and the turnstile would turn, and then somebody from the inside could take it. they had one of those for babies, that you could leave a baby in the turnstile, turn the turnstile around so that it's now accessible from the inside, and then ring a bell and take off. And they would wait a certain amount of time, knowing that you were leaving a child there, they would give you a certain amount of time to run away so that your identity would be preserved. And so they would take this baby. That was her mother. Now think about this.

If it were today, the chances are that Asunta, Maria Goretty's mother, would have been aborted. And without Asunta, we wouldn't have Maria Goretty. And so her mother, in fact, was born Asunta, which means Assumption, because she was born on August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption. So that was the name that she was given. Regardless, so Asunta married Maria's father and lived near Ancona. on the Adriatic side of Italy, on the eastern side of Italy. They were so poor, they had virtually no land with which to farm. I mean, the amount of land that they had, she described as the surface area of a kitchen apron,

which is a bit of an exaggeration, but I've been there, and I can attest that it was a plot of land so small, it was too small to provide the food necessary to feed a family. And so they moved on to the western side of Italy, just south of Rome, about 40 miles, to a town called Natuno. There was a bit of a stop in an intervening city along the way for a couple of years, but that didn't last that long. In Natuno, that city became infamous for what happened to Maria Goretti there. she arrived there at around eight or nine years old and a short time after that her father died of malaria. That area of Italy, Natuno, is within an area called the Pontine Marshes. And the Pontine Marshes were an area of Italy.

And of course, it's very different now because Mussolini back in the 1930s, 1920s, 1930s, sent in the army and they drank the marshes. But until then, it became an absolute breeding ground for chicken-sized mosquitoes. And the mosquitoes carried malaria. And it killed many people with an ancient Rome. It was always considered a place of bad luck. So there was a belief that the air is bad. And so people would avoid that area if they could. Now, because of that soil, because of that marshy ground, it was great for growing crops. And so Maria's father, Giovanni, hired himself out as a sharecropper, and that landowner paired them with two men, a father and son, the son being Alessandro Serinelli, who would become Maria's murderer within a couple of years or so. And so the three men worked this land, and the arrangement

was that they would produce a certain amount of crops, which they would turn over as rent to the landowner. and whatever else they produced, they could keep for their own use, and that landowner, Count Matsolani, put them up in an abandoned warehouse that he had on the property. So they became dwellers in the same building, but kind of neighbors, because there was kind of two apartments within this warehouse, if you will. The Serenelli's lived on one side, the Gorettes lived on the other, and there was a common kitchen in between. Now, the Serenelli's had no woman in their lives,

and the Gorettes had only one man. He had six children, but he was the only man. And so Matsulani is what saw an opportunity here that they could help one another, whereby Asunta could do the cooking for both families, and the men could basically tackle this farm together. And so that's what happened, until Maria's father died of malaria.

He contracted it and died within a week. And this placed the family in a very difficult position because with only two people now, the Serenelli's working that land, it was insufficient to produce what was needed to fulfill that rent. Now, to give you an idea of how poor these people were, they had to buy salt twice a week.

In other words, they didn't have enough money to buy a bunch of salt to last them for weeks. When they're living right next to the ocean, so the salt is going to be made out of the ocean, they had to buy it frequently. Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90. The Exodus 90 challenge begins. this year on January 20th. But this isn't just a 90-day program. Exodus 90 is a spirituality for modern men that is built on three ancient pillars, prayer, self-sacrifice, and fraternity. We all long for something more. We long to be the men God created us to be, sons of a loving father. It's time to turn away from our idols. It's time to break free from the pharaohs that hold us in

bondage. If you're ready to make a fresh start and embark on a journey to uncommon freedom in Jesus Christ, then download the Exodus 90 app today. This is your chance to break free, refocus, and rediscover who God is calling you to be in the new year. It starts January 20th. So go to Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to learn more about Exodus 90. That's Exodus 90.com slash eX files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you.

So it was decided that for the family to be able to survive, both families, that Assunta would take over her. husband's place in the fields, working with the Serenelli's, and Maria at her young age would become mom doing all the cooking, the cleaning, and the raising of her five brothers and sisters. And she took to her job with great diligence. Now, she was nine years old when this started, and she worked really hard. She was the first one to rise in the day of all of them. She was the last one to go to bed. She became very, very serious, took to her responsibilities, with great diligence. In fact, the neighbors used to call her the little old lady because she was so

serious. She never played with the kids her age. She was always doing something. She was always gathering herbs. She was always grinding wheat. She was always doing this or that, going to the market and selling the eggs that the chickens had laid so that they could have some money to buy what they needed, such as salt and so forth. And this went on. And at this point, Maria, who was tall for her age, there might have been an early start to puberty within Maria. We're uncertain of that, but there may have been.

Regardless, she caught the eye of Serenelli, who was her senior by eight years. So starting at the time when he was 18 years old, he started to look at her impurely. at first it started with jokes with kind of cardinal jokes that would embarrass her and that would get her to run away. And the more that she reacted, the more that he liked it. But he eventually revealed to her that he wanted her to give up her virginity to him and that he wasn't going to take no for an answer. Already after two attempted rape attempts where he had tried to corner her. So she was diligent to never be alone with him and to always be aware of where he was and to not leave herself. in a position of vulnerability.

And so what happened was he devised a plan and he perhaps intentionally cut a shirt of his. So he had a shirt that needed mending. And so he said one day, as they were all in the common kitchen, he said, Maria mended my shirt, and she didn't make any reaction. And her mother saw this and actually scolded Maria and said, Maria, mend his shirt.

And so she took the shirt and shortly, after that, Alessandro, his father, and the mother were working outside, and Maria sat on the steps leading up to the kitchen of the house, mending this shirt. She also had the infant baby that she was taken care of at the same time next to her. Well, Alessandra made some excuse that he had to go to the house and get something. And so he walks towards the house, walks up, stairs past Maria, who was very aware of his being present, and he walks into the house. Well, he comes out a moment later, grabs her by the head and pulls her inside. So now he's got her inside the house. Mom is working at a great distance. So Maria inside the house, even if she

screams, she's not going to be able to be hurt. And so he held up to her a sharpened file, which to describe it would be imagine like a flathead screwdriver or an ice pick kind of thing. He held it up to her and said, Maria, unless you do what I want you to do, I will kill you. And so she refused. And so he stabbed her with that file nine times. And he stabbed her with such force that the file went in her body on one side and came out the other for six of the nine stab ones. The three that didn't, they didn't because he hit her spine. And he hit her spine so hard, he actually bent that file.

Maria fell to the floor of her kitchen unconscious. He thought he had killed her, but at this point she was only unconscious. And he went next door and locked himself inside his room. At a certain point, Maria regained consciousness, and she managed to drag herself along the floor of her kitchen to the door, which was about six feet away, and she managed to reach up and flip the latch holding the door closed so that she could try to make an attempt.

to open the door and cry out for help. Well, Alessandro heard her flip that latch, and he came back and stabbed her five more times. Now, it was these second wounds that would kill Maria 24 hours later. He pierced her intestines. And so what began to happen was a leakage of the contents of her intestines into her body. And this causes an infection known as peritonitis, the same infection from which you would die if your appendix burst. And so by the time that Maria was found, she already had a fever. By the time she was taken to the hospital, which was a great distance away, she could hardly move. She was in delirium and a fever was ripping through her body.

Now, she at the hospital begged the doctors over and over for water because of this fever. But the doctors couldn't give her any water because whatever, she would swallow, would come out her perforated intestines and make the peritonitis worse. And they were trying to save her. It was a local priest who had been called to the hospital that posed this question to Maria. He said to her, Maria, our Lord from the cross also begged for water, but no one gave him any. Will you also offer up your thirst for sinners? And she replied, yes, father, I will. And so she never asked for anything again. They performed surgery on her, and as luck would have it, the amazing thing, that hospital in the Tuno, that very morning,

had the installation of electricity complete. So Maria Garelli was the first patient in that hospital that was operated by artificial light underneath light bulbs. So because Maria had parotinitis, they couldn't give her anything orally. So in other words, there was no oral pain killers that would be able to be given her. But neither could they give her any by injection. Because anesthetic is wonderful stuff, right? It takes away the pain. It renders you unconscious during a surgery so that you don't experience the trauma of surgeons

cutting you open, putting their hands inside you and manipulating you. But anesthetic is very hard on the heart. heart. This is why when you have surgery, the anesthetian is right there throughout the entire surgery, making sure that you don't die because there's a fine line between rendering you unconscious and killing you. And so anesthetic is very hard on the heart and because Maria was already so weak because she had lost almost half of her blood, they were worried that if they gave her an aesthetic that it would induce cardiac arrest. So throughout that surgery, she endured everything without any painkillers at all. Throughout that surgery, she never cried out and never

complained. Once, she offered everything up for the salvation of sinners. When the surgery was finished, the internal bleeding continued. So it was clear that Maria would not survive. But before she died, she said these words. I forgive Alessandro Serenelli, and I want him with me in heaven forever. She died. Alessandro, for his part,

was taken to trial at which he pleaded innocence. He said he was defending himself from the attack of Maria Greta. Now, just as you don't believe him, neither did the judge, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. And it is said that Alessandro Seronelli went to prison the most angry man on earth.

He blamed Maria for everything and kept repeating over and over again how if she had just done what he wanted her to do, that none of this would have happened. And in fact, he was so angry that he couldn't be allowed to mix with the other inmates because he would always cause violence whenever he was permitted to be around anyone else. And so he was locked in isolation, placed in solitary confinement, separated from every other inmate until one night. One night, Maria appeared to him, and she didn't say anything to him,

but she appeared in a garden picking 14 white lily flowers, and she handed those flowers to him one by one. Now, the number 14 is significant because it was, of course, 14 times that he had stabbed her. So what Maria is saying here is, I forgive you. Well, that act of forgiveness, that act of love filled Elisander with light and with the Holy Spirit, and he immediately became contrite for what he had done to that little girl. He asked for the local bishop, and he requested the sacrament of reconciliation at which he confessed having murdered her. And shortly after that occasion, there was a construction worker digging at the base of a building in Rome,

and from the top of the building, a large stone block fell onto his foot, completely crushing his foot, and damaging it so badly, nothing could be done to repair it. All they could do was prepare the man for a surgery that they would perform the next day. But his wife, who had been called to the hospital, placed a prayer card of Maria Goretty. Now, Maria Gretti's story became famous within Italy. you know, poor girl in a wretched part of the country, killed in an act of lust. Like, it was very dramatic. And so there was a kind of popular devotion among people towards Maria. Now, this is prior to her being canonized, saint and all that.

Like, this was within one year of Maria's death. There was already a biography printed about her. So it's common for whom the people of God want to promote a cause for canonization to print prayer cards containing a prayer on the back asking God to grant that canonization, that declaration by the church that the person in question is the saint. So this woman had one of these cards. So it had kind of an image, a drawing image of Maria Goretty on one side and a prayer asking God to grant her canonization as a saint on the other. Well, she placed this image in and amongst the banaging on her husband's foot. So the foot was damaged so badly.

there was no way to repair it. I mean, if it was not amputated, it would kill the man because gangrene would be sure to set in. There would be a permanent wound on his foot. Well, the next day, they placed the man on top of the operating table, and they had the saw ready to begin cutting into his foot. When they removed his bandaging, they discovered there was absolutely not a single thing wrong with his foot. There were no broken bones. There was no bruising. There was not a scratch on that man's foot.

There was nothing wrong with his foot. He got up off the operating table and he went right back outside to work. He never missed a single day's work. All because Maria chose to forgive. Because she chose to be a saint. So Alessandra had no remorse, no contrition, no sorrow for what he had done. and yet she chose to forgive. Now, when Alessandra was released, which happened 27 years after his sentence began,

but he was released three years early because his person had changed so much. In those days, nobody was let out early. One of the first things he did was go out and seek the mother of Maria Goretty, who by then had... returned back to the Adriatic's, to Coronado, her birth town from which they had moved as a family. Once they had made a decision, look, we can't raise our family here, we have to leave. The point being that she went back, poor and alone, back to her birth town. Why did that happen?

Because Maria Greta had the job of being mom. mom in the family. She was the one of, she was the one in charge of all the domestic responsibilities, doing all the cooking, the cleaning, and the raising of her five brothers and sisters. When Maria died, there was no one left able to do that job. And her mother couldn't both do that and work the farm to fulfill the contract of rent needed to pay Count Matzolini. So when Maria died, they had to abandon the farm. And so Maria's mother had to give up all of her children to adoption. So the two girls were raised in a Franciscan orphanage in Italy,

and in fact their placement there was secured by the Pope himself, which at that time was Pope Pius I. But the three boys were all shipped to America. And they all were settled, they all were processed at Ellison. and they settled in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. In fact, the descendants of her older brother. Maria had one of her brothers was older than her. Angela was four years older.

And I got to know his daughter, who died just a few years ago. She died at the age of 100. I got to know her very well. And the other descendants of the families, grand nieces, grand nephews, I got to know them because they came here to America. But back in those days, days, you know, there were no orphanages for boys. You were sent to the new world. Italy was extremely poor during this time and you weren't going to be a burden on the system.

You were going to be sent to the new world and you were going to be, you're going to be raised there, you were going to be put to work to there, and that's just how it was. So the point being that Alessandro did not just murder Asunta's little girl. He destroyed her family. So she went back to Coronado completely alone and poorer than when she left. And so one day, she hears a knock on her door, and she opens the door. And there's the man, now 27 years older, who had brought so much misery upon her.

And he said to her, Asunta, do you know who I am? She said, yes, I know who you are. He asked her, do you forgive me? and she said, Alessandro, God has forgiven you. Maria has forgiven you. How can I not forgive you? And she accepted him that day as her own son, and she adopted him.

And from that point forward, whenever Asunta Gareti referred to Alessandro Serenelli, it was always as my son. all because Maria chose to forgive, because she chose to be a saint. And then imagine Asunta's surprise when she's informed that Pope Pius XVI will canonize her daughter as a saint, which happened June 27, 1950. And she was, of course, Asunta, the guest of honor,

at that canonization, which saw over half a million people descend upon St. Peter's Square, which was the largest crowd in Catholic Church history, period, for any event, to that point in time. I mean, when you think about today, for you to have a papal mass in St. Peter's Square, yeah, you can get half a million people for a big one, for sure. But that's with all the conveniences of today, with the subway, with airfare, back at 1950. That was not the case. So for you to have half a million people, in fact, so many people wanted to be at that canonization that the Catholic Church had to move it from inside the basilica to the outside because the

requests for tickets were so many. I mean, the tickets are free, but the church was overwhelmed. In fact, the Vatican printing press was overwhelmed. They had to produce rubber stamps. and they had the staff in the Holy See start stamping any old scrap piece of paper and handing them out as tickets. And so at this canonization, Maria Goretti's mother is there. She is the first mother in history to be present, first parent in history to be present at the canonization of his or her child. Now, it's often reported.

And if you go on Wikipedia, you're going to see that. reported that Alessandro of Seronelli, her repentant murder, was also there, and he was not. But it needs some explaining. Well, Maria Greta's canonization was the largest event in history, in Catholic history. And so all the newspapers were pre-printed for that day. The story was already pre-printed. And he was supposed to be there. He had ended up becoming a Franciscan Capuchin friar, and he was the gardener and served as the doorkeeper.

at that monastery and lived a holy life. In fact, there is talk today of initiating his cause for canonization. And so there was a man whose job it was to bring him in the night before into Rome so that he would be present the next morning for that canonization mass. However, that driver tragically died of a heart attack that night before. And so Alessandro had no ride. But because the newspapers were pre-printed, it was reported that he was there when in fact he wasn't. And so that is the source of the misreporting. And the proof's in the pudding. He is not present in any of the footage or any of the photographs, although mom certainly is.

But all of this because St. Maria Grety chose to forgive. And I have worked with her relics for many years, and I have seen her perform a plethora of healings. In fact, just with amputations alone, just with limbs scheduled for amputations, I've seen her be 11 for 11. I remember the very first one was a man who a brown-war-closed spider had bit him in the elbow. And he thought he had been stung by a bee, so he didn't get any medical treatment. Stubborn guy that he was. And so he allowed eight days to go by, although his arm was paining him. And then suddenly one day, yeah, there was no more pain in the arm.

but when he woke up his arm was black like i mean midnight black the flesh was as hard as wood and he had no feeling anymore in his arm the arm was dead and so he went to the hospital and boom guess what but your arm is coming off he went to the hospital in the evening they scheduled him for a surgery the next morning it was his mother-in-law who called me and told me about this and so i went to go see him it was about 10 30 or 11 at night and i made my mind and i made my way into the hospital room and I told him the story of Maria Carety. I took along a relic of hers, a fragment of one of her bones, and I had him hold it. And at the end of it, I just said a prayer asking Maria to heal him. Now, I could already see at the top of his shoulder the line the surgeons

had already drawn indicating where they were going to cut that arm. And I could see the pitch blackness of the flesh. So his hand was black. And He had bandaging from his wrist going up to his mid-bicep. At the top of the bicep, it wasn't as black, but it was dark, and it would kind of get lighter and lighter up until the top of his shoulder. So they had picked a spot where they thought, okay, well, this is where we're going to cut. And so the very next day, wheeled him into the prep room, unwrapped his bandaging. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his arm. I mean, there was no blackness, no stiffness.

They couldn't find a spider bite anywhere on his arm. All because Maria Goretty chose to forgive. Man, well, that's such a touching and beautiful story. I guess my first question there, father, this brings up a lot, which is this concept of forgiveness. And what is the role of forgiveness in the Christian walk? We've talked about this in spiritual warfare. Obviously, many of the cases document.

victims having to forgive those who have transgressed against them, forgive themselves, etc. But I hear this story, and I think there's a line between just turning the other cheek and letting people hurt you. And then there's also a getting rid of resentment. So could you give us some high-level thoughts on what is the role of forgiveness and what does that mean, maybe the difference between reconciliation versus restoration and kind of maybe walk us through some of that thinking? Because it's so many things going on in this story. And that's a great question, because people often have the wrong understanding, awareness or interpretation of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness certainly does not consist in allowing an abuser to abuse you through continuous abuse.

Absolutely. In fact, that would be the opposite of a virtue because that is enabling someone to sin. That's an enabling. someone who does that and who mistakenly thinks that that's being done for the sake of forgiveness, that's not forgiveness. That's actually inviting a vice and allowing somebody to increase the amount of sin that they're committing. So far from being a virtue, that's a vice. So what is it?

You know, well, look, Maria Grety, the question is like, hey, why didn't she tell somebody that, you know, she was being abused? Why didn't she tell her mother or that? because Maria knew that if she told her mother that this is what he was threatening her with, right? So he had two attempted rape attempts already and was saying disgusting things to her and so forth. She knew that she told her mother, her mother would sever the relationship between the Grades and the Serenellis by moving the family away. But the family had nowhere to go. This is the point. These were people living in abject poverty in a society that was replete with public.

poverty. These were uneducated sharecropping people that didn't know how to do anything other than eke out a living by raising crops. So none of them were literal. I mean, Maria's father had been. He had been a man in the military. He certainly knew how to read. But he's gone. And even if he wasn't gone, you know, there'd be 10 million men just like him applying for every job in Italy. So they had to depend upon themselves. So Maria knew, if I tell my mother that my mom is going to do her duty by moving us away, but the family is going to be torn apart, the family will not survive. So all of that was placed squarely on Maria's shoulders. And so what did she do? Well, she worked evasive strategies. She tried to remove herself from the presence of Alessandro as much as she could. She became

very aware of where he was, she made sure that she, as much as possible, would not be vulnerable and put herself in a position of danger. And she did the best that he could. And she dodged him for two years in this aspect, right? And I mean, what a horrible thing, what a horrible place to be in when you're a little girl like that. What a horrible amount of stress to put upon herself. But I'll tell you this, the year that he had killed her, she made her first communion. and she only ever received communion one time. She didn't live long enough to receive communion a second time. Now, even though they went to Mass every Sunday,

in those days it just was not common for someone to receive communion that frequently. You received it on great occasions. But on the morning of her first communion, she went around to every single member of her household and including each of the Serenelli's and ask their forgiveness for any way in which they sinned against him. What a profound witness to Jesus Christ.

So yes, at the end of the day, look, Maria Gretti is a profound witness to purity. But that's the least of her virtues. The greatest is her complete and total imitation of Jesus Christ as mercy. The love and the forgiveness and the mercy of God or so great that it is a person, a person whose name is Jesus Christ. And she wanted to be that, to configure herself so much to Christ,

that she would become that embodiment of mercy, simply because he has ordered every Christian to be like that. And so when we forgive, we are imitating Christ. and what that means is we're not condemning anybody permanently because he never did that. Now, he didn't place himself in harm's way flippantly. There are times where he avoided the crowds, he avoided the cities because, A, they're going to make him king by force. In other words, they're going to want to redefine what the Messiah is and usurp his plans with their own.

He didn't want that. he didn't go out and seek opportunities to have people beat on him. He just didn't do that. When it came time for him to meet his vocational consummation in his passion, death, and crucifixion, yeah, he took those blows because that was part of his vocation. That was the mission for which he came to earth. He came to suffer for us, and so he undertook that. But he never went and sought any out.

And so we, that's not what forgiveness entails. It's not what forgiveness entails. Forgiveness entails being open for God to work in this situation and configuring ourselves in imitation to Jesus Christ holy and completely. I asked you this once on the show, but I've heard it said, if you're ever wondering whose job it is to initiate reconciliation of some sort and you're wondering between. two people, say in the context of like a fight or something, is it a fair generalization to say, you know, it's you and it's because we're paralleling Christ's constant like, you know, chasing us, you know, God chases us despite our routine rejection of him. And obviously, you just mentioned there's guards and not placing yourself in the way of abuse, etc. But, you know,

when I think in the context of humans offend each other constantly, we get into fights, we hold on to these grudges, but is there a certain level of radical reconciliation for goodness that, like, Christians will say, yeah, you know what, I'm supposed to overlook stuff and supposed to like, you know, just let these things go. Like if you're wondering if it's your job to start the healing discussion, is it generally okay to say it's yours, even if you don't feel you're at fault? For sure. You know, even if nowhere else at the level of your heart, look, Alessandro Serenelli is in prison with no repentance whatsoever. And he's in solitary confinement. And Maria came to him in that apparition. he had no repentance whatsoever but she came offering her forgiveness what i find amazing in that apparition she didn't say a word to him in life maria was known as a super super quiet shy little girl

she almost never spoke i mean she spoke only for the purpose of utility her natural personality it was to just be quiet. And in heaven, that personality is preserved. I think as one of the wonderful things about God, you know, our personalities are not going to change. So she comes to him, and just like on earth, she doesn't use words. She uses the gestures to convey the meaning. She hands him 14 white lilies, which he said as he received them in his hand, they turned to flames. And so she initiated that forgiveness. She initiated it. And the irony, she was already at play even before this dream, because when Alessandra was in prison, so he, for one, he did know how to read. He had been educated. In fact, he loved reading. When his father would go into town,

he often, if he had a coin or two to spare, he would buy old expired periodicals, buy a bunch of them and bring them home and give them to Alessandro so that he could read them. He would get him any book that he could and Alessandro loved to read. In prison, in solitary confinement, you can't do anything other than read.

And so just like in the movies, you know, there was a guy whose job it was to come around to bring you a book. And the only question is, do you want a book? He never asked you what book. You didn't get to pick it. He just handed you a book. So this is sometime

three to four. four years, maybe five years after the deed, but at least one year before his apparition of Maria. So he says, yeah, I want a book. And so the man just grabs the next book in his pile and hands it to him. Lo and behold, it is that very first biography written of Maria Goretti, his victim. So he's reading about his victim and himself in a book. And he has no idea that such a thing existed. He is reading about his own crime.

I mean, here's the irony of ironies. And so we have to imagine that that story probably softened him to some level internally, or at least it would be the equivalent of God sending rains to soften the soil. and then Maria comes in and just does the deed, forgives him, and he accepts the forgiveness. But that caused him to convert from being a monster into being an absolute pussycat. And it completely changed him. And it got him to forgive himself. It would have been the easiest thing in the world if at that moment when you accept contrition,

when you experience contrition for what you'd done, to now despise yourself. And I can't erase this deed for myself. And he's infamous throughout the entire country for being the monster, the pervert, that killed this little girl. And so this is an amazing thing, all brought about by the initiation of forgiveness that Maria did to him. Now, look, for people who are victims, it's not possible always, nor even advisable,

to present yourself to your abuser. And even in this case, Maria's forgiveness was mediated by many things. So in the hospital, it was mediated by distance. So Alessandra had no idea that she had forgiven him. She uttered the words, so they were witnesses. I forgive Alessandro Serinelli,

and I want him with me in heaven forever. Serinelli was not near the witness that. So he had no idea that that even happened. But nevertheless, it was done by Maria. Then in the apparition within the prison, it was mediated by being an apparition. So there was a mediation of mysticism there. So in other words, Maria was no longer, there was zero chance of her being harmed by him again. And so I think that that has to be in the mind of the victim.

You don't want to enable your abuser to abuse you again. So how could you do that forgiveness? Well, perhaps you could write a letter. Perhaps you could write a note. But certainly, you don't have to present yourself to the person in public. But certainly at the very least, you can do it towards Jesus Christ and make a declaration, a legal declaration. You know, Lord, I forgive this person for what this person did to me. Now, when we forgive, we're not saying it's nothing what this person did.

Heaven's no. Heavens no. And we're not saying that we forget. Jesus never tells us that our job was to forget. How in heaven's name can you forget egregious abuse? You can't. What he asks is for forgiveness. And what forgiveness is, when we're making a declaration of forgiveness, we are acknowledging the gravity of the abuse, the gravity of the hurt, which is always, at the end of the day, an act of theft. Because an abuser removes from you something that he or she had no right to take. And guess what? That's theft. And theft incurs a debt because you are obligated to pay back that which you thieved. But an abuser can't possibly do that. How could he give Maria back her life? How could he give her back her peace? How could he give her mother her daughter back?

It's impossible. So it is acknowledging that there was an abuse. which is an act of theft for which there is a debt, but the debt cannot possibly be repaid. So you're handing that debt to Jesus. Lord, I remove this debt from this person, and I transfer it to you, and I ask you to make good on it.

My abuser owes me nothing. I hereby release him from the debt that he owes me at the level of debt, and I turn that over to you. In place of the debt that he had, I ask you to grant him a blessing instead. Holy cow. Now you have a perfect imitation of Jesus Christ, which releases the power of a hydrogen bomb. Because now you have made in a very real way the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And now just watch what God is going to be able to do with that.

Well, speaking of watching what God can do with that, Father, Obviously, this is the Exorcist Files. We should probably mention, I know that every exorcist has his preferred, you know, accoutremae and tools in the kit, but you've mentioned throughout the show that you've had a lot of experiences with relics of St. Maria Garede. Could you give us a few stories maybe? And maybe some stories actually that maybe newer listeners aren't familiar with. What are some anecdotes you have of St. Maria's role in your exorcisms?

Yeah. So her relic is one that I use all the time, simply because I find her story amazing. I love her so very much. And her story just spoke to me from the first moment I heard of it. But hers is one I use all the time. Look, not all relics get the same reaction

with every demon. And ultimately, only God knows the reason for that. So you can have a relic work, a profound effect on this particular demon and you use the same relic on another one. it may get you maybe 10% of the reaction. And on others, it appears no visible reaction. But God has created in his saints the overall solution to the rebellion of the demons.

So not only do the saints replace the place that the demons forfeited in heaven, but their remains become the corresponding kryptonite that serves as a blade that cuts them. but not every saint is the blade that cuts each demon in the same way as another. But that being said, Maria Gretti, her relics, when I use them, always seem to get a visceral reaction. I think that has to do with maybe the devotion I have to her, that the association that this saint and myself have. I don't know, but I just know that I always get a reaction. I remember in the first case when I used her relic, the demon was being belligerent and just mouthing off in a terrible way. I pulled the relic and touched it to the demon's back.

And he immediately stopped his belligerent, straightened up like you had just put some ice cold or some hot object up against his back. And he turned around and looked to see what it was that I just did to him. What did I touch him with? Now, that reaction, let's pause that and parse that. that out a little bit, okay? Why did he display this reaction? Yes, when a demon inhabits someone, he becomes subject at some level to the conditions of the physical world, right? Not entirely, but at some level he does. So that's why, for example, throwing holy water at the body of his inhabited victim as he's inhabiting him or applying a relic or praying the right of exorcism is going to have an effect on him, because he's now made himself subject to the effect.

of the physical world. Demons that are not inhabiting someone, the use of holy water is not going to have the same effect on them because they're not being subject to it immediately. This object that you're spraying it on will, your room, your house, your car, etc., but not a demon in and of itself, unless he's inhabiting something and then those effects touch him. So when he has chosen to incarnate himself into the physical world by way of a victim, the sacred elements of the physical world are going to affect him. Nevertheless, he does not lose his preternatural abilities. In other words, yes, he can use the eyes of his victim to see as he was looking from the perspective of a human. But that doesn't mean his own demonic vision, that is his ability to be aware of every single object in that room

simultaneously. He doesn't have to look at them. He just knows where everything is because he's a demon and has this kind of all-seeing effect of physical reality. What was interesting is that in the case of this demon, he physically turned and looked to see what did you just do to me? And is it because he needed to physically see it in order to understand that it was a relic? No, I don't believe so at all. but I believe God made him do that reaction to give us the feedback that, hey, this thing was a very, very visceral weapon that you just used against him. So he was forced, in my opinion, to react in a certain way by God in order for us to see it and understand the power this relic was having over him. I remember another case when I pulled out the relic and touched this victim with it, the demon screamed and fomented how disgusting he found her,

how sickening he found her, how her purity and imitation to Christ, what was her shame? He was lamenting the fact that the kingdom of hell had such great plans to inflict upon her terrible hurt through Serenelli, but that she had met their match, and surpassed it, that nothing that they leveled at her was able to defeat her. And he was giving out this limit. At the same time, he's contradicting himself because he's declaring her to be the victor,

but at the same time calling her a loser. And this is welcome to the world of demons. They're idiots to the nth degree, as brilliant as their intellects are. They contradict themselves by saying the exact opposite of what they have just done. I remember the same demon in the course of our exorcism. He's just talking about how ineffectual I am and how much of a loser I am because of A, B, C, D, et cetera, et cetera. Then I just turned to him and I just said, you know what? At least I didn't let an 11-year-old girl beat the crap out of me.

Man, there was a plethora of F-words that came out of him to me. I remember Monsignor Brankin was not that exorcism, and he just actually had to stop and just let out a laugh. It was a neat reaction. You know, 10 years ago, well, within a year, it will be 10 years. I brought the whole body of Maria Goretty, all of her skeletal remains on a tour of America. And the very last event was an exorcism that we had planned. And that was not on the official schedule because it was meant to be secret. And so we drove with her remains before taking them back to Italy for this exorcism.

And in the month prior to this happening, I had some. Several of my exorcist friends tell me that the demons mentioned something and told them to tell me that thing that they were declaring to these exorcists. And for you to understand the meaning of what it is that they were saying. So the skeletal remains of St. Maria Gretti are encased inside the lead box that is encased inside the torso of a statue, an effigy, of. her, kind of resembles her, and it's lying prone, lying flat, lying on its back within this reliquary, this large reliquary. So it's a life-size statue of Maria Gretti within which are in case these bones. And so the demons, the message, so this had to be three exorcists that told me this. The demons would say to them in sessions, tell

Mertons were not afraid of the girl in the box, the girl in the box, the girl in the box. And so this chorus just coming up. Well, of course, if they're telling you that they're not afraid of what's happened, well, of course, the exact opposite is the case. Otherwise, they wouldn't mention anything. And so when we used the relics in this exorcism, we didn't use the ritual of exorcism. I mean, this exorcism was an exorcism kind of medieval style. if you will, because there was no ritual, no formal ritual of exorcism during the Middle Ages.

You know, what people did, what Exorcists did, was simply they brought the demoniac in front of the altar in which there were always relics of a saint or saints. And they would just ask the saints to bring about the liberation. They would invoke the holiness of the saint. And so that was what we did there. And it had a great effect, a great effect. a great effect on this case. So a user at every session that I've ever done. She's been wonderful. She's been a delight. And just as powerful a weapon as any other that I've seen.

So 10 out of 10 would refer a friend? Oh, 10 out of 10 would refer a friend. You bet. Absolutely. Well, you will have to, quote, forgive us, listeners, because we are out of time today. And one thing I love about this story with St. Regretti is that regardless of the, list of what persuasion of Christianity you find yourself in. There's just something for everyone with this. And so whether you believe in intercession of the saints or whether you just need a reminder of the power of radical forgiveness, this story pretty much has it all. And it's no mystery why it has blessed so many people. So anyways, Father, thank you so much for sharing today. And folks, we look forward to bringing you more content next week. So thanks for listening.

Thanks for joining us, Father. Okay, yeah, for sure. God bless you all.