Community

Alessandro Serenelli and St. Maria Goretti 

Our namesake, Alessandro Serenelli, lived what we are creating a community for. He was born in Ancona, Italy, on June 2, 1882. His childhood was both traumatic and chaotic. His own mother suffered from mental illness, breaking down after her son Gaspare died. In her deteriorated mental state, she tried to drown 3-year-old Alessandro in a well, but his older brother Pietro saved him. His mother was remitted to an asylum, while his father became an alcoholic, and when Alessandro was still only 11 or 12 years old, he set off on his own to live and work on the shores and docks of the Adriatic. Alessandro was the only one in his family who could read from the little schooling he had received, no more than a year and a half. During these years he was exposed to the ways and speech of the sailors and how they treated women. When Alessandro was 16, his brother Pietro asked him to leave his life on the docks and to go help his father, Giovani, who was sharecropping as a farmer in Paliano.  

He committed a heinous crime in his youth against an innocent girl who forgave him on her deathbed. During his prison sentence he experienced this forgiveness mystically in a vision of his victim, St. Maria Goretti, and repented and was transformed. After his release he was eventually admitted to a Capuchin monastery where he lived peacefully the rest of his days as the doorkeeper and gardener. He died May 6, 1970. St. Maria Goretti and Alessandro Serenelli are our principal co-patrons, but we have many examples in the Church’s history of radical conversions after experiencing mercy and forgiveness. Read more 

“Maria’s forgiveness saved me.” — ALESSANDRO SERENELLI 

St. Maria Goretti was the eldest daughter of a poor Italian farming family at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The Goretti family migrated from Corinaldo to Le Ferriere di Conca near Rome in search of work. They shared a home with their sharecropping business partner Giovanni Serenelli and his youngest son, Alessandro. After her father, Luigi, passed away from malaria and meningitis on May 6, 1900, Maria had to take over the household chores and help raise her younger siblings while her mother, Assunta Goretti, had to go out to the fields to bring in the harvest.  

Our Lady of Fatima 

Not long after the events of Maria’s martyrdom took place, another profound event happened when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, proclaiming a message of peace through repentance, self-sacrifice, and prayer. Just like St. Maria, these children were dauntless in the face of persecution, and because of their faithfulness to the Mother of God, the message of Fatima has touched the world and speaks to the need in our ministry to the incarcerated to make reparation for sins and pray fervently for the conversion of sinners.  

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St. Joseph 

St. Joseph is the patron of the universal Church and the head of the holy family. Most of our incarcerated brethren have a deep wound of fatherlessness in their hearts, and St. Joseph serves an important role in the life of a Serenelli to give an example of Christian fatherhood and to assist these  

St. Benedict 

The father of western monasticism, St. Benedict is a father and spiritual guide to all who seek to live a life fully dedicated to following Jesus Christ and contemplating God in the pursuit of Christian perfection. His rule and his life set the model for our residential community life.