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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

Is it a sin to have been raped? Stories about St. Maria Goretti (1890-1902) say that she “chose not to sin.”

Question:

Is it a sin to have been raped? Stories about St. Maria Goretti (1890-1902) say that she “chose not to sin.”

Answer:

Where there is no free will, there is no sin. Someone who is forced into sexual relations is not a sinner but a victim of someone else’s sin.

Someone who does not fight off an attack or cannot prevent an attack from occurring has not sinned. Fighting off a sexual attack even to the death, rather than allowing a violation of purity—as did St. Maria Goretti—is indeed heroic. Her willingness to fight to the point of death can be an inspiration to all who are threatened by sexual violence. Yet her willingness on her deathbed to forgive her attacker and to desire his salvation was an even greater act of heroic virtue.

 

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