I was unfamiliar with her, but this is a story more people should know.
From CNA:
Pope Francis declared Friday that Sister Maria Laura Mainetti, an Italian religious sister killed by three teenage girls in a Satanic sacrifice, was a martyr for the Catholic faith.
The 60-year-old Sister of the Cross was in 2000 stabbed to death by three teenage girls in a park in Chiavenna, Italy.
Mainetti’s killers were convicted and imprisoned.
The girls knew the religious sister because she had taught them catechism. They lured her to the park by claiming that one of them needed to talk, because she had been raped and impregnated and was considering an abortion.
The three girls originally said the murder was “for a game,” but later admitted they killed her as a demonic ritual.
In the park on the evening of June 6, 2000, the three girls made Mainetti kneel and shouted abuses at her. One girl beat the sister with a brick and another pushed her head repeatedly into a wall.
They took turns stabbing Mainetti 19 times with a kitchen knife. They had, according to Italian media reports, intended to stab her 18 times, six times each, to form by their violence the number 666.
Sr. Mainetti prayed throughout the attack and asked God to forgive the girls for their actions.
Her last words, according to some accounts of her death, were “Lord, forgive them.”
Sister Maria Laura Mainetti, pray for us!
