[In the following review, McDonnell finds the focus of The Penitent misplaced, preferring instead to consider the implications of Alessandro Sereneli's murder of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.]

The problem of sanctity is so special a bafflement to the modern writer, to say nothing of our general estrangement from its seemingly ineffable milieu, that the attempt to record it, if made at all, usually ends in disaster. At least, that is to say, in literary disaster. It is much like the movies you see which attempt to portray lives of genius in the creative arts. The result is invariably a production in kitsch. But if the creative life eludes the cinematic process, how much more the mystery of sanctity escapes the spectrum, from confinement to liberation, of the written word.

This is the problem faced, though not squarely confronted, by Pietro DiDonato in The Penitent, an account of the spiritual transformation of Alessandro Serenelli after his murder of the child-saint, Maria Goretti, in 1902. As a sketch of the relatively “unknown” Allessandro, The Penitent has a certain undeniable interest. But it falters rather seriously in its mere idealization of Maria Goretti. In saying this, of course, one proceeds on the assumption that authentic sanctity is the rarest phenomenon which man may encounter, not the commonest nor the one most easily dramatized in emotive states of “Christian” enthusiasm. What is remarkable about St. Thérèse, for example, is that she penetrated the bourgeois-pietism with which she is still identified. One suspects that a kind of pisan-pietism has already become for Maria Goretti the popular myth which hides the mystery of her sanctity.

Some support for this opinion may be seen in the fact, if it is one, that Alessandro Serenelli seems more real to us than Maria Goretti, and never so real as in the long “Author's Note” which concludes the book. One would have wished, then, that DiDonato had altogether forsaken the ersatz fictional/biographical method for a presentation that would not so much presume on the sophomoric attitudes of the reader. In later years, Serenelli deplored the journalistic distortions of certain aspects of the case in which he was the principal figure. DiDonato has done well to have helped correct errors of judgment that have remained in the public(ity) domain for over sixty years, but this in itself does not quite cancel out his novelist's predilection for mere melodrama.

There is, of course, a place to be sought in the landscape of the soul, which lies somewhere between the extremes of postcard sanctity and that of the madness-and-malnutrition school of ascetic art. It is not with a wholly pedagogical concern, therefore, that one puts down The Penitent in the uneasy conviction that the story still remains to be told. Although this is not postcard biography by any means, it is nevertheless clear that Alessandro Serenelli remains within a mystery of sanctity that cannot be penetrated by “religious” kitsch. It is, regrettably, hard to believe that the author of Christ in Concrete also produced this venture in Reader's Digest hagiography.