Absolutely Vital

Near Anzio, in 1902, an eleven-year-old girl named Maria Goretti resisted a rapist and was stabbed to death with a pointed crowbar. Last fortnight, as the Roman Catholic Church prepared to canonize the dead girl for her martyrdom in defending her "Christian purity," Britain's Catholic Herald (circ. 90,000) ran an "exclusive, extraordinary" Page One picture of THE MAN WHO KILLED BLESSED MARIA.

The copies had hardly been distributed to agents when frantic wires went out as far as Eire: "Suppress current issue . . . Call in all copies distributed. Absolutely vital." The Herald had made a whopping mistake. The man in the picture was not Alessandro Serenelli, Maria's repentant murderer (now, after 27 years in jail, a lay brother in a Catholic monastery). It was actually Passionist Father Mauro, who had pleaded the case for Maria's sainthood.

The Herald had been led astray by information supplied by the official Vatican photographer in Rome and sloppily checked by its own correspondent. Doing its best to repair the damage, the weekly ran off another issue with an ad for a Catholic book in place of the picture. In Rome, Vatican Photographer Luigi Felici blandly explained last week: "After all, it isn't my job to identify the people I photograph."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.