The three teenage girls who killed Sr. Maria Laura Mainetti twenty years ago revealed later that, while they were stabbing the 60-year-old religious sister to death, she said she forgave them.

“The sister cried out. She said she would not report us; that she forgave us,” Milena De Giambattista, Ambra Gianasso, and Veronica Pietrobelli told police when they confessed to killing the woman as part of a Satanic ritual.

In May, Pope Francis declared Venerable Maria Laura Mainetti a martyr, killed in “hatred of the faith” in Chiavenna, Italy. She will be beatified on the 6th of June 2021, on the 21st anniversary of her murder.

Twenty years ago, the three teens, dressed in black, stabbed Mainetti nineteen times with a kitchen knife and beat her, while shouting abuse. They had intended to stab her eighteen times, in three multiples of six gashes, as an expression of the Satanic number— 666.

“I deceived her by drawing her into a trap, and then I killed her. While we were doing this, she forgave us,” Milena De Giambattista wrote to Sr. Mainetti’s religious community some years after the deed.

“I can have of her only a memory of love. And in addition to this, it also allowed me to believe in something that is neither God nor Satan, but which was a simple woman who defeated evil,” Milena wrote.

“Now in her I find comfort and the grace to endure everything. I always pray, and I am sure she will help me become a better person,” writes Milena in her letter.

The girls admitted that they were planning to kill the parish priest, but because he was bigger, they resolved to murder the small nun.

Source: CNA