Dear Al:

There is no sin in a woman who is raped. She is a victim of a brutal assault. The rapist is the sinner.

The idea that a woman sins if she is raped, or that it is better for her to be killed rather than raped, is a convention of a distorted form of "family honor". It is ridiculous and stupid. Such ideas are contrary to Church teaching.

Duress and fear mitigates her actions even if she "appears" to willing submit (which is really not the case, but may appear so to others). The Church says:

CCC 1735 Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.

The level of resistance a person may assert when they are victimized is a matter of between God and the person. Some people may try to take the gun away from a murderer, or chase after a mugger. Others may rather passively accept what happens to them.

What a person will do depends on their personality, their ability to defend themselves, the opportunity to defend oneself, the ability of the victim to overcome fear and intimidation, the ability of the perpetrator to overcome any self-defense efforts of the victim, and the dynamics of the whole situation.

We can never judge how a person reacted to an attack.

St. Maria Goretti case cannot be compared on this issue. Her story is about forgiving her attacker who stabbed her mortally. She died of her wounds. Her courage was that she had given her virginity to God and sought to protect that. St. Dymphna died the same way. In St. Dymphna's case her father wanted to "marry" her. She refused not only because this was incest, but because she had consecrated her virginity to God. Her father killed her because she would not submit.

If St. Maria Goretti had been raped she would not have sinned and still could have become a Saint.  Her Sainthood comes from her courage to protect her consecrated virginity at all cost, even the cost of her life. By virtue of her consecration, her virginity belonged to God, and not to her. So this was a matter of defiling a sacred thing set aside for God, not just defiling her as a woman. Her Sainthood was also made in that she forgave her attacker before she died.

In any event, no matter how the woman responds, even if she submits to her attacker without a fight at all for fear of her life, she does not sin. The fear, duress, and acting contrary to her will preclude any guilt on her part. Any husband or boyfriend who thinks otherwise is out-of-line and sinning themselves by a lack of charity.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary