I give you thanks, Lord and King,
I praise you, God my savior!
I declare your name, refuge of my life,
because you have ransomed my life from death;
You held back my body from the pit,
and delivered my foot from the power of Sheol.

-Sirach 51: 1-2

It is 1961, and the author and essayist Pietro Di Donato is lying on a bed in a room at the Capuchin monastery in Macerata, Italy. He has come here to interview Alessandro Serenelli, the murderer in 1902 of Maria Goretti, for a book he is writing. Serenelli is 80 years old and a lay brother of the secular third order of the Capuchin Franciscans. When Di Donato visits, Serenelli is recovering from cataract surgery. No longer able to labor, he lives a life of peace and prayer in anonymity among the friars.