Greg DalyGreg Daly writes of how the abduction of a Jewish boy in mid-19th Century Rome helped the demise of the Papal States
Students at UCD in June 2014 may have been rather bemused when former President Mary McAleese, describing herself as “perplexed” by James Joyce’s choice of a Jewish hero for Ulysses, wondered whether he had somehow been influenced by “one of the big international scandals” of the mid-19th Century, the forced abduction of a six-year-old Jewish boy who was taken from his family home in Bologna to Rome, there to be raised as a Catholic.
Although the Edgardo Mortara affair may indeed have brought 19th-Century global notoriety to the Papal States – the Pope’s then temporal domain, stretching across central Italy from south of Rome on one coast to north of Ravenna on the other – it was probably not common knowledge for the typical modern Irish university student. This may, however, be about to change.
Screenplay
Two years ago, Steven Spielberg announced that he would be producing a film based on David Kertzer’s 1997 book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. It has subsequently been announced that the Schindler’s List director will indeed be directing the film, based on a screenplay by Tony Kushner, who penned Spielberg’s previous hits Munich and Lincoln, and that Mark Rylance, winner of this year’s best supporting actor academy award for his role in the Spielberg-directed Bridge of Spies, had been cast as Pope Pius IX.
The Mortara affair was a key episode in the demise of the Papal States, which the Pope had ruled – with some interruptions – since the 8th Century. Controversial to modern eyes, the states had generally served to keep the papacy relatively independent of foreign rule, ensuring that Church teaching was decided by the Church, and not by the whims of monarchs.
Fluctuating in size and decidedly unstable since the French Revolution, the states were occupied during the French invasion of 1796-97 with both Pope Pius VI and his successor Pope Pius VII being driven into exile. Restored in 1814, they were far from stable and violence in 1848 caused Pope Pius IX briefly to flee.
The irony of the violence was that it arose following the Pope’s announcement that he would neither seek to drive Austria’s Catholic troops from the north of Italy nor lead a federal Italy, as many had hoped. French troops recaptured the city for Pius IX in July 1849, and in April 1850 the Pontiff returned to the city, dependent on foreign soldiers to maintain his position.
The Papal States’ second city was Bologna, in the north, where almost 200 Jews lived; banned from the city and its territories in 1593, they began to make their way back during the Napoleonic era, and had remained in the city since, despite their questionable status there. Comfortable merchants in the main, they tried to live discreetly, without either a synagogue or a rabbi.
Momolo and Marianna Mortara were living there with their eight children when they heard a knock on the door on June 23, 1858. Marshal Pietro Lucidi of the papal carabinieri had come with a police detail to take away their third-youngest child, the six-year-old Edgardo.
“Signor Mortara,” he said, “I am sorry to inform you that you are the victim of betrayal.” When Marianna asked the nature of this betrayal, he said: “Your son Edgardo has been baptised, and I have been ordered to take him with me.”
He explained that he was acting under orders from Fr Pier Feletti, the city’s representative of the Roman Inquistion, based in the local Dominican convent. Fr Feletti in turn told Momolo that Edgardo had been secretly baptised – though he would not say by whom, or how he came to learn this – and that now Edgardo was known to be a Christian, he could not lawfully be raised in a Jewish household.
He was granted one last day with his family, though further appeals were rejected. The boy would be raised in Rome, his parents were told, under the personal protection of the Pope. He was taken away in a carriage at eight o’clock the following evening.
Edgardo’s parents would not see him again until August, when Momolo was allowed meet with him on a few occasions in Rome’s House of Catechumens. Momolo claimed that the boy was distraught and made it clear that he wanted to come home; the Catholic press of the day, however, said Edgardo had eagerly embraced the Faith, and displayed a spiritual maturity far beyond his years.
Baptism
By this point the Mortaras had established that the story of Edgardo’s baptism had come from a former servant of theirs, Anna Morisi, who told them that when Edgardo had been sick as a baby a neighbouring grocer had suggested she baptise him; she had done so but said nothing until she accidentally mentioned it after Edgardo’s younger brother died in 1857.
Aside from her word, there was no proof of this clandestine baptism, but assuming, as Fr Feletti did, that Anna had told the truth this presented a problem.
Baptism was not merely an empty symbol, after all; rather, it effected an ontological reality, adopting the infant Edgardo into God’s household and making him in the most fundamental sense of the word a Christian. For a Christian to be raised outside the Faith was not acceptable to the Church, as this could endanger the child’s soul, and so the Church felt obliged to exercise the secular power it held in the Papal States by removing children so baptised from their families.
Edgardo’s parents continued to meet with him over the next few months, and the story gradually gathered international traction, with newspapers, politicians, and even the French Emperor Napoleon III criticising the Pope.
When war broke out the following year between Austria and Piedmont in northern Italy, Bologna and its surrounding territories took advantage of the chaos to break from the Papal States and join with the Piedmontese. The Inquisition was abolished there, and Fr Feletti was tried shortly afterwards, but acquitted as he was deemed simply to have done his duty.
With the Papal States now reduced to a small region around Italy, they seemed a doomed anachronism, and their fate was sealed in 1861 when Napoleon III withdrew the troops sustaining the papal regime after another young Jewish boy – the nine-year-old Gieuseppe Coen – was introduced to the House of Catechumens.
In 1870 the city fell to the new Italian state, but Edgardo, now a student with the Canons Regular of the Lateran and bearing the name Pio Edgardo Mortara, refused his father’s appeals to return home. He was smuggled out of Rome and escaped to Austria, from where he moved to France. In 1873, though only 21, he was ordained a priest.
Five years later Marianna travelled to meet her son in Perpignan; though pleased to see his mother, Edgardo was disappointed she would not join him in becoming Catholic. She died in 1890, Edgardo rejecting popular claims that she had converted at the end, and the following year Edgardo returned to Italy for the first time in 20 years, meeting some of his siblings there.
He settled in Bouhay in Belgium, where he died on March 11, 1940, just weeks before the country fell to Nazi Germany.
Twenty-four years later, in October 1965, the Church issued Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s decree on relations with non-Christian religions.
This recognised the degree to which Christians and Jews share a great “spiritual patrimony” and recognises that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues – such is the witness of the Apostle.”
