Edgardo Mortara

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Edgardo Mortara (right) and his mother (seated)
Edgardo Mortara (right) and his mother (seated)

Edgardo Mortara (August 27, 1851 – March 11, 1940) was a Jewish boy who became the center of an international controversy when he was seized from his Jewish parents by the Papal States authorities and taken to be raised as a Catholic. The Mortara case was the catalyst for far-reaching political changes, and its repercussions are still being felt within the Catholic Church and in relations between the Church and some Jewish organizations. Mortara was raised as a Catholic and remained one for the remainder of his life.

The Mortara affair increased discontent with the temporal power of the papacy within Italy and produced calls for Mortara to be returned to his parents from around the world, including twenty editorials in The New York Times.[1] Pope John Paul II's canonization of Pope Pius IX—during the height of the Roman Catholic sex abuse cases—in part revived the controversy over the Mortara case, due to claims that Pius IX had allegedly "sexually abused" Mortara, based on accounts of Edgardo hiding under the cassock of Pius IX.[2]

Contents

[edit] The Mortara case

[edit] Seizure

On the evening of 23 June 1858, in Bologna, then part of the Papal States, police arrived at the home of a Jewish couple, Salomone ("Momolo") and Marianna Padovani Mortara, to seize one of their eight children, six-year-old Edgardo, and transport him to Rome to be raised by the Catholic Church.

The police had orders from Holy Office authorities in Rome, authorized by Pope Pius IX.[3] Church officials had been told that a 14-year-old[4] Catholic servant girl of the Mortaras, Anna Morisi, had baptized Edgardo while he was ill because she feared that he would otherwise die and go to Hell. Under the law of the Papal States, Edgardo's baptism, even if illegal under canon law, was valid and made him a Christian. Under the canon law, Jews could not raise a Christian child, even their own. In 1912, in his relation in favour of the beatification of Pope Pius IX, Edgardo himself noted that the laws of the Papal States did not allow Catholics to work in the homes of Jewish families.[5] That law was widely disregarded due to the ability of Catholic servants to work on the Shabbat[4].

Edgardo was taken to a house for Catholic converts (a "House of Catechumens"[4]) in Rome, maintained by taxes levied on Jews. His parents were not allowed to see him for several weeks, and then not alone. Pius IX took a personal interest in the case, and all appeals to the Church were rebuffed. Church authorities told the Mortaras that they could have Edgardo back if they abandoned their faith and converted to Catholicism, but they refused.

[edit] Reaction

The incident soon received extensive publicity both in Italy and internationally. In the Kingdom of Piedmont, the largest independent state in Italy and the centre of the liberal nationalist movement for Italian unification, both the government and the press used the case to reinforce their claims that the Papal States were ruled by medieval obscurantists and should be liberated from Papal rule.

Protests were lodged by both Jewish organizations and prominent political and intellectual figures in Britain, the United States, Germany, Austria, and France. Soon the governments of these countries added to calls for Edgardo to be returned to his parents. The French Emperor Napoleon III, whose troops garrisoned Rome to protect the Pope against the Italian anti-clerical unificationists, also protested.

When a delegation of prominent Jews saw him in 1859, he told them, "I couldn't care less what the world thinks."[citation needed] At another meeting, he brought Edgardo with him to show that the boy was happy in his care. In 1865 he said: "I had the right and the duty to do what I did for this boy, and if I had to, I would do it again."[citation needed] In a speech in 1871 he called the Jews of Rome "dogs" and said: "of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places." [6] [7]

The Mortara case served to harden the already prevalent opinion among liberals and nationalists in both Italy and abroad that the rule of the Pope over a large area of central Italy was an anachronism and an affront to human rights in an "enlightened" age of liberalism and rationalism. It helped persuade opinion in both Britain and France to allow Piedmont to go to war with the Papal States in 1859 and annex most of the Pope's territories, effectively leaving him with only the city of Rome in the end. When the French garrison was withdrawn in 1870, Rome too was annexed by the new, unified, liberal Kingdom of Italy.

[edit] Ordination and later life

In 1859, after Bologna had been annexed to Piedmont, the Mortara parents made another effort to recover their son, but he had been taken to Rome. In 1870, when Rome was captured from the Pope, they tried again, but Edgardo was then 19 and therefore legally an adult, and had declared his firm intention of remaining a Catholic. In that year, he moved his residence to France. The following year, his father died. In France, he entered the Augustinian order, being ordained a priest at the age of 23, and adopted the spiritual name Pius. He is also known as Pio Maria. Fr. Edgardo Mortara was sent as a missionary to cities such as Munich, Mainz and Breslau to preach to the Jews there. He became fluent in a variety of languages.

In 1912, in his written statement in favor of the beatification of Pius IX, Mortara recalled his own feelings about the abduction: "Eight days later, my parents presented themselves to the Institute of Neophytes to initiate the complex procedures to get me back in the family. As they had complete freedom to see me and talk with me, they remained in Rome for a month, coming every day to visit me. Needless to say, they tried every means to get me back — caresses, tears, pleas and promises. Despite all this, I never showed the slightest desire to return to my family, a fact which I do not understand myself, except by looking at the power of supernatural grace."[5]

During a public-speaking engagement in Italy he reestablished communications with his mother and siblings. In 1895, he attended his mother's funeral. His nieces and nephews, as adults, sadly recalled the frequent visits from the priest. It is not clear whether they knew him as a relative or "family friend."

In 1897, he preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral New York, but the Archbishop of New York told the Vatican that he opposed Mortara's efforts to evangelise the Jews on the grounds that such efforts embarrassed the Church in the view of the United States government.[citation needed] Mortara died in 1940 in Belgium, after spending some years in a monastery.

[edit] Pius IX and the Jews

At Pius IX's accession in 1846, Jews in Rome were required to live in a ghetto, a separated quarter of the city. At first Pius showed some liberalising tendencies towards the Jews. In particular, he relaxed laws requiring them to live in specified neighborhoods and repealed laws requiring them to attend meetings where priests encouraged their religious conversion. But after the attempted republican liberal revolution in Rome in 1848, Pius changed his mind: like most conservatives at this time, he associated the Jews with radicalism and revolution. Jews continued to be taxed to pay for schools for ethnic Jewish converts to Catholicism. Their testimony against Christians was still not admitted in courts of law.

The Mortara case has attracted new attention in recent years because of the campaign to secure canonisation for Blessed Pius IX, a campaign driven by Pope John Paul II and other Catholic faithful. Jewish groups and others, led by several descendants of the Mortara family, protested the Vatican's beatification of Pius in 2000. In 1997 David Kertzer published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which brought the case back into public attention. The story became the subject of a play, Edgardo Mine by Alfred Uhry.

In Italy, Jewish leaders and some Catholic scholars have warned that the canonization of Pius IX will undermine the goodwill engendered by recent Vatican attempts to atone for Christian Europe's history of anti-Semitism. B'nai B'rith, a prominent Jewish group based in the United States, has also protested against the campaign to canonise Pius. The Mortara case is thus once again a live issue in Jewish-Catholic relations.

Some senior Catholics continue to defend Pius's actions in the Mortara case. Monsignor Carlo Liberati, the church official who advanced Pius IX's beatification, said Pius should not be judged by the Mortara case: "In the process of beatification, this wasn't considered a problem because it was a habit of the times" to take baptised Jews and raise them as Catholics. "We can't look at the Church with the eyes of the year 2000, with all of the religious liberty that we have now," Liberati said.

Liberati also said: "The servant girl wanted to give the grace of God to the child. She wanted him to go to heaven… [and] at the time, the spiritual paternity was more important than civil paternity."

Jesuit Father Giacomo Martina, a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, wrote in a book about Pius's life, "In perspective, the Mortara story demonstrates the profound zeal of Pius IX [and] his firmness in carrying out what he perceived to be his duty at the cost of losing personal popularity." He also said the beatified pope regarded his critics as "unbelievers… [operating] a war machine against the church."

In 1912 Mortara testified in writing that he thought Pius IX should be canonized: "I am firmly convinced, not only by the deposition I have given, but by the entire life of my august protector and father, that the Servant of God [Pius IX] is a saint. I have the almost instinctive conviction that one day he will be raised to the glory of the altars. For me it will be an intimate joy for my entire life and a great comfort in the hour of my death to have cooperated to the limits of my strength toward the success of this cause. I pray to God by the intercession of his Servant to have mercy on me and forgive my sins, and make me rejoice in his presence in Paradise."[5]

Elena Mortara, a great-great-granddaughter of one of Edgardo's sisters, and a professor of literature in Rome, continues to campaign for an apology from the Vatican for Edgardo's abduction and against the canonisation of Pius IX. She has said she is "appalled at the idea that the Catholic Church wants to make a saint out of a Pope who perpetuated such an act of unacceptable intolerance and abuse of power." She explained that she "feels historically obliged in the name of my generation to ask [the Church] if this is the example you want to give."

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Cornwell, 2004, p. 151.
  2. ^ Cornwell, 2004, p. 151-152.; Cornwell fails to mention that Edgardo himself hid from his angry parents 'behind' Pius IX's cassock.
  3. ^ "The End of the Inquisition". David Rabinovich, producer, director. Secret Files of the Inquisition. PBS. May 2007.
  4. ^ a b c Dawkins, 2006, pp. 169–172.
  5. ^ a b c Edgardo Levi-Mortara's Testimony for Beatification of Pius IX, Zenit News Agency, September 20, 2000.
  6. ^ Stowe, Kenneth (2007). Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response. Ashgate Press, 57-58. ISBN 0754659151. 
  7. ^ Carroll, James (2002). Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews — A History. Houghton Mifflin Books, 379-380. ISBN 0618219080. 

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • The story was adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Alfred Uhry into the play Edgardo Mine based on David Kertzer's book.

[edit] External links