The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (11 page)

Viewing life through lenses so different that they saw entirely different worlds, the Church faithful and the Jews were ever perched on the brink of conflict. Where matters of Church religious teachings were in question, and where the most basic of all tenets—the superiority of Christianity and the divine protection enjoyed by the baptized—were at issue, the stage was set for a confrontation that, historically, the Jews could not win.

In the Mortara case, this clash of two realities meant the construction of two narratives, two stories. The Jewish narrative, embraced not only by the Jews but by other opponents of the temporal power of the Roman Church as well, told of a loving family brought to ruin by the papal regime’s religious fanaticism. In this account, papal police tore a desperate little boy from his helpless father’s arms, forcing the child, despite his heartbreaking pleas to be returned to his parents, to journey alone to an unknown fate. While the boy plays a major role in the drama, his parents play just as big a part, for they are the major victims of the piece.

When the first protests on behalf of the Mortara family began to make their way out of the ghetto, Church defenders sought to deflate the tale of the kidnapped child and stricken parents by offering a very different account of what had happened. In the Church narrative, the parents’ role was secondary. The focus was entirely on Edgardo himself. The story was not one of kidnap, the classic tale of evil outsiders arriving in the night with overpowering force to abduct a child from his loving parents. It was, rather, a heartwarming story of redemption, an inspiring tale of the divinely ordained salvation of a boy who until then had been consigned to a life of error and a hereafter of eternal damnation. Plucked from the clutches of evil and granted the joys of eternal happiness, the child had been bestowed a place at the side of the most holy and revered leader in all the world, the Pope himself.

Yet, if Edgardo had been blessed by the miracle that was the hallmark of baptism, there should be some sign. It was, after all, 1858, the year in which the apparition of Mary first appeared at Lourdes. God would surely signal His pleasure.

When Scazzocchio asked the Mortaras in July to send details of how Edgardo had behaved when he was being taken away, it was in response to the first Church reports that God indeed had sent a sign, one so dramatic that it bordered on the miraculous. A preternatural change, it was said, had come over the little boy on his trip to Rome, a trip that quickly began to take on the mythic quality of a voyage from error to enlightenment. He left Bologna a Jew; he arrived in Rome a few days later a devout Catholic.

Although Scazzocchio was aware of these reports in July, the first accounts in the Catholic press did not appear until the fall. In a long story published in
L’osservatore bolognese,
the newspaper founded by Archbishop Viale-Prelà to defend the faith in the battle against the liberals, lavish attention was devoted to the boy’s miraculous transformation en route. The article began by telling of Edgardo’s capture: “We can assure our readers,” the paper reported, “that in carrying out the orders received from Rome, no violence was employed, and it was all carried out with gentleness, solely through the use of persuasion.” True, on first hearing the news that Edgardo was to be taken from them, his parents were upset, but his mother was finally convinced by her husband to leave her son, and Edgardo himself “got into the carriage that awaited him tranquilly and serenely.”

The paper excitedly revealed “touching details” from eyewitnesses about the subsequent trip to Rome. Two devout women had accompanied the boy, and gave him a prayer book to read. “He read those prayers with great pleasure, and each time the subject of the Christian religion came up in conversation, he paid great attention. Indeed, he often asked questions on particular points of our faith, showing such great interest that it was clear how important it was to him to know the truths of our holy religion.” Nor was this all.
“Whenever the carriage stopped in any town or city, the first thing that he asked was to be taken to the church, and when he entered he remained there at length, showing the greatest respect and the most moving devotion.”
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Scazzocchio urged Momolo to provide him with some ammunition to counter the damage being done by these inspirational stories of a boy going contentedly with the papal police and finding divine enlightenment on the road to Rome. After finally meeting with his son in the House of the Catechumens in Rome in August, Momolo prepared his own account, which he sent to the Pope.

Momolo’s short document recounts that when, in the presence of the Rector of the Catechumens, he spoke to his son about what had happened, Edgardo “recalled the surprise and the immense shock he felt when he heard that the carabinieri were looking for him in order to take him with them.” And the Rector, reported Momolo, had learned from Edgardo that he feared the reason why the police wanted to take him away from his family was so that they could cut off his head.

Momolo also gave a very different account of his son’s journey to Rome than the one being broadcast to the Church faithful. In the place of demands to visit churches were pleas for his mezuzah:

Edgardo added that when he was led away he was sobbing and asked for his father and mother. All along the way he repeatedly asked the person accompanying him for his mezuzah, which he normally wore around his neck as a symbol of the Jewish religion. But in its place the man offered him a kind of medallion, to be used in the same way. Edgardo, though, refused it, until finally the man assured him that it was just the same as the object he had asked for. Throughout the trip, the man tried to calm him with the promise that his parents were but a short distance behind them. When he got to Rome and discovered this was not true, he changed the favorable opinion he had had of the man, an opinion based on the sweet and wheedling manner the man had used with him throughout the journey.
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The source for the Church’s account of Edgardo’s trip was Giuseppe Agostini, the police officer who had taken him from Bologna to Rome. When Cardinal Antonelli received Momolo Mortara’s very different account, and learned that it was being distributed to sympathetic newspapers throughout Europe, he asked Brigadier Agostini to prepare his own written report.

Dated November 2, the document was written four months after the disputed journey. Agostini’s description of the scene at the house when he and Lucidi arrived and announced their mission jibed with that of the Mortaras
themselves. It was, he reported, an extremely moving scene, an excruciating sight of desolation. The boy’s parents, and especially his mother, had been “consumed with tears, protesting.” He wrote: “It looked as though they would not give him up regardless of the amount of force used.”

The brigadier reported that the following day, during the twenty-four-hour reprieve, he had returned to San Domenico to get further instructions from the Inquisitor. There Father Feletti gave him two French medallions of the Blessed Immaculate Virgin, with images of Mary on one side and of Jesus on the cross on the other. Agostini was told that, if at all possible, he should place one of them around the neck of the “new Christian” once they were on their way to Rome.

Agostini did not report on the final scene at the Mortara home (the “house of the Jew,” as the brigadier called it) but skips in his account to five days into his journey with Edgardo, in the small city of Fossombrone, when, early in the morning, as the boy was getting dressed, Agostini first showed him one of the medallions the Inquisitor had given him:

I gently asked him to put it around his neck, and to kiss it, while I did the same with mine. At first, he showed repugnance, saying that his mother didn’t want him to kiss the Cross. But, using all the tenderness I could, I told the child that he was now passing from blindness to the sight of Divine things, the true light, and that he was not an Unbeliever but part of the Christian Religion. Finally yielding, he kissed the medallion and put it around his neck.

Agostini took Edgardo by the hand and led the boy to the cathedral of Fossombrone, where, the brigadier reported, he kindly urged Edgardo to go in. “At first, he stubbornly refused,” Agostini recalled, “but seeing the other gendarmes going in to Mass, he entered as well.” It was then that the miracle occurred. No sooner was the child inside the church—the first time in his life he had been in one—when, “thanks to the Heavenly wonders, there was an instantaneous change. Getting down on his knees, he took part quietly in the Divine Sacrifice, listening with interest to the explanations” that Agostini gave him. The Brigadier’s first thought was to teach the boy how to make the sign of the cross. Having accomplished this, he then taught him how to recite the Ave Maria.

The transformation was indeed a thing of wonder: “From that time he showed the strongest desire to visit the other churches there. After lunch, while visiting one of them, he couldn’t take his eyes off a painting showing the passion of the Redeemer,” and so Agostini explained it to him. From that moment, the brigadier claimed, Edgardo “forgot his parents, and as we
continued on our journey, at every stop the first thing he asked was to visit the House of God, where he would make the sign of the cross with the holy water and recite the Ave Maria that he had just learned.”

When they reached Spoleto, Agostini reported, he took Edgardo to a church, where, after having him genuflect, he had the boy recite the Paternoster. A priest at the church, learning of the boy’s stirring story, took him to the vestry, where, with great kindness, he gave him a scapular of the Holy Mary and put it around his neck, making him kiss it repeatedly. For the rest of the trip, the visits to churches continued, until the moment when Edgardo, the neophyte, was delivered to the Catechumens in Rome.

For Brigadier Agostini, who had already been given a bonus payment by Father Feletti in gratitude for his excellent work and his inspiring story, the request that he prepare a report of his experiences for Cardinal Antonelli, the Secretary of State, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make his voice heard at the highest levels of Church and state. Agostini’s report of his remarkable success undoubtedly made the Cardinal very happy, but just how much of it the Cardinal—known within Church circles for his lack of religious conviction—actually believed is hard to tell.

CHAPTER 6
The House of the
Catechumens

F
OR BOTH
the Church faithful and the Jews of Italy, the Casa dei Catecumeni, House of the Catechumens, was a place of the greatest significance. It straddled the border of the two worlds, and in its liminality lay its awesome power. A Jew could enter the Catechumens and come out a Catholic; in so doing he left one world and entered another. The convert was reborn, with a new identity and a new name. For the Church faithful, what went on in the Catechumens was the work of God, the conferring of the highest of spiritual gifts, bestowing supernatural blessing on a condemned people. For the Jews, by contrast, the Catechumens was a place of utmost horror.

While the earliest houses of Catechumens can be traced back to the third century, the history of the house to which Edgardo was taken had more recent origins. It was the first of the modern Houses of the Catechumens, established in 1540 by Ignazio of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, and aimed at the conversion of Jews and Muslims. Its example was soon followed elsewhere: Bologna opened one in 1568, Ferrara in 1584, Modena and Reggio Emilia around 1630. Wherever there were Jews, a House of the Catechumens was founded.
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The Church hierarchy followed cases of conversion in the Catechumens with the greatest interest. The baptism of an unbeliever, and especially of a Jew, redounded to the glory of God and helped fulfill one of the requirements in preparing the way for the Second Coming of the Messiah. The baptism of Jews, following their period of confinement in the Catechumens—typically set
at forty days for adults, although often longer for children—was a cause for great celebration. In Rome, cardinals frequently presided over such rites, which were held in the major churches of the city before large and appreciative crowds. In cities having no cardinal, bishops administered the baptism, often in the cathedral itself.
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According to Church teachings, a person who helped save the soul of an unbeliever earned divine blessing, performing a deed that would be remembered at heaven’s gate. As a result, noble families competed for the honor of acting as baptismal godparents for Jews, the trickle of converts being small compared with the robust ranks of the nobility. Among the roster of baptismal sponsors listed in the records of the various Catechumens are the most distinguished noble families in Italy. Such families bore some responsibility for the welfare of their spiritual wards, a fact that provided Jews with material incentive for conversion. The converts were also offered the nobles’ own family names. As a result, Italians who today bear illustrious noble names are not necessarily the progeny of nobility but may be instead the descendants of poor Jews who sought a new life by passing through the doors of the Catechumens.

Of the 262 Jews baptized after a period of training in Modena’s Catechumens between 1629 and 1701, for example, 115 were accompanied to the holy font by princes and princesses of the Estensi family itself. The ceremony was typically held at the cathedral and conducted by the archbishop, following a large procession that began at the Catechumens. The Jew, dressed entirely in white, marched to the cathedral amidst a gaggle of banner-hoisting confraternities singing inspirational hymns. On their return to the Catechumens, the men’s voices harmonized as they sang “Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel.”
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