The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (22 page)

For the next forty days, through the end of November, Marianna and Momolo remained in Rome, regularly journeying from their lodgings to the Catechumens to visit Edgardo. Just what happened during these visits is a matter of controversy, for, once again, we find two very different stories.

In the Mortaras’ account, the boy lived in constant fear of his clerical keepers, desperately longing to return home with his parents, yet intimidated by the priests who kept him under their remorseless control. The battle between his identity as a Jew and his identity as a Christian was, in this account, a contest pitting his loyalty to his parents against his loyalty to the priests who cared for him.

A little over a year later, at the trial of Bologna’s Inquisitor, Marianna Mortara testified about these encounters. After describing her first visit, when, on seeing his mother, Edgardo threw himself in her arms and they both sobbed uncontrollably, she told how, over the next forty days, she saw her son often, always in the same room. “Although he was under the domination and the influence of the Rector, who was always present for our meetings, and who could intimidate him with just a look, Edgardo always showed his affection for me and his desire to return to his family and to his religion, and always recited his Jewish prayers with me, which he assured me he said every day when no one was watching.” According to his mother, the boy was not looking well: “He had lost weight and had turned pale; his eyes were filled with terror.”
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In mid-November, with hopes that the Pope would heed their pleas rapidly receding, the Università Israelitica of Rome prepared a French account of these meetings. The audience was the French Jewish community, who were eager for news of the boy.

In Monsieur and Madame Mortara’s most recent visits to see their son, who is under guard in the House of the Catechumens, the people there have begun to tell them, in an increasingly explicit way, that their efforts to get him back are hopeless. Since their return from Alatri, when the unhappy mother first saw her son again, and when, following her heart’s impulse, she reminded her son of the religion in which he was born and raised, and his duty to remain forever faithful to it, the individuals in whose care he has been placed have complained about the negative effect that this call to return to the creed of his parents was having on the pressure they were exerting on his spirit. Consequently, they sought to reduce these inopportune visits insofar as possible.

The Catechumens officials, in this account, urged the Mortaras not to make any disparaging remarks to Edgardo about the Christian education that
he was getting, but Momolo replied that he was only exercising his sacred rights as a father. He felt further justified by the fact that the child had confided in his mother that “the fear of displeasing the Rector, a fear reinforced by the man’s reprimand following the parents’ first visit, prevented him from declaring his desire to return to his paternal home.” Momolo added that the Pope had placed no restrictions in giving them permission to see their son. When the Catechumens authorities responded by arranging for Edgardo to go out just at the hour when his parents were supposed to arrive, Momolo prepared a new complaint to the Rector, and the practice was stopped.

On one of the Mortaras’ visits, as they were sitting with their son, the Rector’s brother remarked that Edgardo was a very lucky boy, for the Holy Father himself had taken a great interest in him. He added that many people envied the Mortaras’ good fortune, and went on to suggest that the Pontiff’s solicitude for Edgardo might well extend to the parents themselves. “Because the kindly heart of Pius IX was saddened by the reversal of fortune suffered by the Mortara family,” the Rector’s brother told them, “he would like to do something to provide relief for the natural parents of his favorite son.” Referring obliquely to the recent failure of Momolo’s business, the priest went on to suggest that Momolo go to see the Pope, assuring him that he would find it to his advantage. This overture, according to the Università Israelitica account, wounded the Mortaras deeply. They firmly “rejected the idea of selling their approval of the Christian education of their child in exchange for financial help.” No amount of money could begin to pay them back for the loss of their beloved son.

It is unclear whether the Pope was in fact inclined to provide any such financial reward to get the Mortaras to end their campaign. But one point that both sides agree on—although the two narratives treat it very differently—is that the Rector and his clerical colleagues did do all they could to convince Momolo and Marianna that a happy solution to their troubles was within their reach: They could follow their son into the House of the Catechumens and convert themselves.

The Università Israelitica document provides a glimpse of the Mortaras’ state of mind during these visits, and of how, despite all the negative signs, they remained hopeful that their son would soon be released:

Up until this moment, the direct relations with the Rector and his brother had stayed within the bounds of a certain politeness. The souls of Monsieur and Madame Mortara were torn between hope and fear. They awaited the decree that would produce either their consolation or their eternal sorrow. They could not resign themselves to the idea that, having traveled so far, having presented so many arguments in their favor,
having produced so many documents and cited so many authorities, they would not succeed in the end.

These hopes were very much on their minds as they held Edgardo in their arms on the morning of November 9. Across the room stood the Rector and his brother, with a few nuns at their side. The priests, talking loudly enough to be heard across the room, spoke of the airtight arguments being prepared by the Church authorities as the basis for what would be the Pope’s final refusal of the request to let Edgardo return home. A dramatic encounter followed, as described in the Università Israelitica account:

The poor parents begged the two speakers not to poison their conversation with such words, but rather than go along with this reasonable request, the two clerics exclaimed that it would be contrary to their duty, which was to exhort the parents to follow their child in his new faith. It was only by embracing Christianity that they would be permitted to see their son; if they converted, they would be treated with the greatest respect. They added that far from returning to the religion into which he was born, the new son of the Church was destined by God to become the apostle of Christianity to his family, dedicated to converting his parents and his siblings.

The three Jews clutched one another as—in an account eerily echoing the one that Anna Del Monte told about the same place a century before—both the priests and the sisters got down on their knees before an image of Jesus and began reciting heartfelt prayers for the conversion of the entire Mortara family. “The boy did not follow his teachers’ example, although they would have liked to make him kneel down with them. He stayed by his parents’ side. But Momolo and Marianna could not stand it any longer, and despite the enormous wound that they suffered, they were careful not to say a single word as they made their way out of the room.”

As his parents were leaving, Edgardo threw himself in his mother’s arms. The effect of the scene—the priests and sisters on their knees, begging Jesus to show them the light—was

to redouble the tears, the kisses, and the sighs, while the poor mother pressed the boy to her breast until finally the Rector came to tear the boy away, saying, “That’s enough.”

One can well imagine the state that Monsieur and Madame Mortara were in as they returned to their room, and how they were stunned and completely done in by the scene they had witnessed. The mother’s pain exploded into atrocious convulsions, which lasted all day, and from that fatal moment she has not been able to get out of bed.
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As the moving accounts of the poor mother’s torment circulated through Italy and beyond, a very different story began to appear in papers sympathetic to the Church. It tells of a child terrified of his mother, a woman who will not leave him in peace while all he seeks is the comfort of his new family, the Church. In the first of these stories in the stridently pro-Vatican newspaper
L’univers,
its French readers learned of Edgardo’s horrified reaction when his mother told him to remain faithful to the religion of his ancestors. Edgardo told the Rector that if she returned, he would go and hide, for he could not bear to hear such awful words again.
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The most influential Catholic report of the mother’s first meetings with her son appeared in the Jesuit
Civiltà Cattolica.
The long story in the November issue sketched out the main lines of counterattack to be used in the battle against all those forces—Jewish, liberal, anticlerical—that were, in the Catholic view, maligning the Pope and the Church over the Mortara case. The defense had two components. One, involving Church law and precedent, we will look at later. The other focused on Edgardo’s actual behavior and on his attitude toward his parents and toward the Church. In the
Civiltà Cattolica
account, Edgardo had clearly made his choice.

Critics had accused the Church of flagrantly violating one of its own cardinal principles, indeed one of the Ten Commandments: a child should be taught to honor his father and his mother.
Civiltà Cattolica
responded that Edgardo’s tutors had done nothing to compromise the boy’s respect and love for his parents. The transformation that had come over him on entering the Catechumens, thanks to the miracle of the baptismal sacrament, was instantaneous, but the journal reported, “that did not detract one whit from his affection [for his parents], nor from his filial devotion.” In fact, when, in his first few weeks at the Catechumens, he was taught the rudiments of reading and writing, the first little letter he asked to write was to his mother (this was before her first visit), and he signed it “your most affectionate little son.”

This, of course, did not mean that he wanted to go home to be with his mother, for then he would have to live among Jews, which he did not want to do; indeed, he had reason to fear. “He begged to be brought up in a Christian home,” the
Civiltà Cattolica
recounted, “to escape the seductions and perhaps too those acts of violence that, beneath the paternal roof, would more than likely have met him.”

The choice of a new religion meant a choice of a new family, or perhaps it was the other way around. Escaping the threat of violence at the hands of his parents—Jews who would stop at nothing to keep their child from enjoying the spiritual liberation he had attained through baptism—Edgardo turned to his new father and his new family: “ ‘I have been baptized,’ he said, with a wisdom and a precision far from childlike; ‘I have been baptized, and my father is the Pope.’ ”

The Jesuit journal went on to report that the boy’s sentiments were warmly reciprocated by the Pontiff, who indeed had come to view Edgardo as his new son: “Nor did His Holiness delay in responding with paternal solicitude to this new son that Providence, in such an unforeseeable way, had added to the great Catholic family.” The Pope lost no time in calling the fortunate little boy to him; he embraced him warmly and, “with his august hand, made the holy sign of the cross on his forehead, and presented the boy to the distinguished priest taking care of him at the House of the Catechumens as someone who was most precious to him.”

For the Jesuit journal, as for the Catholic press throughout Europe, the proof that the Church had acted properly lay in Edgardo’s attitude toward his parents. More than that, his behavior demonstrated the truth of the Catholic religion. The child’s firm desire to “persevere at any cost,” his “calm wish to remain far from his own,” could be explained only as the special workings of holy grace, divine testimony to the fact that he had indeed been baptized. The Church officials had paraded the little boy before a wide assortment of “important persons, clerical and lay, dignitaries, and diplomats,” who had interrogated him. Moreover, the Church had let his parents visit him frequently. “In all these circumstances,” the journal reported, “he never has wavered for a moment.”

As for the behavior of Edgardo’s parents,
Civiltà Cattolica
painted a very different picture from that found in the Jewish and the liberal press. Momolo and Marianna’s anguish was the result not of losing a son but of their hostility toward the Church. Edgardo’s fears about his parents, the journal reported, were well founded. “They act with such desperation not so much because one of their eight children has been temporarily taken away, for they still have seven left at home, but rather because it is the Catholic Church that has acquired him.”

The Jesuit author told of speaking with Edgardo a few days after his first meeting with his mother at the Catechumens. The little boy told him a dramatic story of the encounter. As his mother embraced him, he reported, she noticed the medallion of the Blessed Virgin that was hanging from his neck. Enraged at the sight, she ripped it off. Edgardo was aghast but, out of respect for his mother, said nothing. Yet, he told his Jesuit visitor, “I kept repeating to myself: ‘I am a Christian by the grace of God, and a Christian I want to die.’ ”

All this, the Jesuit journal reported, put the question of whether a child should obey his parents in an entirely different light. The real issue was this: “Should a Christian son be returned to a Jewish father?” And it asked, “Is it right to allow the father to freely abuse his paternal authority to make him become an apostate?” The author concluded: “Having posed the question in
this way, it requires only common sense and a little faith in the supernatural to respond that one cannot, and one ought not. It would be inhuman cruelty to do so, especially when the son has the insight to see the danger himself, and himself begs for protection against it.” If nature gives the father full responsibility for the care of his son, it is not so that the father can do as he pleases, but so that the son’s interests can be protected. How can anyone think that such authority should be left to the father when “it is almost certain that it will be employed not for the son’s good but rather for his supreme ruination?… Does not civil law provide that one should take a child away from a cruel and murderous father in order to protect his life? And why, then, should it be unjust to do for someone’s eternal life that which seems so just when it concerns his temporal existence?”