The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (33 page)

That evening, Signor Tagliacozzo—who two months before had been part of the Jewish delegation that met with the Pope—came to see Montefiore, reporting the latest news from the ghetto. In two different synagogues the Jews had found Catholic children hiding, apparently placed there by people who hoped that they would be closed in at night, allowing the rabble-rousers to whip up anti-Jewish fury. In one case, just as a synagogue was about to be locked up following Friday evening services, a small child was found asleep in a corner, under a seat, and was put out. An hour later, a crowd of women, children, and some men, accompanied by police officers, descended on the ghetto and made their way to the synagogue, where they charged that the Jews had concealed a Christian child to prepare him for sacrifice. The next morning, many of the Jews who worked outside the old ghetto stayed home, having recently become targets of verbal abuse—and, in some cases, stones—aimed at them from passersby.

Finally, on April 28, Sir Moses, escorted by Odo Russell, had his appointment with Cardinal Antonelli. The day before, although no one at the Vatican yet knew it, Austrian troops had crossed into Piedmont in an attempt to defeat the Piedmontese troops before their French allies could arrive. On the very day that Sir Moses was again climbing the 190 steps to the Secretary of State’s office, Grand Duke Leopold II—facing popular demonstrations for the annexation of Tuscany to the Piedmontese kingdom, as well as a rebellion among his own troops—fled Florence. The battle for unification, and for the dismantling of the centuries-old temporal reign of the popes, was under way.

Montefiore told the Secretary of State why he had come to Rome, and expressed his disappointment at being unable to see the Pope to make his case. He asked the Cardinal to present the British Board of Deputies’ written plea to the Pope for him, lest he not be able to do so himself, and added that he would wait in Rome another week for the Pope’s reply. Antonelli received the elderly Jew with great courtesy, shaking his hand vigorously and insisting
that Montefiore sit beside him on the sofa in his office. However, as for the question at hand, he could not have been less encouraging. Once a child has been baptized, he informed Sir Moses, “the laws of the Church prevented its being given back to the parents.” However, on reaching adulthood—about age eighteen—Edgardo would be free to do as he pleased. In the meantime, the Cardinal promised that the boy’s parents would be able to visit him regularly. “On my expressing a hope to receive a reply to the address [of the Board of Deputies] from the Pope,” Montefiore wrote, the Secretary of State said simply: “No reply had been given to similar memorials from Holland, Germany, and France.”

Chastened, Montefiore returned to his quarters and sent a telegram reporting the disheartening news to London. It was addressed to the Board of Deputies, the Lord Mayor, the Chief Rabbi, Baron Rothschild, and Sir Culling Eardley, head of the Protestant Evangelical Alliance.

Two days later, news of the battle between Austrian and Piedmontese troops, and the grand duke’s flight from Tuscany, reached Rome, and members of the English community in the Holy City, fearing the spread of disorder—if not the arrival of hostile troops—hurriedly packed their bags. It was no longer certain that the French troops who protected papal rule in Rome would remain.

Montefiore would not leave, however, until the week was up, clinging to the hope that the Pope would respond. Finding a berth on a boat was not easy, for people were streaming out of the city, but by paying double fare, the Montefiores were able to get tickets and left Rome on May 10. Sir Moses wrote in his diary: “This journey and mission has been, on many accounts, a painful and sad trial of patience … but our God is in Heaven, and no doubt He has permitted that which will prove a disappointment to our friends, &c., and is a grief to us, for the best and wisest purposes. Blessed be His name!”

On his return, Montefiore stopped in Paris, where he met with the French minister of foreign affairs to thank him personally for the efforts made by the French ambassador, the Duke de Gramont, to win the Mortara boy’s release. The British newspapers were filled with news of Montefiore’s abortive mission, and an ad hoc committee was formed in London to lodge a protest to the Pope on behalf of the British Christian community. A statement was drawn up and signed by two thousand members of the British upper crust, branding the Vatican’s actions a “dishonour to Christianity” and “repulsive to the instincts of humanity.”
¹¹

Reactions in the British Jewish press combined praise for Sir Moses with harsh words for the Catholic Church. Two weeks after Montefiore’s departure from Rome, London’s
Jewish Chronicle
reported that the mission was a success in showing the Pope “that the Jewish people no longer intend tamely to
submit to outrages on human nature.” Yet, sadly, “degenerate modern Rome has by the weapons of brutal force obtained and maintained a momentary advantage. It refuses at the entreaty of an outraged community, at the bidding of insulted religion and down-trodden morality, to make the only adequate, acceptable reparation for the atrocity committed, by restoring to the robbed parents their kidnapped child.”
¹²

Meanwhile, in France, Sir Moses did not receive such uniformly adulatory reviews, even in the Jewish press. A number of French Jewish leaders were offended at the treatment they had received from the peripatetic crusader. He had gone off on his own, thinking that the backing of the British government would be sufficient to repeat his Damascus success, even though everyone knew that it was the French, and not the British, who had influence with the Vatican. Although he had traveled through France to get to Rome, he had not bothered to stop off to confer with leaders of the French Jewish community.

In its July 1859 issue, the
Archives Israélites
reported the failure of the Montefiore mission. “At the time of his departure,” the editor recalled, “we had expressed our regret that he did not come to Paris to find support for the cause that he went to defend before Cardinal Antonelli.… In Rome, he wasn’t even able to get an audience with the Pope.”
¹³

The article, written a year after Edgardo entered the Catechumens, reported with great satisfaction that the boy, “according to well-informed persons, has not capitulated.… Neither threats, nor promises, nor gifts, nor amusements, nothing has shaken this young soul, and so nothing should lessen our perseverance.”
¹⁴
At about the same time, another French paper, the
Journal des Débats,
reported the news that on June 14, in a solemn ceremony held at Rome’s famous church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Edgardo had been confirmed.
¹⁵
The paper—no friend of the Vatican—had the details wrong, for in fact the ceremonies had been held the month before, presided over by Gabriele Cardinal Ferretti—nephew of Pope Pius IX—in a private chapel. The rites had been performed three days after Montefiore’s departure from Rome, and apparently the Church was not eager to make the ceremony public, given the rebellions that had broken out in the north and the fear that the French might move their troops out of Rome.
¹⁶

It was true, however, that Edgardo was now being educated at San Pietro in Vincoli and no longer at the Catechumens. In a letter Scazzocchio wrote on February 1, just before his debilitating audience with the Pope, he reported this news, which the Rector of the Catechumens had given him, to the Mortaras.
¹⁷
Once Edgardo had received his initial Catholic education, there was no point keeping him in the Catechumens. He was ready to be send off to a
collegio,
to study religion and other subjects together with other boys.

The decision as to where Edgardo should go was made by the Pope himself,
for the boy from Bologna was no run-of-the-mill neophyte. Pius IX had initially favored entrusting him to the Jesuits’ care, with the hope that he might one day become a Jesuit himself. What could be more appropriate? Not only had the founder of the Jesuit order, Loyola, been the founder of Rome’s Catechumens, but the Jesuit journal,
Civiltà Cattolica,
had taken the lead in defending the Church decision to keep Edgardo. But on further reflection, and perhaps on the advice of his more politically savvy secretary of state, the Pope changed his mind. The Jesuits were all too exposed to the displeasure of foreign governments as it was. It might not be doing them any favor to put them in the limelight again.
¹⁸

The
collegio
at San Pietro in Vincoli was run by the order of the Lateran Canons Regular. Perched atop Rome’s highest hill, no more than a half-hour walk from the ghetto, the church was one of the oldest and most famous in the Eternal City. The name of the church, Saint Peter in Chains, derived from a reliquary containing what was thought to be the chains in which Saint Peter had once been bound. At the time Edgardo arrived there, it was believed that the chains had been brought to the church in Rome directly from Jerusalem in the fifth century.
¹⁹
In another reliquary were bones that were thought to be the remains of the heroic Maccabees from the Holy Land. The
collegio
’s quarters, situated beside the glorious church—with Saint Peter’s chains, beautifully painted ceilings, majestic pillared architecture, and Michelangelo’s famed statue of Moses—and with a magnificent view of the city, offered dazzling surroundings for the seven-year-old son of a storekeeper.

Shortly after Scazzocchio’s letter reporting Edgardo’s move to San Pietro in Vincoli reached the Mortaras, the boy and his fellow students went on a trip to Saint Peter’s. Coincidentally, Louis Veuillot and his sister were just then touring the Vatican. The French Catholic editor spied the group of boys, dressed in the same habit as their teacher, as they were being led into the church. Veuillot’s guide, a French bishop, pointed to one of the smallest of their number and exclaimed: “Voilà! There is the famous celebrity who has so much occupied all of Europe, us included. Let me introduce you to the little Mortara.” The bishop then pulled aside the friar who was leading the group and explained who Veuillot was.

Veuillot provides the following account of the encounter: “Since the time I arrived, I had always hoped to see the famous little Mortara. I was delighted to meet him at the foot of St. Peter’s chair. On his superior’s order, he kissed my hand.” The sense of satisfaction, of triumph, that
L’Univers
’s editor felt directed his thoughts to his enemies, the editors of the secular French press, who had vilified the Pope over the Mortara affair. “What a sight for Monsieur Pleé of the
Siècle,
if only he could have seen it!” Veuillot took the boy into his arms and hugged him. Edgardo, Veuillot reported, was in good health, had
a trusting and “spiritual” face and “the most beautiful eyes in the world,” and “responds to questions without embarrassment, just like a well-raised child.” Veuillot was told that of all the students his age, Edgardo knew the catechism best.

The French editor arranged to visit Edgardo at San Pietro in Vincoli one day soon thereafter. On his arrival, he first stopped to kiss the reliquary containing Saint Peter’s chains, and then met with the neophyte. “I found again the same open and lively manner, the same big, intelligent eyes.” Ever eager to gather material to support his cause, Veuillot asked the boy about his family. “He tells me that he loves his father and his mother, and that he will go to live with them when he is older and has been educated, so that he can speak to them of Saint Peter, of God, and of the most Holy Mary.” After further conversation along these lines, Veuillot recounted, it was time for Edgardo to return to his class. The Frenchman concluded, with his accustomed sarcasm, “He doesn’t seem to be aware of all the horror of his fate, but that, Monsieur Pleé would say, is the height of the horror.”
²⁰

CHAPTER 17
Uprising in Bologna

C
OULD THE STORY
of an illiterate servant girl, a grocer, and a little Jewish child from Bologna have altered the course of Italian and Church history? The question is not nearly as far-fetched as it appears. A case can be made that Anna Morisi—sexually compromised, dirt-poor, and unable to write her own name—made a greater contribution to Italian unification than many of the Risorgimento heroes whose statues preside over Italian town piazzas today.

National sensibilities encourage Italians to view unification as the product of Italian nationalist sentiments, embodied by the cerebral (and driven) Giuseppe Mazzini; Italian military bravery, embodied by the swashbuckling Giuseppe Garibaldi; Italian diplomatic savvy, embodied by Count Cavour; and the dedication of Italian royalty, in the person of Victor Emmanuel II. But what most effectively precipitated Italian unification, which began in 1859, was the decision of the French government—and of Emperor Napoleon III in particular—to commit troops to join the Kingdom of Sardinia in driving Austrian forces from northern Italy, and to approve the annexation to the kingdom not only of the Austrian-ruled lands but of all those protected by Austrian troops, lands that encompassed much of the Papal States.

This is not the place to examine the life and times of Napoleon III. He had been an enthusiast for Italian unification earlier in his life, and indeed took part in the Carbonari-inspired revolts in Italy in 1831. On the other hand, in order to win Catholic support in his bid to solidify power at home in 1849, he had ordered French troops into Rome to defeat the Republic and reinstall the old regime. His fear of antagonizing Catholics in France led him to keep French soldiers in Rome, but his distaste for the idea of a state ruled,
under Church law, by the Pontiff made him a fainthearted supporter at best of papal power.