The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (37 page)

The Inquisition’s heyday had passed by the beginning of the eighteenth century—no longer were heretics publicly immolated, nor were suspects hoisted off the ground by their wrists, bound behind their lower back.
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But it was only with the French invasion of Italy in the last years of the century that the Inquisition was first declared at an end. Not only was Bologna’s inquisitor out of a job; he no longer had a home, for the Dominican convent was dismantled
and the inquisitorial archives were seized. The Inquisition returned in Bologna, as in the rest of the Papal States, only in the aftermath of the fall of the French in 1814.

Among the Holy Office’s major responsibilities in the Restoration years was oversight of the Jews of the Papal States. In addition to adjudicating individual cases of Jews who had run amok, it issued edicts reminding the population of the restrictions that had been reimposed on the Jews. In 1843, the Holy Office distributed a complete list: Jews were prohibited from providing Christians with lodging or food, nor could they have Christians work for them. Jews were not permitted to own land or buildings. Jews could not spend the night outside of their ghetto, nor could they have “friendly relations with Christians.” Jews were prohibited from conducting any ceremonies in connection with burying their dead. The Inquisitor General concluded the edict: “Those who violate these dispositions will be punished by the Holy Inquisition,” adding, “these provisions will be communicated to the Ghettoes and published in the Synagogues.”
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At the time that Father Feletti first wrote to the Holy Office in Rome asking how to proceed in the Mortara case, he, like his Bologna predecessors, had had little practice in dealing with Jews. He knew, however, that the Holy Office had had a great deal of experience. The twelve cardinals who made up the Congregation of the Holy Office, with their expert staff, met each Monday to decide just such cases as he had sent before it.

By contrast, the newly assembled team in charge of criminal justice for the Royal Government of the Provinces of Emilia, an entity that had come into existence only the day before, had had little experience at all. In prosecuting the first criminal case under the new regime, they faced a political and legal morass; it was far from clear just what laws should be applied. But for the moment, they were more concerned about the outrage of an inquisitor ordering a child seized from his parents than they were about the niceties of applying a new legal system retroactively to the actions of the old.

Once Curletti completed his late-night interrogations of the two carabinieri, he decided, with Farini’s encouragement, to arrest the Inquisitor. He assembled an imposing group for the mission, for Father Feletti was no ordinary criminal. Accompanying Curletti to San Domenico were several top officers of the Bologna police, plus Francesco Carboni, the prosecuting magistrate, and a large number of other police. Just before 3 a.m. they arrived at San Domenico, barely a two-minute ride from the Palazzo Comunale. Father Feletti himself later described the scene of his arrest:

On the morning of the second of this month, at around 2:30, I was surprised in my bed by various police officers, and by a large number of
other policemen, who announced that I had to get dressed and prepare for a search of the premises. Putting my clothes on as quickly as I could, I was taken from my bedroom to the other room of my residence, where I was told by a police inspector—who was not Bolognese [Curletti’s accent giving him away]—that I was under arrest. After that they began to interrogate me, declaring that I was guilty of an assault on public tranquillity for having ordered, as they said, the taking of the boy Edgardo Mortara, son of the Jew Momolo.
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Two worlds collided that night as the police officers invaded the Inquisitor’s quarters with their accusations of kidnapping and their impatience with the Dominican brother who stubbornly refused to recognize their right to judge him. The tables turned as Father Feletti, in his own quarters in San Domenico, faced his inquisitors.

“My name is Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, of the Order of Dominicans,” he told them. “My father, now deceased, was Filippo. I was born in Comacchio [near Ferrara]; I live in this convent. I never before this moment have had any encounter with the Law, nor have I ever been arrested or tried.” Asked whether he knew why he had been placed under arrest, he replied that he did not but added: “In this regard I must declare the following: I view this arrest as the act of an incompetent authority, for I am a priest, and, indeed, I was once charged by the Holy Pontiff with overseeing the Inquisition in Bologna.”

“Are you aware,” the police chief asked, “of the kidnapping of the boy Edgardo Mortara, which took place in this city, at the hands of the Pontifical gendarmes, on June 24, 1858?”

On that subject, Father Feletti responded, “I can say nothing.”

But the police inspector persisted: Did you write a letter to Colonel De Dominicis, in your capacity as Father Inquisitor, ordering him to arrange the boy’s abduction?

“If I wrote official letters to anyone I would not deny it, but neither can I say anything about it.”

Curletti, infuriated by the monk’s reserve, repeated the question, but the Inquisitor simply responded: “I am prevented by a sacred oath from revealing anything that is the property of the Tribunal of the Catholic Faith.”

Phrasing the question a bit differently, Curletti asked whether it wasn’t, in fact, the Inquisitor’s order that had led Brigadier Agostini to take the boy to the Catechumens in Rome. After brushing this off, too, by invoking his oath of secrecy, Father Feletti added: “Since I hear the name of a certain boy, Edgardo Mortara, mentioned, I must say that I am filled with consolation knowing that I have in that innocent creature another guardian Angel who will pray for Divine mercy for me to save my soul.”

After a series of other questions failed to elicit a useful reply, Curletti ordered the friar to hand over all his files dealing with the Mortara case.

“I have nothing here having to do with the affairs of the Holy Office,” he responded. He had burned all of the Mortara documents. But when asked to specify when he had committed them to the flames and how he had gone about it, Father Feletti repeated that on matters concerning the Holy Office he could say nothing.

Curletti made one last attempt to loosen the Inquisitor’s tongue: “The kidnapping of the Mortara boy undermined public order and family tranquillity. So let me once again urge you to give more satisfactory responses, since whatever office a man occupies, and especially for someone like the Father Inquisitor, he should be prepared to give an explanation of the orders he has given.”

“As far as the activities that I carried out as Inquisitor of the Holy Office of Bologna,” Father Feletti replied, “I am obliged to explain myself to one forum only, to the Supreme Sacred Congregation in Rome, whose Prefect is His Holiness Pope Pius IX, and to no one else.”

As was the custom, the transcript of the interrogation was then read to Father Feletti for his signature, but he refused to put his name on it. The document was signed by the other eight men present: the police chief, Curletti, the prosecutor, Carboni, four police officers, and two others brought in as witnesses.

Despite the friar’s protests, Curletti ordered the police to search the convent for the inquisitorial records dealing with the Mortara case. They explored every cranny of Feletti’s quarters, as well as the cabinets that had housed the inquisitorial archives, and the convent library. Finding nothing, and with sunrise fast approaching, Curletti gave up. The inquisitor, his flowing white robes dragging along the stone courtyard outside San Domenico, was escorted into the police wagon. The procession galloped back to police headquarters, stopping on the way to deposit the Inquisitor at his new home in the notorious Torrone prison.
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Of all the episodes in the heavily mythologized Mortara story, the arrest of Father Feletti at San Domenico stands out for the speed with which it acquired mythic dimensions. Despite his central role in the case, the friar had not previously gotten much popular attention. The other personalities on the Church side were too well known. When anyone in Bologna was blamed for the affair, it was always Cardinal Viale-Prelà, whose fame was continentwide and who conveniently incarnated, in the public eye, the zeal for religious orthodoxy. Story after story had assigned the Cardinal the role of organizing and overseeing Edgardo’s seizure, despite the lack of any supporting evidence. And, in any case, with the main battle having long since moved to Rome, where Edgardo was being held, attention centered on Cardinal Antonelli and
Pope Pius IX. It was only with the arrival of Curletti and his police companions at San Domenico that Father Feletti, belatedly, earned his rightful place at the center of attention.

Dramatic as his arrest actually was, the scene at San Domenico was greatly embellished in the European press. The liberal papers treated the news with great excitement, their accounts reporting details (largely invented) that fed the image of him as a religious fanatic—sincere in his beliefs perhaps, but fanatic nonetheless.

Most widely quoted was the story carried in the
Times
of London, which had the police arriving in the nick of time, catching the friar just as he was boarding a carriage to flee. As the hand of the law came down on him, the monk fell to his knees in the street “to thank Heaven for having chosen him to be the martyr for the holy cause.” Turning his attention back to earth, the
Times
account continued, Father Feletti then hurled curses and threats of excommunication at his captors, to which they responded with derision.
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Bottrigari, in his Bologna chronicle, added that although Feletti had claimed that, on the orders of his superiors, he had burned all the inquisitorial records, a careful search by the police had yielded “a pack of papers that are thought to have some importance.”
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This rumor, too, gained wide distribution, although in fact the police had found nothing.

The Catholic press greeted news of the Inquisitor’s arrest with outrage, yet, curiously, some of its own inventions neatly paralleled those of the liberal press. Just how the two narratives dovetailed can be seen in the decision by the ultramontane
Il Cattolico
to reproduce, in lieu of its own account of the arrest, the version published by Milan’s newly founded liberal paper,
La perseveranza.
In this account,

When the police arrived at the convent and knocked on the front gate, although it was 3 a.m., it was promptly opened, because the porter was expecting a monk who was still out. Obeying the police agents’ orders, the porter took them to Father Feletti’s rooms.… No sooner had they rung than a lay brother opened the door for them. When the police entered the Inquisitor’s rooms and ordered him to get up, he did so, but then he immediately got down on his knees and said, “I give thanks to the Lord for your visit; blessed are those whom He visits in their suffering.”

What to the liberal
La perseveranza
was evidence of fanatical folly was, for the pious editors of
Il Cattolico,
an inspiring account of faith and the triumph of Christianity against the brutality of its adversaries. That the event in question happened only in their imaginations made little difference.

For the Jews of the former lands of the Papal States that now came under
Farini’s control, news of the Inquisitor’s arrest was greeted with joy and deep satisfaction. On January 17, one Leone Ravenna wrote to the
Archives Israélites
from Ferrara to say that the government gazette had just confirmed Father Feletti’s arrest. For Ravenna, the order to arrest and try the Inquisitor was additional grounds for praising the new government, “a government free to act to redress all wrongs, to see, above all, justice and reason triumph.” Farini, he wrote, realized what the Mortara case represented. “The whole world applauds him, and the Jews of all nations will pray to the Almighty God for the final victory of this cause that is Italy, that is the cause of Jewry, the cause of civilization and freedom.”
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At the same time, Joseph Pavia, a Jew from Bologna, also wrote to the French paper to report the exciting news. He added an unflattering portrait of Father Feletti, describing him as a “well-educated and very cunning man. He well knew the Roman government’s bad faith and the mess it has made but, because he was eager for power and money, he attached himself to it with all his force and became its most devoted agent.” Although Pavia shows a marked lack of sympathy for—or understanding of—the Inquisitor, he does raise a concern that was beginning to trouble even some of those who were happiest to see the proud Dominican jailed: “The question arises as to whether his arrest is legal or if, rather, it is no more than an act of reprisal against the papal government.” Pavia got to the heart of the problem that the Bologna criminal court would soon face: “If, in effect, he played no role other than that of a gendarme, I don’t know how they can find him guilty.” Pavia entered this doubt parenthetically, for, he wrote, “regardless, this arrest is a great demonstration against the intolerance of the government of Rome.” He expressed doubt that the Inquisitor’s arrest would prompt the Vatican to release Edgardo but concluded his letter by reporting that the news of the arrest had been “met everywhere with great joy, as always happens when oppressors or their lackeys are punished for their tyranny.”
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CHAPTER 19
The Case Against
the Inquisitor

F
ATHER
F
ELETTI’S NEW HOME
was a frigid, windowless cell in the tower that still today forms one corner of the massive municipal complex in the center of the city. Known for centuries simply as
il torrone,
“the tower,” it had a notorious history, specializing in political prisoners. When it was built, in 1352, prisons were designed primarily for people awaiting trial. The notion of keeping a person locked in a cell after sentence had little appeal when better options—public penance, torture, exile, consignment to the galleys, and execution—were available and were swifter, cheaper, and more educational. In 1365, a fortification was built around the emerging government palace, and
il torrone
began its long history as the northwestern corner of the palisaded center of power in Bologna. Massively walled, but of modest dimensions—about eight meters square—the tower loomed over via Vetturini, where the Mortaras had lived when, according to Anna Morisi, she baptized Edgardo.
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