The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (38 page)

In the first days following Father Feletti’s arrest, his case remained in the hands of the police chief, Curletti. While the friar got accustomed to his new quarters, Curletti, in his office in another part of the government complex, saw a parade of witnesses as he reconstructed what had happened on those two days in June 1858. The Mortaras’ Jewish friend Giuseppe Vitta testified about the scene when Edgardo was finally taken from Momolo’s arms and put into the police carriage. Marianna Mortara’s brother and her uncle then testified, the first telling how the crying Riccardo had told him the terrible news at
the cafe and pleaded with him to rush to his family’s aid, the latter recounting how he had convinced the Inquisitor to grant a delay and how he had taken the Inquisitor’s slip of paper and presented it to Marshal Lucidi. He also recalled his fruitless trip the next morning in search of the Cardinal Legate and the Archbishop. Bonajuto Sanguinetti, the 73-year-old Jewish banker who had lived next door to the Mortaras, remembered peering out of his window and seeing five or six carabinieri milling outside, and then recounted the ghastly scene he had witnessed on his arrival that night at the Mortara home.

On January 18, full authority for the prosecution of the case was turned over to Francesco Carboni, the magistrate who had been present at Father Feletti’s arrest and who had witnessed his defiant testimony at San Domenico. Carboni first had to draw up the official charge. It was a significant moment, for neither the decision of whom to include in the charge nor that of what to charge them with was a simple one. Clearly they would charge Father Feletti, who had ordered the child seized, but what of those who had actually carried out the abduction? Colonel De Dominicis had overseen and organized the operation, Marshal Lucidi had been in charge of carrying it out, and Brigadier Agostini had taken the boy from his home to Rome. And what about Father Feletti’s own superiors in Rome, those who had presumably authorized him to have the child seized? The implications of following that path had to give the magistrate pause, for he could quickly end up—in the first major criminal case tried by the new government of Emilia—bringing charges against the Pope himself.

No less thorny was the problem of what to charge them with. Did Farini’s prosecutors and courts have any jurisdiction over what had happened in Bologna a year before the new regime emerged? Could they put on trial an inquisitor who had, at the time, been legally invested with the power to enforce the faith? In short, could legal principles of the new state be applied retroactively? Or would the courts have to judge those charged according to the laws of the ancien régime, able to find them guilty only insofar as they were determined to have disobeyed the laws then in effect?

Dated January 18, 1860, and embossed with the name of the Royal Government of the Provinces of Emilia, Civil and Criminal Lower Court in Bologna, Carboni’s indictment read as follows:

Charge

Of the violent separation of the boy Edgardo Mortara from his own Jewish family on the grounds of presumed baptism, occurring in Bologna the evening of June 24, 1858, and followed by his reclusion in the House of the Catechumens in Rome.

Against

The friar Pier Gaetano Feletti of the Order of Preachers, and former Inquisitor of the Holy Office, arrested January 2, 1860. Lieutenant Colonel Luigi De Dominicis of the Pontifical Police, who has fled to the Dominions of the Holy Faith.

The charge, then, was abduction. In addition to Father Feletti, De Dominicis was charged, but not Lucidi or Agostini. The logic employed was that De Dominicis, as the head of the Bologna police, was responsible for determining whether the order given him by the Inquisitor was legal, whereas those under his command could not be held responsible for obeying a direct order from their superior. More to the point, perhaps, was De Dominicis’s status as a symbol of the abuses of papal power and craven collaboration with the Austrian occupiers. Memories of his recent cowardly assault on unarmed students at the university were still vivid. The police chief, no doubt recognizing the risks of remaining in Bologna after the fall of papal power, had fled along with the Cardinal Legate, seeking safety in what remained of the Papal States.

On January 23, three weeks after Father Feletti’s arrest, he had his first visitor, the prosecuting magistrate Carboni, who had come to the friar’s cell to hear his story. “He seems to be aged 65,” Carboni wrote in his report of their meeting, “of average height, his hair is gray, as are his eyelashes and eyebrows, with a large forehead, dark eyes, big nose, evenly proportioned mouth, round chin, and oval face.” Carboni asked him to identify himself:

I am Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, aged 62, born in Comacchio, resident in Bologna, member of the religious family of the order of Dominicans. I have been in this city since I was sent here by the Holy Pontiff in 1838 to serve as the chief Inquisitor of the Holy Office. I always exercised that office with a prudent moderation which the whole city could count on, and operated in conformity with the orders of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome, on which I depended.…

In responding to your interrogations, I do not intend to renounce that Canon privilege that the Church gives me not to be tried by an incompetent court. I believe that it is my duty to say this if I am to avoid running the risk of incurring ecclesiastical censure myself.

Father Feletti’s claim of ecclesiastical privilege made no impression on Carboni, who warned the prisoner that he was obligated to tell the truth, to answer the questions that the magistrate would put to him. The privilege of which he spoke, Carboni informed him, had been abolished by the government’s recent proclamations. Now all citizens were equal before the law.

Asked to describe his arrest, Father Feletti told of being roused from his sleep, getting hurriedly dressed, being informed of the charge against him, and refusing to answer the questions put to him because to do so would violate his sacred oath of silence. “How can they charge me with a crime against public tranquillity for something that took place two years ago by order of the Government that was then in office? How,” the Inquisitor added, “could they proceed with such severity against a functionary of the Holy See simply because he did his duty and obeyed the commands of the Head of the Catholic Church?” Yet the friar expressed his deep faith: “I bow my head before the decisions made in Heaven, I put myself in God’s hands alone, trusting in His mercy.”

In the three weeks that Father Feletti had spent pondering his predicament since his arrest, he had decided that there were some things about the Mortara case that he could say without violating his oath, and he was eager to say them. Since certain aspects of the episode had become public knowledge, he told Carboni, there was no harm in trying to set these straight.

Despite this preface, what Feletti first had to say was anything but public knowledge, for it regarded his communication with the Holy Office in Rome. The point would turn out to be a critical one, for as the trial evolved, a key issue became whether the Inquisitor had acted on his own or had simply been following orders from on high. “Having learned that the boy Edgardo Mortara had been baptized while in danger of death,” he told the magistrate, “the Supreme Sacred Congregation ordered that this child be taken to Rome to the House of Catechumens, and I was given responsibility for [the order’s] execution.”

Lest the prosecutor miss his point, Father Feletti reiterated that in having the child taken from his family and sent to Rome, he had done nothing other than “carry out the orders that were given me by the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office in Rome, which never promulgates any decree without the consent of the Roman Pontiff, the Supreme Head of the Catholic Church.”

In seeing that the order was carried out, Father Feletti hastened to add, he had taken every possible precaution to ensure that only the gentlest means of persuasion were employed. He had, in particular, been at pains to persuade Edgardo’s mother to give her son up “spontaneously,” and he had even granted a twenty-four-hour stay toward this end. This had had the desired effect. When Momolo visited him on the afternoon of June 24, the friar reported, the two of them agreed on a plan “to induce his wife to let her son go, and in fact the mother, in complete tranquillity, left her son.”

Where the Inquisitor drew the line was in answering any questions on the sources of his information, on how he first heard that Edgardo had been baptized, or what he had done to see if the rumors were true. The frustrated magistrate asked Father Feletti to give him at least the names of people who could
verify his claim that the child had been baptized. “The Tribunal of the Supreme Sacred Inquisition in Rome,” responded the former inquisitor, “the Prefect of which is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Pope Pius IX, is the one best informed of the matters you are asking me about.”

“You say that the order to take the Mortara child from his family came from the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome,” the magistrate countered. “Do you have any means of supporting that claim?”

“The proof that I can adduce … is the faith that the Roman Pontiff placed in me, although I am but his miserable and humble servant. And another proof,” Father Feletti added, “comes from the good people of the city of Bologna, who have always regarded me kindly, believing me incapable of abusing the office that the Roman Pontiff has entrusted to me.”

Under questioning from Carboni, Father Feletti went on to describe the orders he had given to Colonel De Dominicis, his preparation of the list of names of the Mortara children, and his warning to Marshal Lucidi to keep a close watch on the Mortara home during the daylong vigil, given the danger that the Jews might decide to sacrifice their son rather than give him up to the Church.

It was getting late, and Carboni told the Inquisitor that he had to go. But the friar who, three weeks earlier, had refused to respond to any questions had more now that he wanted to say. He had not yet had the chance to tell of Edgardo’s trip to Rome, nor of the boy’s wish to become a Christian and leave his parents behind. It was a tale that, in the friar’s eyes, provided proof enough that his actions had been not only legal but providential, guided by the hand of God.

He got to tell Carboni his story the next day, beginning with the very moment when, on the evening of June 23, 1858, the Mortara family first learned that Edgardo had been baptized and would be taken away. While “his brothers and sisters all cried at this news,” said Father Feletti, “Edgardo remained quiet and tranquil. And then on the evening of June 24, when he had to get ready to leave, he let the carabinieri help him get dressed. His spirit was serene, and he was completely at ease and happy.” And then on the voyage to Rome, “when it was time to stop to let the horses cool off and to get something to eat, Edgardo often asked the marshal to take him to church.”

In Rome, the boy’s inspiring saga continued:

Seeing so much happiness in the boy for having become Christian, the Holy Pontiff, in his wisdom, always guided as he is by the Holy Spirit … arranged to have the boy’s father and mother called to Rome. He put two seats in a stagecoach at their disposition so that they themselves could judge their son Edgardo’s desire to remain in the Christian religion.…

In fact, once they got to Rome, Edgardo’s parents were given
permission to speak with their son together with the Rabbi of Rome. These three did all they could, using all the arguments they knew, to persuade the boy to return with them. But he, all by himself, a child of about nine years [sic], knew how to protect himself from his father’s, his mother’s, and the Rabbi’s temptations. He told them that he was a Christian, and he wanted to live and die as a Christian.

Moreover, he added that he would “pray to God for the conversion of his father, his mother, and his brothers and sisters.” Said Father Feletti, “I do not know whether it was just once, or more often, that the two parents spoke with their son. But I do know that the boy had a number of meetings with the Rabbi of Rome, and that he always remained firm in his desire to remain a Christian.”

Father Feletti then gave his version of the encounter in Alatri: “At the time the Mortara parents were staying in Rome, which was in the month of October, or thereabouts, the Rector of the Catechumens took Edgardo on a holiday for a few days. Having learned about it, the Mortaras went to that same place. Waiting for the chance that would present itself when the Rector went to say mass and Edgardo was assisting him … they entered the church and approached the boy.” Fortunately, Edgardo was alert to the danger. “Seeing his mother, who, perhaps, was thinking of kidnapping him, he clung to the Rector’s habit and shouted as loudly as he could: ‘Mamma wants to take me away!’ Those around him were thus warned, and, realizing that they were unprotected, they left the church. The boy remained with the Rector, and they returned right to the Catechumens in Rome.”

Learning of the narrow escape, the Pope “decided to move the boy to the College of the Lateran Canons in San Pietro in Vincoli, where he can still be found today, doing very well, and studying in such a way as to promise much success.” Indeed, Father Feletti concluded, one day the boy will prove to be “his family’s support and pride, since baptism does not annul the ties of blood but, rather, reinforces respect for them, and so Edgardo will have more love for his parents than do his other brothers and sisters.”

The Magistrate, hearing this amazing story of the little boy who suddenly saw the light, rejected the religion in which he had been raised, embraced Christianity with all his soul, and clung to the priest’s robes to protect him from his mother, was skeptical. “Do you have any means of proving the facts you have stated?”

“As for what happened in Bologna,” the friar responded, “I can only point to Agostini and Marshal Lucidi. For what happened along the voyage, there is only Agostini. As for the facts in Rome, I received my information, through letters, from individuals deserving of full faith, but I cannot give you their names.”
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