The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (46 page)

There were other reasons why the freeing of Father Feletti was greeted with little protest in Italy. Just a week earlier, following the crushing of a revolt in Sicily by the armed forces of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Garibaldi announced that he would bow to the Sicilian revolutionaries’ pleas and organize an expedition of volunteers to come to their aid. This alarmed Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, whose carefully crafted diplomatic arrangements were put in jeopardy and who, most of all, worried that the unification movement would escape from their hands and degenerate into a social revolution. They did everything they could to prevent Garibaldi from sailing off while, at the same time, they tried to solidify their own support, both within their newly expanded kingdom and in the courts of Europe. A head-on assault on the Church was not what they needed, and although the Pope’s opposition to their annexation of his northern lands could not have been any clearer, both the King and his prime minister sought to portray themselves as good Catholics, eager to live in harmony with the Church.

For the Jews, it was a different story. The Inquisitor’s arrest had been a triumphant vindication, and sweet revenge. The major Italian Jewish newspaper,
L’Educatore israelitico,
describing the verdict, aptly called the proceedings “the trial of the present against the past.” Higher political aims were at stake, as the paper recognized. “And so,” the Jewish paper observed, “almost suddenly and unexpectedly, a trial concludes that was, perhaps, begun unwisely, because they never foresaw a successful conclusion or, indeed, they wanted, prudently, to avoid it.”
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And the editor of
Archives Israélites,
who had led the French campaign for Edgardo’s liberation, took a similarly philosophical view. “At least,” he wrote, “this sentence demonstrates the court’s impartiality.… As for the rest,” he concluded, his sights set on higher targets than the Bologna friar, “what good does it do to strike at the arm when it is the head that in this case conceived, carried out, and sanctioned the attack?”
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When Father Feletti, praying in his prison cell, received word of the court’s decision, he thanked God for being merciful to him, and made his way back to San Domenico. The Archbishop, who was seriously ill, was also thankful that the friar had been released, but he found himself no less embattled than before. He had just been informed that, to celebrate the annexation of Romagna, King Victor Emmanuel himself was planning a triumphal visit to Bologna in two weeks’ time, a visit made more propitious for the King, no doubt, by not having to be feted in the shade of a tower holding an imprisoned friar. The authorities were planning gala celebrations to mark the monarch’s first visit to his new lands and would, as usual, require the services of local priests to lend the proper religious flavor to the occasion.

On April 26, Cardinal Viale-Prelà sent a letter to the King’s aide-de-camp with the bad news: no priest under his authority would take part in the festivities. It was his sacred duty, he wrote, to do everything in his power “to
maintain the integrity of the pontifical territory, especially that of Emilia.” He could not obey the government’s order to illuminate all of the churches on the night of the King’s visit: “I would betray my conscience and trample shamelessly on my solemn oaths, I would renounce every principle of honor … and I would be dishonored for the rest of my life.” He explained: “This illumination is ordered to celebrate the sovereign authority of His Majesty in these lands. Were I to illuminate the churches, I would thereby be recognizing the King’s authority.” The Cardinal added the hope that the King would see to it that he was not insulted and attacked as he had been the previous summer, when he came to a similar decision regarding Massimo d’Azeglio’s triumphal march into Bologna. He could not believe, he wrote, “that His Majesty would tolerate that, under his very eyes, a Bishop, a Cardinal, be insulted because of what his sacred duty forbade him to do.” It would take, he added, but one word from the King to prevent such outrages from those people who “sought nothing but scandals and disorder.”
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The same day that he sent the letter, the Archbishop, gravely ill, left the city for the healthier air of the Apennines nearby. He was not in Bologna when, on May 1, Victor Emmanuel rode into town.

Such was the nature of the battleground in the war between Church and state that the point of honor on which the new rulers insisted, and the Church officials resisted, was the ringing of the city’s church bells. How, after all, could the sovereign march into town with the bells silent? The day after the Archbishop took to the hills, Bologna’s mayor sent a letter to every parish priest in the city, ordering that “on the entrance of His Majesty Victor Emmanuel II in Bologna, they ring the bells of their church to celebrate just as all the other cities have done.” But, following their archbishop’s instructions, the Bologna parish priests refused.
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Through the city’s portal and down the flag-draped city streets the King marched, beneath tapestries—hung from windows—painted the colors of the more than two hundred cities and provinces of his newly enlarged realm. People waved flags from windows and balconies and sent a blizzard of flowers down onto the royal carriage. Everywhere the coats of arms of the King and the city were displayed together, alongside the tricolor. The King made his way to the central piazza, newly renamed Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, filled not only by celebrating citizens but by color guards, military battalions, and even firemen. Amidst the cheers, the bands, and the artillery salutes, the King may not have noticed how few church bells rang.

The next day, the local paper excitedly recounted the splendiferous day, but hastened to add a rejoinder to the clerical critics of the celebration: “We note that, contrary to the confusion of our malicious enemies, who wanted to see a disastrous welcome and heavenly disapproval” for the event, “not even a
sprinkle of water came to dampen the public joy, even though it rained continuously all morning, and then rained again right after.”
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What most enraged the Church leaders that day was the ceremony held in the King’s honor in San Petronio. On May 2, the Archbishop’s second-in-command, Monsignor Ratta, in place of the ailing Cardinal, sent a report of the latest outrages to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, in Rome. “What most saddened me,” he wrote, “is what happened in San Petronio when the King had barely reached the entrance of the church. There was a horrendous uproar, with people shouting ‘Long live the King!’ and it lasted through much of the mass and until the King left the church. And so Jesus Christ was insulted in his own home, and the sanctuary devoted to prayer and the holding of sacred services were profaned.… Most Eminent Reverence,” the Monsignor concluded, “I thought of the scourges sent by Jesus Christ against those who profaned the Temple, and what came to my mind was the words
zelus domus tuae comedit me
[the zeal of your home consumed me].”
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The Monsignor would soon have unexpected time on his hands to ponder the new government’s sacrileges. Just three days after Monsignor Ratta sent his letter to Cardinal Antonelli, the parliament in Turin decided that May 13 should be celebrated in communities throughout the realm as a festival honoring the Piedmontese constitution, recently extended to the annexed territories. The Archbishop, by now mortally ill, gave his second-in-command instructions to continue the hard line, forbidding any Church action that could be interpreted as legitimating the new government.

When the government ordered Bologna’s parish priests to celebrate a special Te Deum on May 13, the clergy received instructions from the archdiocese to refuse. This was the last straw for government officials, who wanted to arrest the recently returned Cardinal Viale-Prelà. Apprised of the Archbishop’s failing health, they ordered the arrest, instead, of his pro-vicar, Monsignor Ratta, charged with promoting disobedience of the laws of the land.

Ironically, on the very Sunday of the patriotic festival for the constitution, as the new regime was showing its vigor, Cardinal Viale-Prelà’s condition took a turn for the worse, and Monsignor Ratta was urgently called to administer the last rites. As the Monsignor left his lodgings to rush to the Archbishop’s side, he was intercepted by police and arrested, an arrest approved by Count Cavour himself. The police escorted him to the Torrone prison, locking him in the cell that Father Feletti had vacated less than a month before. Later that morning, the Te Deum was sung in churches throughout the diocese, led, for the most part, by military chaplains. Bologna’s parish priests had heeded their archbishop’s last wish.

That night Michele Viale-Prelà, aged 61, died. The man who had been the toast of all Europe—or at least all Catholic Europe—five years earlier when
he concluded the new concordat as papal nuncio to the Austrian Empire, the friend of Metternich, the man who might have replaced Cardinal Antonelli as secretary of state, died in the most humiliating of circumstances. In the less-than-two years since the seizure of Edgardo Mortara, the Archbishop had been reduced in standing from the most prominent and influential man in Bologna, the city second only to Rome in the Papal States, to an embattled enemy of the government, openly reviled, unable to prevent his own assistant’s being jailed simply for following his orders.

Just how swiftly the tide had turned, and how unscrupulous Bologna’s elite were in embracing their new rulers, can be seen in the diary kept by Francesco Nascentori, the same Bolognese chronicler who—then a fearless champion of papal rule—had approvingly quoted from
Civiltà Cattolica
in describing the Mortara case only a year and a half earlier. His obituary notice for the Cardinal showed that Nascentori had been transformed, overnight, from a defender of Church power to a red-white-and-green patriot:

At 2 a.m. on Tuesday, May 15, the physical sufferings and moral apprehensions of Cardinal Archbishop Viale-Prelà came to an end. We are all glad about this, knowing that he had no homeland here, nor consolations, and aspired continuously to heaven, inasmuch as he found it upsetting and tiresome to feel any human sentiments or charity for this people. We thank God for him while, for ourselves, let us hope that Bologna’s next Archbishop is Italian and Catholic, human and pious, like the one we had the other time [that is, Cardinal Oppizzoni], a respected and beloved pastor who, when separated by eternal decree from his flock, merited the mourning of the entire citizenry and not just the usual hypocrites and stupid servants of Austria and the despots of the Roman Curia.
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On July 4, Monsignor Ratta was found guilty, sentenced to three years in prison, and assessed an enormous fine. After a Church delegation went to Turin to plead with Count Cavour for leniency, the King pardoned him. Like Father Feletti, he had spent about a hundred days in jail.
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As for Father Feletti, Church authorities judged it prudent for him to leave Bologna and move to Rome, which remained under Church control. His principled stance on behalf of the Church, his refusal both to recognize the right of the usurper state to try him and to reveal any of the secrets of the Holy Office, his testimony to the grace that God visited on little Edgardo, all these endeared him not only to his Dominican superiors but to the Pope himself. He was appointed prior of a Dominican convent in the Holy City, where he remained until his death, in 1881, at age 84.

A few years before Father Feletti died, he wrote to the elderly Pius IX, reminding the Pope who he was (“the religious events of 1860, well known to your Holiness, having necessitated that I withdraw from Bologna”), and asked for authorization to be buried at a Dominican convent in Lombardy, in northern Italy. When he did die, he was eulogized—in Latin—by the head of the Dominican order in Lombardy, who recalled the Mortara case in these terms: “With the sadness of all good people, he was made to stand trial, and in this critical situation he behaved so courageously as to provoke the admiration of all those who take religion to heart and, in particular, his ecclesiastical superiors, especially Pius IX.”
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Both Cardinal Viale-Prelà’s and Father Feletti’s successors in Bologna faced disastrous situations. With the chaos in which the Church found itself in the former Papal States, it took three years for a new archbishop to be appointed. The Pope’s choice for the position reveals a great deal about his attitude toward the Mortara affair. Rejecting any attempt to accommodate himself to the loss of papal power in Bologna, and choosing to ignore the sensibilities of those who had protested the Mortara abduction, he named a Dominican friar, Filippo Guidi, to the post. Indeed, not only was Guidi a Dominican, but he had lived for the previous three years in Vienna, thus combining—from many a patriotic Bolognese’s viewpoint—memories of their former inquisitor with their worst memories of their recent archbishop.

The Pope had finally been forced to fill the vacancy because Monsignor Antonio Canzi, bishop of the small northern diocese of Crema, who was serving as acting archbishop of Bologna, had himself been jailed. The Monsignor was but one in what was becoming a long line of high ecclesiastical victims in the ritual struggle between Church and state in Bologna. In January of 1862 he had advised a parish priest not to officiate at the funeral of a prominent judge, because the man was a well-known supporter of the new regime. The jurist’s family initiated court proceedings against both the parish priest and the bishop. On April 5 of that year, Bologna police invaded all of Bologna’s churches, searching the vestries for a circular that Monsignor Canzi had just sent out. The circular, in line with the policy enunciated by the Holy See itself, called on the parish priests to refuse communion to those who took part in the new government. Monsignor Canzi was arrested for having sent out the offending circular without first getting government authorization. In early August, the Bishop was found guilty and began serving a three-year prison sentence.