The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (5 page)

Until the mid-sixteenth century, Church policy toward the Jews showed a certain restraint. They were allowed to practice their rituals, to have their synagogues, for they were a people who had played a special role in God’s work on earth, and their continued existence bore testimony to that historic role. Yet the day would ultimately come when the Jewish people would see the true way, embrace God’s Church, and in this way help to usher in the Second Coming. This attitude, however, changed dramatically with Pope Paul IV’s declaration in 1555 consigning the Jews to ghettoes. Their conversion was no longer something to await passively; it was to be pursued vigorously.
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Vicini, reacting to the anti-Semitic campaign in Bologna and to the discriminatory laws directed against the Jews in the Papal States, published his own views in 1827, in the form of a brief on a thorny legal question that had recently come up. Giuseppe Levi, a converted Jew, had died without a will. He left behind three brothers; one of these had also converted, but the other two remained Jews. The prevailing juridical view in the Papal States was that only the brother who had converted should inherit, because, according to canon law, in the act of being baptized converts severed ties with their Jewish kin. As Vicini put it in his 154-page analysis of the case, the central issue was “whether the baptism of a member of a Jewish family dissolves the ties of kin and of blood that he has with the members of his family who remain Jews.” Vicini’s opinion was that they did not, and that consequently the Jewish brothers should be allowed to inherit.
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Bologna’s legal profession, or at least that part of it identified with the government, was scandalized by Vicini’s claims. The city’s most distinguished expert in civil law, Vincenzo Berni degli Antonj, a professor at the University of Bologna, prepared a denunciatory reply, published that same year. Following the time-honored Church credo on the Jews, he denied, first of all, that Jews had any rights of citizenship. He dismissed Judaism as a vicious religion,
and Jews as a people condemned by God to wander homeless across the land, an object of scorn among God-fearing peoples.

The professor went on to enunciate the following basic legal principles:

1. That Jews in the Papal States are simply slaves to be tolerated.
   
2. That they have no right to share along with Christians in the intestate inheritance of a Christian relative.
   
3. That the Jews themselves, in order to fulfill the nefarious requirements set down by a religion marked by an implacable hatred of Christians, are called upon to treat them with all manner of trickery, of treachery, and of torture, and to work tirelessly to reduce Christians to perpetual slavery.
   
4. That the restrictions under which Christians permit Jews residence are entirely necessary in order to avoid the deadly effects of their religion.
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The Inquisition in Bologna, only recently back in business at the Dominican monastery after being abolished during the period of French occupation, took a dim view of Vicini’s heresy. Both he and the printer who published his defense of the Jews were found guilty and condemned to spend eight days confined in a convent to reflect on their sin.
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Three years after this sentence, Vicini had the satisfaction—albeit short-lived—of pronouncing the end of papal rule in Bologna.

The Austrian soldiers who retook Bologna remained in the city for another half-dozen years to ensure that there would be no further challenge to the rule of the Cardinal Legate. But barely a decade after their departure, Bologna once again rose in revolt, this time along with much of the rest of the peninsula.

The Italian revolts of 1848–49 followed insurrections elsewhere in Europe in that fateful year. In February, an uprising in Paris spawned a new Republic; the next month a revolution in Berlin led to the granting of a constitution and the installation of a liberal government in Prussia. Most important of all for Italy—most of which came under Austrian influence in one way or another—a revolt in Vienna in March brought about the fall of the redoubtable Prince Metternich and the formation of a liberal government there as well.

In Italy itself, the Sicilians were in revolt for their freedom from the inept Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. When the revolt spread to the capital, Naples, King Ferdinando II was forced to grant a constitution, and his example was followed by the other rulers on the peninsula, unnerved by the prospect of popular revolt: Carl Albert, King of Sardinia, with his capital in Turin; Leopold II of Tuscany; and the Pope himself, Pius IX, who had ascended St. Peter’s throne just two years before.

The Viennese uprising in March prompted a revolt against Austrian
rule in Milan, center of the Austrian territory of Lombardy-Veneto, which stretched across the northeast of what would become the new Italian state. Those who dreamed of a unified Italy, free of foreign tyrants, called on the Savoyard king of Sardinia to help them throw out the Austrians and their lackeys. The creation of an Italian nation ruled only by Italians seemed to be within reach. In Milan, people threw up barricades and began to fight the Austrian troops. Fourteen days after Augusto Mortara’s birth, Duke Francesco V of Modena fled his duchy. By the end of March, the Austrian troops had been driven from both Milan and Venice, and provisional governments were formed to replace the old regimes. King Carl Albert decided to send his soldiers to Lombardy, hoping to rout the Austrians and expand his kingdom. Newly installed governments from Modena to Venice deliberated the annexation of their lands to the Sardinian kingdom, to make Carl Albert the king of all Italy. By the beginning of April, volunteers from Modena and Bologna were heading north to join the war against the Austrians.

The war for national unification, the end of foreign rule, and the achievement of a state based on constitutional principles guaranteeing basic rights to its citizenry were initially viewed by most partisans of Italian unification as having the Pope’s blessing. When he had assumed the papacy two years earlier, Pius IX had been widely regarded as a champion of reform and modernity. Some, indeed, had imagined that he would serve as honorary head of a confederation of constitutional states that would together make up the Italian nation. These hopes were dashed for good, however, when, at the end of April 1848, Pius IX announced his opposition to involvement of the Papal States in the war against the Austrians. In Rome and throughout the Papal States, the rebels found that they had a new target: the pope-king himself.

In Bologna, enthusiasm for the war against Austria ran high, while the Pope’s announcement of late April undermined the moderates, who had been preaching the compatibility of a united Italy with continued papal rule. When, later in the spring, Austrian troops began to take the offensive and news of the first reverses of the Piedmontese forces began to come in, Bologna was in turmoil. Increasing numbers of defeated soldiers flooded into the city, and reports that Austrian troops were heading for Modena and Romagna left the population nervous and afraid.

In early August, the Austrians marched into Modena and reinstated the duke. They then moved on to Bologna, where, after a fierce battle against a rapidly mustered, largely civilian force, they were repulsed from the city. Tales of the Austrians’ cruelty as they retreated—sacking houses and killing people on the way—fueled popular hatred.

Rome’s increasingly tenuous hold on Bologna gave way in the fall when, following the assassination of his prime minister and facing the threat of a popular uprising, Pope Pius IX fled Rome and the Papal States altogether,
seeking refuge in Gaeta, a fortified coastal town north of Naples. Demonstrations in Bologna forced the conservative city council to resign. In February 1849, following Giuseppe Garibaldi’s arrival in Rome, the victorious rebels announced the birth of a new Roman Republic, while in Bologna there appeared the first decree of the Roman Constitutional Assembly:

Article I. The papacy’s rule and temporal power over the Roman State is declared over.

Article II. The Roman Pontiff will have all the guarantees necessary for his exercise of spiritual authority.

Article III. The form of the government of the Roman State will be pure democracy, and will take the glorious name of the Roman Republic.

In Bologna—although conservatives warned of impending anarchy—demonstrators rushed to the city’s public buildings, removed the papal insignias from their portals, piled them up in the middle of Piazza Maggiore, and lit a great fire.
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Three days later, Bologna’s newly elected council proclaimed the city’s proud adherence to the Roman Republic. But however joyous the night of celebration that followed, it could not hide the widespread conviction that, in the face of opposition from the Austrians as well as the French, the new government would not last long.

Indeed, Bologna had little defense, other than its wall, against the Austrian troops who, in the name of the Pope, soon marched on the city. After an eight-day siege in mid-May 1849, the Austrians entered Bologna, restored the papal insignias, prohibited all public gatherings, required all residents to be off the streets by midnight, reinstated censorship of the press, and banned all displays of the national tricolor. Bologna was once again part of the Papal States. Two weeks later, Francesco V reentered Modena to take back his duchy. A month after that, French troops marched into Rome, destroying the last remnants of the republic and sending Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini into exile.
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Too weak to stand on its own, papal rule in Bologna would now be ensured by the presence of a large, permanent force of Austrian troops and a reign of repression. In 1850, with order returning, the Mortaras made their move from Reggio to a home in the center of Bologna. Although they followed political developments with interest, they were preoccupied with the tasks of caring for their five small children and getting a new business started. They avoided the attention of the Austrian troops and the papal police as much as they could.

CHAPTER 3
Defending the Faith

W
HILE
A
USTRIAN TROOPS
maintained their vigil in Bologna, Marianna Mortara went on busily bearing more children. Having given birth to Arnoldo shortly before moving to Bologna, Marianna bore her first child in Bologna, Edgardo, in 1851. Just a few months after Edgardo’s birth the family acquired a new servant, Anna Morisi, a girl from the nearby rural town of San Giovanni in Persiceto. Anna, who, like all her kin and friends, was illiterate, was 18 years old, although she herself had only a hazy idea of her age.

No self-respecting family of merchants, of however modest means, would do without a domestic servant in Bologna. It was the servant’s task to keep the house clean, do the laundry and much of the daily shopping, run errands, and help take care of the children. While the wealthy and the aristocrats had both male and female servants, the middle class had only women, most often unmarried and young. Anna was a typical case. Her parents, by sending Anna and her three sisters to the city to work as servants, saved the cost of feeding them while allowing the girls to save, from their modest pay, for their trousseaux and dowries so that one day they could marry. All the Morisi sisters followed this path, three of them returning to San Giovanni to marry. Only unlucky Maddalena never made it back: she died from the bite of a rabid dog.

Following Edgardo’s birth, on August 27, 1851, Marianna again found herself pregnant, giving birth to Ercole late in 1852, and then, in 1856, after a four-year hiatus, to the ill-fated Aristide, who would die a year later. The household had grown large, with six boys along with their twin sisters. Riccardo, eldest of the eight, was only 12 years old.

Stability had meanwhile returned to Bologna, although hatred of the
occupying Austrian forces remained strong. In 1855, Carlo Cardinal Oppizzoni, who had served as Archbishop of Bologna for an incredible fifty-two years, died two days short of his eighty-sixth birthday. Having survived the depredations of the city’s churches at the hands of Napoleonic troops—who turned some of them into stalls for their horses—early in the century, having endured the revolts that flared up over the ensuing decades, and having weathered opposition from the more intransigent members of the Church hierarchy for his live-and-let-live attitude, Oppizzoni represented, for the people of Bologna, the benign side of Church authority, a Church that was an inextricable part of their lives.

His successor was a man of a very different stamp. At the time when he was named archbishop of Bologna, Michele Viale-Prelà was one of the continent’s best-known cardinals. As papal nuncio to Vienna—the Pope’s ambassador to the Austrian Empire—he had just concluded a concordat between Austria and the Vatican that was hailed as a great triumph for the Church. It was an achievement that crowned a brilliant career as a papal diplomat.

On the first of November, All Saints’ Day, 1856, the new archbishop made his triumphal entrance into Bologna, capped by his solemn entry into the cathedral. The following morning all the church bells of the city rang, joined by the sounds of Austrian artillery blasts, as a long procession of priests, monks, and local dignitaries, together with the entire university faculty, clad in their academic gowns, marched to San Petronio, in the Piazza Maggiore, to meet the new archbishop and escort him back to the nearby cathedral.

Viale-Prelà cut an imposing figure in his purple robes. A tall, slender man whose eyes radiated intelligence, he gave the impression of always being in control of himself, always acting with self-conscious dignity. His forehead was large, his face thin. He dressed with exquisite care. Although he smiled benevolently when the occasion called for it, those who knew him could not remember ever seeing him laugh. Having spent years in the highest diplomatic circles, Viale-Prelà was known for his erudition, his familiarity with history, art, and literature. He was a serious man; indeed, many thought he was too serious, a man unbending in his commitment to the Church.
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