The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (56 page)

In 1878, Marianna Mortara, now widowed and with all of her nine children grown, heard that Edgardo was preaching in Perpignan, in southwestern France. Accompanied by a family friend, she went to see him. It had been twenty years since she had last laid eyes on her son. It was a poignant reunion, for Edgardo felt great affection for his mother. But try as he might to turn her onto the path of eternal blessing and happiness, he could not get her to agree to enter the Catechumens and convert.

From that moment, Edgardo remained in touch with his family and, as he aged, sought out family members when he found himself in Italy. But while his mother made peace with him, not all of his siblings were so kindly disposed.

In 1890, when Marianna Mortara died, French newspapers reported the dramatic news of her deathbed conversion by her proselytizing son. It seemed that after all those years of holding out, she had finally succumbed to her son’s pleas. But in a letter to the paper
Le Temps,
dated April 18, 1890, Father Pio Edgardo denied the report: “I have always ardently desired that my mother embrace the Catholic faith, and I tried many times to get her to do so. However, that never happened, and although I stood beside her during her last illness, along with my brothers and sisters, she never showed any sign of converting.”
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The following year, to much public curiosity and, in some quarters, enthusiasm, Father Pio Edgardo visited his mother’s natal city, Modena, to preach at the Church of San Carlo. A sympathetic local newspaper offered a description of Edgardo a month short of his fortieth birthday: “Of medium height, he is a man with a most pleasing appearance, with a gentle and courteous manner, and an entirely Christian kindness about him.” The correspondent told of shaking the friar’s hand just before he got up to preach: “His modesty, his simplicity moved us, knowing that his learning and his fame are known throughout the world.”

When Edgardo rose to speak, not only were a sister and a number of his brothers in the pews, but the large audience contained, according to the newspaper’s account, “not a few Jews, eager to hear the illustrious speaker.” Father Pio Edgardo told of his joy upon first returning to Italy after a twenty-year absence, and of his thanks to God for letting him see his beloved land once again. He then spoke of his emotion in returning to Modena, his mother’s homeland, of the way his heartbeat quickened at the thought of her, and of the emotion he felt in seeing his sister and brothers sitting before him.

Edgardo then launched into his sermon, expanding on the theme of what
a great and wonderful adventure it was to be a Catholic, because as a Catholic a person possesses the truth. What he most fervently desired, he said, was that others come to understand these truths, that others come to share the happiness he had gained by taking them into his heart.

The journalist described the crowd’s delight in hearing the friar’s inspiring sermon, concluding: “We were extremely pleased to have heard him. We blessed God, who, in the inscrutable ways of his providence, permitted the acquisition to Catholicism of such a powerful champion of the faith.” They had all left the church convinced, the correspondent wrote, “that God would, without doubt, concede him great triumphs and the comfort of seeing others embrace that Holiest Religion, of which Father Mortara is a most learned and convinced apologist.”
³

By this time both Cardinal Antonelli and Pope Pius IX were long gone. The Secretary of State, whose merits were more appreciated by the Church’s diplomatic enemies than by its own cardinals, died in 1876. It is said that even Antonelli’s longtime protector, the Pope, on first being told of his Secretary of State’s death, responded: “Let’s not talk about him anymore!”
⁴

Two years later, the two principal antagonists in the unification battle, King Victor Emmanuel II and Pope Pius IX, died within a month of each other. Indeed, one of the Pope’s final acts was to authorize the giving of the last rites to the monarch whom he had excommunicated. The King’s body, visited by fifty thousand mourners a day, lay in state in the Quirinal Palace, which had for three centuries served as the official residence of the popes before being taken over by the royal family in 1870. An imposing funeral followed at the Pantheon, a building dating to Roman times and now merging imperial and Christian functions, the church of the royal family.

When the Pope died, the following month, his body lay for a week in St. Peter’s basilica as thousands of mourners came to pay their respects. As part of the ceremonies, his coffin was taken in solemn procession out from the Vatican through the nearby city streets. When the procession of carriages, white-tunicked clergy, purple-robed cardinals, mournful bishops, and papal guards reached the bridge over the Tiber, they were met by an unruly mob of anticlerical protesters, who waved the tricolor, chanted patriotic songs, and shouted antipapal slogans. Just as it looked as though they would succeed in removing the Pope’s coffin from its carriage and heaving it into the river, a detachment of police arrived to save the day.
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Edgardo lived many more years. By the end of the First World War, he had moved into the abbey of the Canons Regular in Bouhay, Belgium. Although he visited Italy occasionally—including a nostalgic visit to Rome’s House of the Catechumens in 1919—he preferred to remain in Bouhay, dedicated to contemplation, study, prayer, and devotion to the Virgin Mary, for
whom he had a special fondness.
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Bouhay was renowned for its sanctuary to the Virgin of Lourdes, second in fame only to that found in the Pyrenean town itself, and Pio Edgardo felt a special, spiritual link to the miracle at Lourdes.
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The Virgin had chosen to reveal herself to the faithful in 1858, and so two miracles took place in the same year, one in a French town, the other in Italy, when the Virgin appeared to a little boy just plucked from his Jewish home, a boy who, in a few days’ time, went from the obscurity of life as the sixth child of a modest merchant’s family to the heights of celebrity, his welfare of concern to a pope, a secretary of state, ambassadors, a prime minister, and even, fleetingly, to an emperor.

On March 11, 1940, the 88-year-old monk died at the Belgian abbey in which he had lived for many years. Two months later, German soldiers flooded into Belgium, soon to begin rounding up all those tainted with Jewish blood.

AFTERWORD

W
HY HAS
the Mortara case attracted so little attention from historians? It represents one of the significant episodes in the unification of Italy, and yet it has been largely ignored, even though a huge amount of historical work has focused on the Risorgimento.

The case of the Jewish child seized from his family, and of the Pope who braved popular denunciation and fierce diplomatic pressure to hold on to him, has all the elements of melodrama, as was recognized by the several nineteenth-century playwrights who rushed to write plays based on the case. From a historian’s perspective, the Mortara case is loaded with ties to epochal developments, providing a window into many of the major forces at work at one of the turning points in Italian history. There could scarcely be a better demonstration of the worldview that lay behind the Holy See’s commitment to temporal rule, or of the manner in which it came into conflict with the new liberal, secular ideology that spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. Also, the involvement in the Mortara case of many of the principal protagonists of the unification struggle offers a valuable vantage point for understanding the mind-set of such crucial figures as Pope Pius IX, Secretary of State Giacomo Antonelli, Count Camillo Cavour, and the French emperor Napoleon III.

So how can we explain the fact that until now the only book-length scholarly study of the Mortara case was one published in 1957 by an American, Bertram Korn, dedicated entirely to the American reaction to the affair, a book by an author who apparently read neither Italian nor French? It should not be surprising that the account of the actual facts of the case given in the opening chapter of Korn’s book—before he turns to his main topic, what
happened in the United States—is filled with inaccuracies. Unfortunately, insofar as non-Italian scholars around the world (mainly in Jewish studies) have learned about the case, it is through Korn’s flawed and, in any case, limited account.

The major historical work to date on the Mortara case was undertaken by Gemma Volli and published in a series of articles around the hundredth anniversary of the boy’s seizure. These made a major contribution to Jewish history but were published in places where few people other than Italian Jewish studies scholars ever saw them. For the rest, the Mortara case is known to historians through passing mention in various works of nineteenth-century Church history: no serious biography of Pius IX or Cardinal Antonelli is complete without a discussion of the case, but in these the focus and perspective are understandably limited.

When I first learned about the story, it struck me as so dramatic and so bound up with the major personages and events of the Risorgimento that I assumed that it must be widely known among educated Italians. I was amazed to discover how mistaken I was. Very few had ever heard of it. Even many modern Italian historians, at least those who were not specialists in the Risorgimento, were unfamiliar with the case. Yet, whenever I spoke with specialists in Jewish studies anywhere in the world, from the United States to Israel, Canada to Britain and France, they invariably knew in detail (albeit not always accurately) the story of the little Jewish boy taken at the Inquisitor’s order from his home. People who did not know the difference between Mazzini and Cavour knew all about Edgardo and the illiterate Catholic servant who claimed to have baptized him.

The Mortara story, in short, fell from the mainstream of Italian history into the ghetto of Jewish history. It became something of interest to Jews. If it took on a special importance in this arena, it was because the case was not simply one more illustration of the persecution suffered by the Jewish people at the hands of the Christian Church, but was itself an influential chapter in modern Jewish history. What was striking about the case was not the forced baptism and the taking of the Jewish child from his family, but the fact that, after centuries in which such events happened regularly, the larger world finally took an interest, finally rose in protest. But, most significantly, the Mortara affair marked a turning point in helping to catalyze the creation of national and international Jewish self-defense organizations in both Europe and the United States.

Why have Italian scholars taken so little interest in the case? Here, as a foreigner, an American, I tread on uncomfortable ground, but let me forge ahead, however foolishly. The historiography of the battle between Risorgimento forces and papal power contains two large currents. One consists of the
Risorgimento historians themselves, and the other of historians of the Church. Needless to say, both traditions have made major contributions to Italian history, yet each has its limitations. One of the major ones, from my perspective, is that the history of the Church has been viewed primarily as the domain of scholars closely identified with the Church, who tend to take a rather Church-centered view of Italian history. Let me hasten to add that the problem has its parallel in the history of the Jewish people—in Italy and elsewhere in the world—which has been practiced largely by Jews and which has, as a result, often had a somewhat parochial character. For Church historians, the Mortara case has a certain importance, and scholars such as Giacomo Martina and Roger Aubert have made significant contributions to our knowledge of it, but their concern is primarily with the negative impact that the case had on the Church. By contrast, the Risorgimento historians have, for the most part, simply ignored
il caso Mortara.
Major biographies of Cavour, for example, fail to mention it at all. Is this because the matter is viewed as affecting only Jews, and therefore of no concern to those historians who deal with the major issues of the period? The question cannot easily be answered.

It is also true that in those two communities most closely implicated in the Mortara case, the Italian Church and Italy’s Jews, the memory is not only painful—for very different reasons—but also embarrassing. If the case has been kept out of public view, it may be because neither Catholics nor Jews in Italy are eager to publicize it. For Catholics, the case is troubling for a number of reasons. It is based on an article of faith that was absolutely central to the Church until recent times but that today is deemed reprehensible: the tenet that presented the Jews as degraded Christ-killers and that sanctioned the use of physical force to take Jewish children from their parents. Moreover, in highlighting the fact that until recent times the Church rejected the ideal of religious toleration and, indeed, continued to promulgate an Inquisition, the Mortara case draws attention to the fact that the Church’s transition from a medieval fundamentalism to modernity took place only in the present century. It is no surprise, in this context, that the most common reaction of people today on first hearing of the Mortara case is: “You mean there was still an Inquisition in 1858? I thought the Inquisition took place hundreds of years ago!”

More generally, the Church’s treatment of the Jews has not been a favorite topic of Church historians. It raises too many awkward questions, especially after the Holocaust: Who was it who developed the tradition in Europe of requiring Jews to wear colored badges so that they could be readily identified? Who for centuries taught that any contact between Jews and Christians was polluting to Christians and should be punishable by force? It was far better to see Italy’s 1938 racial laws as having nothing to do with the Church, or indeed even with Italy, but as some sort of importation, the fault of foreigners.