The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (27 page)

The story was reported, in much the same form, in Catholic papers throughout Europe, including
L’Univers
in France. Two months later, the editor of the French
Archives Israélites
published a response. It was true, he wrote, that a little boy had been brutally murdered in the Moldavian town, and it was true that the population rose up, stirred by reports that the Jews had tortured and killed him for his blood, and sacked the Jewish homes of Folkchany, murdering a number of Jews before the police belatedly arrived. What
L’Univers
and the other papers failed to report, however, was that investigators had discovered that the boy had been killed by his uncle, who was currently awaiting trial in Bucharest.
¹⁵

The notion that Jews regularly captured Christian children in order to drain their blood was widespread in Italy at the time and, while rejected by the small liberal elite, was firmly rooted in the general population, nourished by parish priests, Lenten sermons, and the Catholic press. Two years before Edgardo was taken from Bologna, for example, a Jewish merchant in a small northeastern Italian town was arrested, accused of abducting a 23-year-old Christian servant and of having drained much of her blood for religious
purposes. Miraculously, the woman survived to report the crime in the most lurid detail. Indeed, the striking parallels between the story she told and the folk stories prevalent in Europe in the nineteenth century about Dracula-like vampires inevitably raise the question for us of the relation between the two myths. In this case, the Jew’s trial revealed that the young woman—no doubt drawing on a combination of these legends—had invented the hair-raising story in order to divert suspicion after she had robbed her employers’ home and fled with the loot.
¹⁶

The Church’s role in fostering the ritual-murder charge continued long after the Mortara affair. Thirty-five years after the
Civiltà Cattolica
published its influential defense of the taking of Edgardo, for example, it returned to the sanguinary theme in a series of articles about the Jews. “There is no point here in wasting time and words to make clear what everyone already knows—that is, that the Jews are always engaged in harrying and robbing the Christians. Rather, we intend to prove something that many people do not know, and that others find difficult to believe and even try to deny. We refer here to the mystery of the blood.” The Jesuit journal went on at gory length to establish the irrefutable proof that the Jews had always made a practice of seizing unsuspecting Christians and taking their blood.
¹⁷

The campaign against the Jews continued, in these later years of the nineteenth century, to be equated by the Church with its battle against liberalism. The liberals’ defense of the Jews as having equal rights, and even worse, their doctrine that the state should recognize no religion as superior to another, directly contradicted Church dogma.

In an 1886 article, the
Civiltà Cattolica
took up this theme in characteristic fashion. Under the headline “On Jewish Persecution of Christianity,” it set out to demonstrate that “Christians have never persecuted Jews, as the Jews and the Judaized liberals and Freemasons continue to assert falsely, but rather the Jews have always persecuted Christians.”
¹⁸
A half-dozen years later, the Jesuit journal was still defending the Church’s treatment of the Jews as a people in need of special surveillance and restrictions. “What,” it asked, “have been the consequences of the emancipation of the Jews in all those countries that have given it? Two, both of them clear, palpable, and doleful: a remorseless, pitiless war against the Christian religion, and especially against Catholicism, and then an unbridled arrogance in usury, monopolies, and a series of thefts of all sorts, to the damage of the very people who gave them their civil liberty.” The picture that
Civiltà Cattolica
painted of the Jews was not a pretty one: “For Judaism, brotherhood and peace were and are merely a pretext to be used to prepare—through the extermination of Christianity, if it were possible, and the enfeebling of the Christian nations—for their Messianic kingdom, the dream that the Talmud prophesies for them.”
¹⁹

To understand the Catholic reaction to criticism of the Church’s treatment
of Edgardo Mortara, one must keep in mind this basic attitude toward the Jews and its deep roots in Christian theology. When
L’armonia
ran its first article on the controversy, in August 1858, not only did the author try to link the protests to the antireligious, bomb-throwing revolutionaries—hence the title of the article, “The Jew of Bologna and the Bombs of Giuseppe Mazzini”—but he tapped into this view that it was the Jews who persecuted Christians, not the reverse. “Isn’t it ridiculous in the extreme for an Italian and Catholic government [the Kingdom of Sardinia] to take up the cause of a Jew against the Government of the Head of the Church when it should instead be appealing to the foreign powers for aid against that wicked sect that, while trying to subvert the other governments, also continuously undermines the government that tolerates and nourishes it?”
²⁰

Six weeks later, the Turinese Catholic weekly, returning to the controversy over the Mortara case, defended the Church by arguing that from the most ancient times to the present, popes had always done all they could do to protect the Jews. Yet, the author pointed out, “We must not forget the great wrongs and the true infamies that have stained the Jews’ reputation, and the disorders they have caused by the hatred that burns in them against Christianity.”
²¹

By the time Edgardo was taken to Rome, this centuries-old Church view of the Jews, although still influential, had not entirely withstood the onslaught of the new currents of thought sweeping Europe. One sign of this, of course, was Pius IX’s own reforms at the beginning of his papacy, loosening the restrictions under which Rome’s Jews lived. But by 1858, Church leaders saw defense of their traditional position on the Jews as an integral part of their more general fight against the liberal and revolutionary threat that faced them. The Jews, small in number as they were, represented a centerpiece of the ideological underpinnings of the Papal States: the need to protect the supremacy of the Church, and the folly of an ideology that treated all religions as equal and thus required a separation between Church and state.

Antonio Gramsci, no friend of the Church, writing from his Fascist jail cell in the 1930s, reflected on the use that the Church had made of the Jews in its battle against the liberal threat. He recounted how, in 1848, when a Jew who had participated in the protests in Turin returned to his hometown, reactionaries spread the tale that he had murdered a Christian child for ritual purposes, leading the peasants to march on the town’s small ghetto and sack it. Gramsci concluded: “The reactionaries and the clerics wanted to make it seem as though the liberal innovations of 1848 were an invention of the Jews.” To this observation, the imprisoned Communist leader added a note: “I must reconstruct the history of the Mortara boy, which had such a clamorous echo in the polemics against clericalism.”
²²

If some in the Church in Italy thought that taking Edgardo and keeping
him in the Catechumens were wrong, they kept their opinions to themselves. The Catholic press was unanimous in its support for the Vatican position and merciless in attacking those who criticized it. It was time to unite behind the Pope, not a time to show signs of weakness to the enemy.

Elsewhere in Catholic Europe, a few Church voices were raised in protest. The most significant was that of an obscure French priest, l’abbé Delacouture, whose letters denouncing what the Church had done were given wide circulation in the European press. His writings enraged the Pope’s supporters, for he argued, as a priest, that the Vatican had violated the basic principles on which Catholicism rested.

Delacouture’s writings on the Mortara case were published in late 1858 in a French pamphlet, and soon thereafter translated into Italian. What prompted him to speak out, he wrote, was the arrogance and presumption of the defenders of the pontifical government in arguing that no true Catholic could hold a contrary view. He would not, he said, allow the enemies of the Catholic faith to believe that the principles being espoused in support of the “kidnapping” of Edgardo were those of Catholicism. It was his task to show the contrary, for if the position of the Pope’s supporters was allowed to stand, it would have grave consequences for the Church. “Is there anything in the world,” asked Delacouture, “that could make so hateful a religion that is so holy and so beneficial, as does the fact of which we speak?”
²³

Delacouture’s argument—a Catholic position clearly influenced by Enlightenment ideals—was based on the supremacy of natural law. Natural law came from the human capacity for reason, a capacity that God had given humankind. And one of the fundamental tenets of natural law, according to the abbot, was that a child belongs to his parents. Natural law has God as its author, and so is superior to all human laws and cannot be countermanded by them.

The abbot expressed another fear about the potential harm to come to the Catholic Church as a result of the position it embraced in the Mortara affair. If the Church claimed the right to seize baptized Jewish children in those lands under Catholic rule, would it not be encouraging those states where other religions were dominant to use force to convert their own Catholic citizens? What would happen to the Catholics living in the Muslim countries, or among the “schismatics” in Greece, or among the Lutherans in Switzerland?
²⁴

Behind the scenes, Delacouture’s superiors tried unsuccessfully to silence him. In a letter of December 19, 1858, Carlo Sacconi, the papal nuncio in Paris, gave Cardinal Antonelli the disquieting news of the publication of Delacouture’s booklet: “Having been prevented from having more of his letters on the Mortara affair appear in the
Journal des Débats,
since the Government has imposed silence on the press in dealing with this question or any other religious
issue, he has adopted the expedient of publishing a booklet to expound his theses. This work has been placed on sale today.” The nuncio enclosed a copy.

“This work of Delacouture,” the nuncio reported, “is erroneous, defective, and baseless, just as his letters were.… But,” he warned, “it may make an even greater impression than those letters did on people with little education, on those who are weak in religious matters.” And then there was the question of ecclesiastical discipline, for the abbot had been specifically forbidden to publish anything more on the Mortara case. “With this publication, not only has Delacouture not paid any heed to the specific instructions and warnings given to him by the Curia of this archdiocese … but he has acted in clear violation of and disrespect for an order that remains in full effect … an order prescribed in keeping with the Laws of the Church, that no member of the clergy can publish a work bearing on ecclesiastical matters without having first given it to the Archbishop for him to censor.”

In concluding his letter to Cardinal Antonelli, the nuncio expressed doubt that the local Church authorities “will have the courage to take severe measures against him.” From the nuncio’s point of view, the Parisian Church authorities were being overly indulgent.
²⁵

If the Archbishop of Paris was less than eager to impose sanctions on the rebellious abbot, he might well be forgiven. Less than two years earlier, his predecessor, Monsignor Sibour, approved of the disciplining of a priest for preaching against Church teachings (the renegade disputed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary). On January 3, 1857, Father Vergès, believing that God was on his side, surprised the Archbishop as he was presiding over a ceremony in a Parisian church and planted a dagger in his heart. Monsignor Sibour died within minutes. When questioned, the clerical assassin explained that he was protesting the Archbishop’s decision to silence him, although, he added, he meant “nothing personal” by his action.
²⁶

At the end of December, the Secretary of State sent his reply. After thanking the nuncio for sending him a copy of the “reprehensible booklet,” he recommended action. Sharing Sacconi’s concern that the Parisian Church hierarchy might be disposed to be too forgiving, Antonelli told him to give the Curia a push in the right direction. “Make them realize the unseemly and scandalous consequences that naturally follow when cases of such transgressions remain unpunished.”
²⁷

Cardinal Antonelli could not have been pleased at the reply he received the following month. You must, Sacconi wrote, have already read with amazement “Abbot Delacouture’s letter of the fourth of this month to the
Union
and reported in the
Presse
on the seventh, and in other newspapers.” In his letter, the abbot declared “that the instructions he received from the ecclesiastical
authorities regarding his publications on the Mortara affair did not address the substance of the matter but only whether his publications were opportune at this time … Encouraged by the
significant
”—and here Archbishop Sacconi underlined “significant”—“silence of the ecclesiastical authorities, he even dared to send a new insolent letter, dated the twelfth, to the
Presse,
which was carried on the seventeenth.”
²⁸
It appears that Church authorities were at last able to silence the rebellious priest, but only after the damage had been done.