The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (45 page)

As for how the Inquisitor came to hear about the baptism, what could be more believable than the story that Anna Morisi had told of running into a neighbor’s servant and talking about the boy who was then dying in the Mortaras’ home? Or the other woman, Regina Bussolari, urging her to baptize the dying boy, and Anna’s refusal and her story of what she had done five years earlier when Edgardo was sick. Regina then went off, Jussi reconstructed, and “recounts it to someone else, and this other woman tells a third, until it comes to the inquisitor’s ear.

“And here too,” Jussi argued, we have in Bussolari

a woman who herself was on friendly terms with the priests, for she is described as overly devoted, and a bigot. Indeed, the police commissioner, Meloni, would have her as something more, charging her with having had an affair with a priest who is now dead. But lacking any information in the trial beyond what the commissioner said, we would rather choose to believe Signora Pancaldi, who tells us in her sworn testimony that Bussolari was a good and very religious woman, and that she went often, perhaps even too often, to church.

But then why, Jussi asked, would both Lepori and Bussolari deny Morisi’s account? The answer was simple: they were both afraid to tell the truth. They lied to try to save themselves.

Lepori’s behavior, Jussi argued, shows this from the beginning. He had first told Momolo Mortara that he would give him a signed statement refuting Morisi’s account, but then he refused to do so. What possible motive, Jussi asked, could Lepori have had for refusing to sign such a statement if it were accurate? Nor did Lepori’s later testimony have the ring of truth. Is it credible that he had no memory of the girl the Mortaras sent every day in 1852 to shop in his store?

And what about Regina Bussolari? Isn’t it a little suspicious that the police had such a difficult time tracking her down?

It was about three months ago, exactly at the time that Father Feletti was taken to prison—what strange coincidence!—that she abandoned her poor home in the San Lorenzo district in order to move in with her nephew Giuseppe Rossi in via Galliera. Was it merely by chance? Was it out of love for her kin? Or was it only from fear of being called in to testify? Bussolari admits all the circumstances regarding the place and time of that discussion [with Anna Morisi], and denies only that part that could expose her to legal action.

Jussi next turned his attention to Anna Morisi herself, for she was admittedly the only witness to the baptism, and Father Feletti’s action was based on taking her at her word. Anna Morisi’s life was not, Jussi admitted, above reproach. “On the contrary, she had been involved in illicit loves and had known the liveliest sensual pleasures. But if we are unwilling to believe anyone who has fallen prey to human weakness,” asked Jussi, “whom would we be able to believe in this world?” And, he continued, Morisi must have some good qualities, or why would the Mortaras have gone to the expense to have her cared for when she was pregnant, and then taken her back after she left her baby in the foundling home?

As for the prosecutor’s claim that Edgardo was not in any danger of dying at the time of the baptism, even if true, it would do nothing to negate the validity of the baptism and hence the need for the Inquisitor to act as he did. And how credible was the prosecutor’s claim anyway? Didn’t Dr. Saragoni’s records show that he had made twelve house calls in seven days to check on the boy?

Jussi was now ready to sum up: Father Feletti had gotten word of Edgardo’s baptism, he had heard Anna’s story, a story that the Jews Padovani and De Angelis had themselves heard and found convincing. What had the Inquisitor done? He had merely done what his office demanded that he do. “And this is to be called a crime?” Jussi asked. And just what crime was it? The prosecution first “called it an attack on public tranquillity, then a kidnapping, then a violent separation, and then an abuse of power. But it is not any of those things; it is no crime at all.” He went on: “It was not a crime when it happened because there was no law that prohibited it. On the contrary, there was one that expressly required it.”

The lawyer then spoke of his long-suffering client.

Father Feletti has not thought of himself when it came to preparing his defense, for he did not want to incur ecclesiastical censure, nor would he break the oaths that he swore when he accepted his office. In his long hours of solitude, in the anguish of being in jail, in the total silence in
which he finds himself, he feels inspired to give glory to the maker of the universe, whose grace he sees infused in that young child, in the boy’s tranquillity when he first saw the police and when he was separated from his family, for his miraculous tranquillity … and for what I would call his evident pleasure during the journey, which Marshal Agostini confirms.

Compelled by his oath and his office to have the child removed from his Jewish parents so that he could be raised as a Catholic, Father Feletti had only done his duty. Yet he did all he could to make the separation as painless as possible. He had asked De Dominicis “to select the most humane soldiers in his militia, and to tell them to show every possible consideration, as in fact everyone in that family, including the boy’s mother herself, has said they did. And when,” Jussi asserted, “the boy’s father
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and brother-in-law went to see him to obtain more time for the separation, he welcomed them with kind words and granted them twenty-four hours, if not to persuade the mother, at least to make her son’s sudden departure less harsh and less painful.… What more,” asked Jussi, “could he have done that was compatible with his duty?”

Jussi carefully chose the final image he would leave with the six judges, and with the thousands of the faithful who would soon read his defense. It was an image of a martyred man of God, inspired by the divine light that shone through a little boy: “Suddenly assailed by this misfortune, he followed his conscience not to violate those oaths to which he was bound by his office. Then in his mind’s eye he saw the grace with which the Lord had infused Edgardo and, absorbed in this idea, decided to leave himself to the fate that the heavens had for him, disdaining any human defense, content to offer his tears to God and not to men.”
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CHAPTER 22
The Rites of Rulers

M
UCH HAD HAPPENED
outside the walls of Father Feletti’s prison in the fifteen weeks he had been locked up. Farini’s efforts to solidify the new regime in Emilia were moving ahead, while the old grand duchy of Tuscany was likewise hurtling toward annexation with the kingdom of Sardinia. The Risorgimento goal of a unified Italian state appeared to be a pipe dream no more.

The white-robed Dominican friar in Bologna’s prison tower was not the only churchman to feel besieged and persecuted. As the papal territories shrank, the victim of popular revolt and military intrigue, Pope Pius IX saw the devil himself at work. One week after Father Feletti’s arrest, the Pope replied to King Victor Emmanuel II’s request that he accept the loss of Romagna and cede effective political control over the central Italian regions of Umbria and the Marches. The Pope angrily rejected the proposal, asking the king “to reflect on my position, on my sacred character, and on the duty I have to the dignity and the rights of this Holy See, which are the rights not of a dynasty but of all Catholics.” On January 19, 1860, Pius IX issued the encyclical
Nullis certe,
denouncing the seizure of Romagna and calling for its immediate restitution.
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In Bologna, relations between the Church and the new state were tense. On the very day of the ex-Inquisitor’s arrest, the government of the province of Bologna published a warning, delivered to all town offices. It threatened a penalty of jail and fines for those priests “who, in the exercise of their ministry or by means of their public speeches or writings, or by other public means, censure the institutions and the laws of the state, or provoke disobedience toward those laws or to other public authorities.”
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The new rulers were moving quickly toward the annexation of Romagna, Modena, Parma, and Tuscany to the kingdom of Sardinia, which was being steadily transformed into a kingdom of Italy. While Father Feletti reflected on his fate and God’s will in prison, Bologna was preparing for a plebiscite on annexation. The government that had replaced the papal regime had long since proclaimed its desire to become part of Victor Emmanuel’s kingdom, but international diplomatic considerations argued for a demonstration that the end of papal rule and the embracing of the Savoyard king were the product of irresistible popular demand. The plebiscite would show that it was the Pope’s erstwhile subjects themselves who had rejected his rule.
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Not that the wording of the plebiscite Farini prepared for Emilia and Romagna gave much room for diehard defenders of the Papal States. The question put to a vote on March 11–12 asked the citizens to cast their preference for “annexation to the constitutional monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel, or for a separate kingdom.” The ritual nature of the exercise was evident from the result: 426,000 votes for annexation to 756 against. A week later, Farini took the implausible tally to Victor Emmanuel, who, the very same day, issued a royal decree proclaiming the annexation of the provinces of Emilia to the kingdom of Sardinia.
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Each such milestone on the path away from papal rule turned into a battleground between the new state and its sworn enemy, the Church. Were the walls of his cell not so thick, or had he had more than a small window, Father Feletti would have heard the bands playing and the crowds streaming toward the nearby central piazza on March 21. A special mass was being celebrated in San Petronio, a Te Deum of thanks sung, a heavenly blessing sought for the Bolognesi’s new monarch. The grand chapel orchestra played as a host of dignitaries basked in the sacred glow of this, Bologna’s holiest place. Among those in the first row was the provincial intendant who had issued the stern warning to the clergy three months earlier, surrounded by members of the provincial and city councils. And alongside them sat the dignitaries of Bologna’s judiciary—including, no doubt, the judges who would, less than a month later, decide Father Feletti’s fate. All too embarrassingly missing, by contrast, were San Petronio’s priests. The Archbishop, Cardinal Viale-Prelà, had again forbidden them to take part, and so the usual military chaplains had been pressed into service.
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Four days later, Pius IX gave his own response to the loss of Bologna and Romagna: an edict excommunicating all those involved in the “evil rebellion” in those provinces. They were to lose all the privileges of the Church and could receive absolution only if and when they “publicly retracted all that, in whatever way, they had done,” and restored the lands to their former political condition.
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The judges of Bologna’s court were, in this way, forewarned of
what would happen to them if they were to convict the jailed friar. Farini, who had brought about Father Feletti’s arrest, and Curletti, who as police chief had seized the friar from his convent, were already beyond the pale. The judges’ position was more ambiguous.

The judges were far from revolutionaries, for the elite of the new regime in Bologna hardly differed from the old. What had been cast off in the revolt was not the previous order of social and economic privilege, but a political regime that had become increasingly anachronistic for Europe’s elite. It was not a revolt led by proponents of a new social or economic order; still less was it the product of any peasant or protoproletarian uprising. And just as Bologna’s new political leadership came disproportionately from the old claque of nobles and notables—Napoleon’s cousin Gioacchino Pepoli among them—so too did the city’s judiciary. The head of the six-judge panel in the ex-inquisitor’s trial, Calcedonio Ferrari, was a count, as was a fellow judge, Achille Masi. A third member of the panel, Carlo Mazzolani, was a baron.

The concluding session of Father Feletti’s trial began on April 16 with Count Ferrari, in his chair as president of the court, reciting a prayer. The day proceeded with the prosecutor’s closing arguments, followed by Francesco Jussi’s stirring brief for the defense. The judges then filed out of the courtroom for their deliberations. Their discussion of the case was brief. Upon their return to the courtroom, Count Ferrari read their decision:

The Court, responding to the questions put to it by its Head, invoking the most holy name of God, declares it determined that on the evening of 24 June 1858, the police took from the Jewish couple Salomone, alias Momolo, Mortara and Marianna Padovani their son Edgardo, and that this action was authorized by the government.

Therefore there were not, and are not, grounds for proceeding criminally against the executors of the above-mentioned action, and thus against the defendant Pier Gaetano Feletti of the Order of Preachers, formerly Inquisitor of the Holy Office in Bologna. Consequently, he should be immediately released from jail.
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By the time the court came to its decision, the clamor over the Jewish boy’s abduction had largely died down. For the liberals and the opponents of the Pope’s temporal rule who had taken up the cause, events were moving too quickly, headed toward the unification of Italy, of which they had long dreamed. They had little time to waste worrying about Edgardo and the Inquisitor’s fate. Also militating against any protest was the fact that the decision had been reached by a court of the new regime. Indeed, it was one of the very first court verdicts made in the former Legations, now under King Victor Emmanuel’s control.