Some 140 years ago, on the night of June 23, 1858,
a squad of policemen arrived at the apartment of Momolo and
Marianna
Mortara, an Italian Jewish couple in Bologna, which was then part
of the Papal States that formed a swath across the Italian
Peninsula.
The pope's domain ran north and east from Rome to the Po River on
the border of Austrian-ruled Veneto.
Politely, but without regard for the cries of a
hysterical
mother, the police removed the Mortaras' 6-year-old son, Edgardo,
from the household and put him in the hands of Roman Catholic
officials,
who whisked him away to Rome.
Five years earlier, a teenage Catholic servant girl
had surreptitiously baptized Edgardo, or so she now fearfully said.
Church law strictly forbade the baptism of Jewish children without
their parents' consent, unless the child was in imminent danger of
death. Yet this is exactly what the illiterate maid, who was no
longer
in the Mortaras' employ, claimed had driven her to baptize the
ailing
infant.
But once such a child was properly baptized,
whether
prudently or not, the same church law decreed that he or she must
not be raised by the Jewish parents but by Catholics. In the Papal
States of 1858, church law was also civil law.
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, to use
the
title of David I. Kertzer's carefully documented and heart-
wrenching
account, published in 1997 by Knopf, became an international cause
celebre.
In one month alone, The New York Times
devoted
20 articles to the Mortaras' unavailing struggle to regain their
son.
Politicians protested the church's action. The Rothschilds tried
backdoor
diplomacy.
According to Mr. Kertzer, the Paul Dupee Jr.,
university
professor of social science at Brown University, the backlash
against
the Vatican for the seizure was a crucial element in the collapse
of support for the long-standing papal rule of parts of Italy.
But for all the prolonged diplomacy, legal
maneuvering
and frustrating negotiations over whether--and under what
conditions--the
parents could meet with their child, sent to live in a church-run
residence in Rome, Edgardo's fate may have been decided within days
of his removal from Bologna.
Care and attention was lavished on him, soon enough
by Pope Pius IX himself. Boy and pope came to regard each other as
father and son. The Mortaras and their supporters insisted Edgardo
was true to his Jewish faith and was being held against his
will.
At 13 the boy entered a seminary. In 1870, when the
last remnants of papal rule were shattered by the new united
Italian
state, the 19-year-old Edgardo fled Rome rather than return to his
family. After living in monasteries under an assumed name, he was
ordained Father Pio (for Pius) Edgardo and entered into a long,
"distinguished"
life of study and preaching. He died in Belgium in 1940, a month
before
the German invasion.
Professor Kertzer fits this drama into a much
broader
picture--of historic mistreatment of Jews, of the battle between
constitutional liberalism and dynastic conservatism in 19th-century
Europe, even of Know-Nothing anti-Catholicism in the United States
and the fight over Southern slavery.
Today one hopes that the Edgardo Mortara story
gives
pause to those Vatican stalwarts promoting the sainthood of the
reactionary
Pope Pius IX.
A surprising number of Pius IX's contemporaries
found
him a charismatic, attractive personality, who had ameliorated some
of the humiliating centuries-old restrictions on Jews in Rome while
retaining others.
But there is no evading the fact that his conduct
in the Mortara case was of a piece with an outlook that led him to
denounce vehemently most of what his current successor, Pope John
Paul II, has been preaching about religious freedom and human
rights
for two decades. Conservative Catholics would take on a heavy
burden
in making Pius IX their poster pope.
What is puzzling about the Mortara story, even in
Professor Kertzer's detailed account, is why so many otherwise
reasonable
people remained adamant about tearing a child from his parents--
despite
the heavy price to the church in moral credibility and political
influence.
Sheer legalistic adherence to church law does not explain it, nor
even antisemitism, although that was always an important factor in
the background, nor even the highly politicized atmosphere that
quickly
engulfed the family and church officials.
It is at this point that the battle over Elian
Gonzalez,
the Cuban boy whose mother died with 10 others when their boat
capsized,
can shed some light on the battle over Edgardo Mortara and maybe
vice
versa. Those determined that young Elian should stay in the United
States rather than be returned to his father in Cuba cannot bear
the
thought that he might forever lose the benefits of a "free life"
in America.
But even the worldly rights and advantages that
come
with growing up in Miami pale beside the divine graces and eternal
rewards that, for Pope Pius IX and like-minded 19th-century
Catholics,
were at stake for young Edgardo.
To the contemporary question, "What's in the best
interests of the boy?" a believer like Pius IX would have summoned
up not just Disneyland, but paradise itself, not just citizenship
in the United States, but citizenship in the Divine City.
For Catholicism, of course, things have changed
drastically.
Not only did the Papal States disappear, but Pope
Pius IX's understanding of church teaching did not survive the
Second
Vatican Council with its affirmations of religious liberty and the
permanent religious value of Judaism.
And when Catholic New York, the weekly paper
of the New York archdiocese, looked at whether "an American
upbringing
is more important than a parent's right," the paper, which
entertains
no affection for Fidel Castro's Cuba, did not hesitate.
Barring serious dereliction, it editorialized, a
parent's
right "is paramount," even, quoting the Catechism of the Catholic
Church, "primordial and inalienable."
