Hi delaplla,
Thank you for a very interesting question.
Knocking on History's Door By Chad Galts
http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?ID=1188
"The battle over Edgardo Mortara altered the course of European
history. For Italians who were looking to unify their country under a
democratic, constitutional government, the boy's story symbolized
everything that was wrong with a politically empowered church. Within
two years of Edgardo's kidnapping, the Catholic Church lost virtually
all of the territory under its control and saw the country now known
as Italy assembled around it."
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The Beatification of Pope Pius IX
http://www.americamagazine.org/articles/Omalley-pius9.htm
"Pope John Paul II has beatified and canonized more individuals than
all his predecessors put together. Since these solemnities occur with
such frequency, they receive at most perfunctory mention in the
American press. The beatifications taking place in Rome on Sept. 3,
however, have excited notice because, though they include Pope John
XXIII, they also include Pius IX, who reigned from 1844 to 1878. Some
Jewish organizations, Catholic columnists and others have made their
shock, even indignation, known because of the so-called Mortara
incident during Pius's pontificate, almost forgotten until David L.
Kertzer published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara three years ago.
In Bologna, after nightfall on June 23, 1858, the papal police arrived
unannounced at the Mortara home and removed from this Jewish family
one of their sons, Edgardo, six years old, because he had been
secretly baptized by a Christian maid when he was dangerously sick as
an infant. Despite the anguished pleas of Edgardo's parents and
international indignation, the boy was never returned to his family.
He became almost a personal ward of Pius IX and eventually was
ordained a priest."
[edit]
"Causes for beatification and canonization often take a long time, but
why has this one dragged on? Not for lack of information. In fact, the
overwhelming amount of testimony of various kinds has been as much a
hindrance as a help. Pius had the longest pontificate in the history
of the church. His definition of the Immaculate Conception, issuance
of the Syllabus of Errors and convocation of Vatican Council I make
him an extraordinarily important pope and generated even during his
lifetime an immense amount of documentation directly or indirectly
concerning him. As monarch of the Papal States, his many dealings with
leaders of other nations placed him in a major role in the history of
the West in the 19th century. In Italian history he broods over the
century as the most prestigious and most adamant obstacle to the
unification of the country that finally took place in 1870 with the
seizure of Rome. The amount and diversity of the information
concerning him can seem limitless."
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The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The%20Kidnapping%20of%20Edgardo%20Mortara
"Edgardo Mortara (1851 - 1940) was a six-year-old Jewish boy living in
Bologna, Italy, when he was seized by the Papal authorities in 1858
and taken to be raised as a Catholic. His case became the centre of an
international scandal and the catalyst for far-reaching political
changes. Its reverberations are still being felt within the Catholic
Church and in relations between the Church and Jewish organisations.
The Mortara Case
On the evening of 23 June 1858, police of the Papal States, of which
Bologna was then part, arrived at the home of a Jewish couple, Momolo
and Marianna Mortara, to seize one of their eight children,
six-year-old Edgardo, and transport him to Rome to be raised by the
Catholic church.
The police had orders from the Vatican authorities in Rome, authorised
by Pope Pius IX. Church officials had been told that a Catholic
servant girl of the Mortaras had baptized Edgardo while he was ill
because she feared that he would otherwise die and go to Hell. Under
the law of the Papal States, Edgardo's baptism made him legally a
Christian, and Jews could not raise a Christian child, even their own.
Edgardo was taken to a house for Catholic converts in Rome, built with
funds from taxes levied on Jews. His parents were not allowed to see
him for several weeks, and then not alone. Pius IX took a personal
interest in the case, and all appeals to the Church were rebuffed.
Church authorities told the Mortaras that they could have Edgardo back
if they converted to Catholicism, but they refused.
The incident soon received extensive publicity both in Italy and
internationally. In the Kingdom of Piedmont, the largest independent
state in Italy and the centre of the movement for Italian unification,
both the government and the press used the case to reinforce their
claims that the Papal States were ruled by mediaeval obscurantists and
should be liberated from Papal rule.
Protests were lodged by both Jewish organisations and prominent
political and intellectual figures in Britain, the United States,
Germany, and France. Soon the governments of these countries added to
calls for Edgardo to be returned to his parents. The French Emperor
Napoleon III, whose troops garrisoned Rome to protect the Pope against
the Italian unificationists, also protested.
Pius IX was unmoved by these appeals, which mostly came from
Protestants, atheists and Jews, and were thus without moral force for
him. When a delegation of prominent Jews saw him in 1859, he told
them, "I couldn't care less what the world thinks." At another
meeting, he brought Edgardo with him to show that the boy was happy in
his care. In 1865 he said: "I had the right and the duty to do what I
did for this boy, and if I had to, I would do it again."
The Mortara case served to harden the already prevalent opinion in
both Italy and abroad that the rule of the Pope over a large area of
central Italy was an anachronism and an affront to human rights in an
age of liberalism and rationalism. It helped persuade opinion in both
Britain and France to allow Piedmont to go to war with the Papal
States in 1859 and annex most of the Pope's territories, leaving him
with only the city of Rome. When the French garrison was withdrawn in
1870, Rome too was annexed by the new Kingdom of Italy.
In 1859, after Bologna had been annexed to Piedmont, the Mortaras made
another effort to recover their son, but he had been taken to Rome. In
1870, when Rome was captured from the Pope, they tried again, but
Edgardo was then 18, and had declared his intention of remaining a
Catholic. In that year, he moved his residence to France. The
following year, his father died. In France, he entered the Augustinian
order, being ordained a priest at the age of 23, and adopted the name
Pius. He was sent as a missionary to cities such as Munich, Mainz and
Breslau to preach to the Jews, with little effect. He became fluent in
a variety of languages, including the difficult Basque language.
During a public-speaking engagement in Italy he reestablished
communications with his mother and siblings. In 1895 he attended his
mother's funeral.
In 1897 he preached in New York, but the Archbishop of New York told
the Vatican that he opposed Mortara's efforts to evangelise the Jews
on the grounds that they embarrassed the Church. Mortara died in 1940
in Paris, after spending some years in a monastery.
Piux IX and the Jews
The Vatican's doctrine that baptism of Jewish children, even by lay
people, required that they be raised as Christians was one
manifestation of its doctrine that Christianity was the true religion
and that Jews were second-class citizens who had no rights to oppose
the Church's will.
At Pius IX's accession in 1846, for example, Jews in Rome were
required to live within a squalid ghetto. Although Pius at first
showed some liberalising tendencies towards the Jews, the attempted
republican revolution in Rome in 1848 changed his mind: like most
conservatives at this time, he associated the Jews with radicalism and
revolution.
To this official view was added Pius's personal anti-Semitism. In a
speech in 1871 he called the Jews of Rome "dogs" and said: "of these
dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them
howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places."
The Mortara case has attracted new attention in recent years because
of the campaign to secure canonisation for Pius IX, a campaign driven
by Pope John Paul II and his conservative supporters. Jewish groups
and others, led by descendants of the Mortara family, protested the
Vatican's beatification of Pius in 2000. In 1997 David L Kertzer
published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which brought the case
back into public attention. The story became the subject of a play,
Edgardo Mine by Alfred Uhry, and a film version is planned.
In Italy, Jewish leaders and some Catholic scholars have warned that
the canonisation of Pius IX will undermine the goodwill engendered by
recent Vatican attempts to atone for the Church's history of
anti-Semitism. B'nai B'rith, a prominent Jewish group based in the
United States, has also protested against the campaign to canonise
Pius. The Mortara case is thus once again a live issue in
Jewish-Catholic relations.
Some senior Catholics continue to defend Pius's actions in the Mortara
case. Monsignor Carlo Liberati, the church official who advanced Pius
IX's beatification, said Pius should not be judged by the Mortara
case: "In the process of beatification, this wasn't considered a
problem because it was a habit of the times" to take baptised Jews and
raise them as Catholics. "We can't look at the church with the eyes of
the year 2000, with all of the religious liberty that we have now,"
Liberati said.
Liberati also said: "The servant girl wanted to give the grace of God
to the child. She wanted him to go to heaven... [and] at the time, the
spiritual paternity was more important than civil paternity."
Jesuit Father Giacomo Martina, a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome, wrote in a book about Pius's life, "In
perspective, the Mortara story demonstrates the profound zeal of Pius
IX [and] his firmness in carrying out what he perceived to be his duty
at the cost of losing personal popularity." He also said the pope
regarded his critics as "unbelievers... [operating] a war machine
against the church."
Elena Mortara, a great-great-grandaughter of one of Edgardo's sisters,
and a professor of literature in Rome, continues to campaign for an
apology from the Vatican for Edgardo's abduction and against the
canonisation of Pius IX. She has said she is "appalled at the idea
that the Catholic Church wants to make a saint out of a Pope who
perpetuated such an act of unacceptable intolerance and abuse of
power." She explained that she "feels historically obliged in the name
of my generation to ask [the church] if this is the example you want
to give."
Keyword search:
Edgardo Mortara Italian history
Edgardo Mortara kidnapping
Best regards,
tlspiegel |
