The Mortara Case
In the city of Bologna, in the Papal States, in the year five thousand six hundred and eighteen, there was a Jewish merchant named Salomone Mortara, and a wife named Marianna, and a child of six years named Edgardo.…
Biblical Narrative
In the city of Bologna, in the Papal States, in the year five thousand six hundred and eighteen, there was a Jewish merchant named Salomone Mortara, and a wife named Marianna, and a child of six years named Edgardo. And there was a Christian servant in the house, an unlettered girl from the countryside named Anna Morisi, who in a moment of fear had splashed water on the sick infant Edgardo and whispered the formula of baptism, believing she was saving his soul. And she had told no one for five years. And then she told.
On the night of the twenty-fourth of June, the agents of the Papal Inquisition came to the house. They told the parents that by the law of the Church their child was now a Christian, and a Christian child could not be raised by Jewish parents. They took him by candlelight from his mother's arms. They put him in a carriage. They rode through the night to Rome. The mother fell to the floor and the father followed the carriage on foot until his strength gave out. The boy cried for his parents the whole way and his cries reached the gates of Rome and went up to heaven.
Pius IX, the pope who had begun his reign as a liberal and had become an absolutist, took the boy under his personal protection. He brought him into the Casa dei Catecumeni, the house where Jews were converted. He baptized him formally a second time, gave him the name Pio in his own honor, raised him as a son of the Church. The parents traveled, petitioned, wept before consuls and ambassadors. The Mortara name was now known from Paris to New York. Sir Moses Montefiore came again, this time to Rome itself, and the pope refused him the audience.
And the Jewish world cried out, and a great gentile world cried with them. The emperor Napoleon the Third intervened. The emperor Franz Joseph protested. Twenty rabbinical assemblies in Europe and America issued joint declarations. James Buchanan, the President of the United States, was urged by his cabinet to act. The pope did not yield. Edgardo grew up in the Vatican; he became a Catholic priest; he died in 1940 in a Belgian abbey, refusing to the end to renounce the baptism that had been forced upon him. The case did not free Edgardo, but it broke the moral standing of the Papal States, and within twelve years the Risorgimento had swallowed Bologna and Rome both, and the temporal power of the popes was no more.
Non possumus — we cannot. The Holy Father will never allow a baptized child to be raised outside the Church.Pope Pius IX to the Mortara family delegation, 1858
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Mortara case is exhaustively reconstructed in David Kertzer's The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Knopf, 1997), drawing on the trial files of the Bologna Inquisition rediscovered in 1996, the Mortara family papers, the Vatican Secret Archives papers later opened by Pius XI, and the dispatches of the Sardinian and French diplomatic services. Edgardo Mortara was born 27 August 1851 in Bologna, then under direct Papal rule. The servant Anna Morisi, then 14 years old, claimed in 1858 to have baptized him during a serious illness in 1852.
Under the canon law in force in the Papal States, any baptized person was a member of the Catholic Church and could not be raised in a non-Christian household. The Inquisitor of Bologna, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, convinced the matter was canonically clear, ordered the police to remove the child. On the night of 23–24 June 1858, brigadier Giuseppe Lucidi entered the Mortara home and took Edgardo to the Casa dei Catecumeni in Rome, where he was placed under the personal protection of Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti).
The diplomatic backlash was severe and unprecedented. Cavour and the Sardinian government in Turin used the case to delegitimize Papal temporal rule, with Cavour reportedly remarking that the Mortara affair was 'worth more to us than a battle won.' Napoleon III pressured the Vatican through his envoys; the British and Prussian governments protested formally. In the United States, twenty-six American cities held public protest meetings; President Buchanan, however, declined formal intervention, citing the doctrine of non-interference in foreign religious affairs. The Vatican response, articulated in the official Civilta Cattolica, defended the action on canonical grounds.
Edgardo Mortara remained in Rome, was educated at the Lateran, and entered the Augustinian Canons Regular in 1873, taking the religious name Pius after his protector. He became a missionary preacher in five languages and died on 11 March 1940 at Bouhay Abbey near Liege, aged 88. His memoir, Il rapimento di Edgardo Mortara — written in Spanish in the 1880s — was published only in 2005 by an Italian Catholic press; it presents his abduction as providential. Mauro Pesce and Marina Caffiero have subsequently placed the Mortara case within a broader pattern of forced baptisms documented in the Roman ghetto from the 1640s to the 1860s.
More than any single event, the Mortara case turned European liberal opinion definitively against the temporal power of the papacy — and accelerated the unification of Italy by twelve crucial years.David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997)