The famous Mortara affair — and Pope Pius IX's role — remain a stain on the Church's largely decent record of modern relations with the Jews.
This year’s Cannes Film Festival premièred an important Italian film by Marco Bellocchio, Rapito (Kidnapped.) Steven Spielberg once planned to make The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, but it never appeared. Rapito may fill that lacuna, for critics say it faithfully and movingly recounts the infamous Mortara case of the 1850s and beyond.
A Bolognese Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara became deathly ill in the 1850s. A domestic in the Mortara home secretly brought the child for an emergency baptism to save his soul. Bologna was then in the Papal States, whose head was Pope Pius IX. The Church declared the baptism valid and forcibly carried the child away from his parents.
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Why did the Church kidnap Edgardo? Papal States’ laws did not permit Jews to raise Catholic children. To underscore the need for a modern secular stat, the unifiers of Italy called the Mortara case a perfect example of the Church’s medieval obscurantism.
The kidnapped six-year-old child was raised solidly Catholic and became a priest. Pope Pius IX, in an outrageous and infamous case of blaming the victim, declared that the child would be returned to his parents if only they accepted Catholicism. They refused, and the pope then stated that the lack of return of the kidnapped child was the parents’ fault for closing their hearts to the truth of Christianity, and that faced with a similar situation, he’d do it all over again.
While the Church has apologized for the persecution of Jews, there has been no apology to the Italian Jewish community or to the Mortara family, which still demands and waits for redress. The Mortara case constitutes an indelible stain on the Church’s largely decent record of modern relations with the Jews, and it was Pope Pius IX whose obstinacy broke the heart of one Jewish family and alienated generations of Italian Jews in their relations with the Church.
When Italy was unified after capturing Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX refused to recognize the new Italian state and forbade Catholics on pain of excommunication from voting or otherwise participating in Italian civic life. He said “the ideals of Italian patriots are the work of the devil,” excommunicated King Victor Emmanuel II, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Camillo Benso (Count of Cavour), and whoever supported the Italian nationalist movement.
In Montreal, we have two civic areas named in honour of Pope Pius IX — Pie IX boulevard and the métro station.
Though he started his papacy as a liberal leader, given this pope’s actions later on, isn’t one honour enough?
In the face of the unrepented kidnapping of Mortara and of the pope’s opposition to Italian unity — an insult to all Italians, I would assume — I urge the city to change the name of the métro station from Pie IX to Edgardo Mortara, and in the spirit of our times, perhaps to examine new possible names for the boulevard itself.
Rabbi Leigh Lerner is rabbi emeritus of Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Westmount. Upon retirement, for seven years he wintered in Italy, helping Reform Judaism to grow in Milan, Florence and Rome.
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