Mortara case

The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held the view that the action irrevocably made the child a Catholic and, because the law of the Papal States forbade the raising of Christians by members of other faiths, it ordered that he be taken from his family and brought up by the Church.

[5] Pope Pius IX, elected in 1846, was initially widely seen as a great reformer and moderniser, who might throw his weight behind the growing movement for unification of Italy – referred to in Italian as the Risorgimento (meaning "Resurgence").

[2] The Jews of the Papal States, numbering 15,000 or so in 1858,[5] were grateful to Pope Pius IX because he had ended the long-standing legal obligation for them to attend sermons in church four times a year, based on that week's Torah portion and aimed at their conversion to Christianity.

After receiving written permission to investigate from the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (also called the Holy Office), the body of cardinals responsible for overseeing and defending Catholic doctrine, Feletti interrogated her at the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna.

[26] For the Holy Office, situations such as that reported by Feletti presented a profound quandary – on the one hand, the Church officially disapproved of forced conversions, but on the other, it held that the baptismal sacrament was sacrosanct and that if it had been properly administered, the recipient was thereafter a member of the Christian communion.

Momolo's version of events, favoured by the Jewish community and other backers, was that a family had been destroyed by the papal government's religious fanaticism, that helpless Edgardo had spent the journey to Rome crying for his parents, and that the boy wanted nothing more than to return home.

When Marianna wrote to her son in August, Scazzocchio refused to deliver the letter on the grounds that, being relatively calm and reassuring in tone, it might work against the impression they were trying to give him that she was no longer herself and that only his return could save her.

According to an eyewitness account published in the Catholic L'armonia della religione colla civiltà, he had learned the catechism perfectly within a few days, "blesse[d] the servant who baptised him", and declared that he wanted to convert all Jews to Christianity.

That story had the child begging the rector of the Catechumens not to send him back but to let him grow up in a Christian home, and initiated what became a central plank of the pro-Church narrative – that Edgardo had a new family, namely the Catholic Church itself.

[46] A booklet, published in Brussels in 1859, outlined the two contrasting narratives, then concluded: "Between the miracle of a six-year-old apostle who wants to convert the Jews and the cry of a child who keeps asking for his mother and his little sisters, we don't hesitate for a moment.

[50] Scazzocchio also forwarded an affidavit from the Mortara family doctor, Pasquale Saragoni, who acknowledged that Edgardo had fallen sick when he was about a year old, but stated that he had never been in danger of dying and that, in any case, Morisi had herself been bedridden at the time she was supposed to have baptised the boy.

Antonelli was not impressed, considering it to be an undignified line of action that would give obvious ammunition to the Church's detractors, and ordered Sarra to bring Edgardo back to the capital to meet his parents.

[55] After meeting Edgardo in Rome, Louis Veuillot, the ultramontane editor of the newspaper L'Univers and one of the Pope's staunchest defenders, reported that the boy had told him "that he loves his father and his mother, and that he will go to live with them when he is older ... so that he can speak to them of Saint Peter, of God, and of the most Holy Mary".

[58] The case, an anti-Catholic "publicist's dream", to quote Kertzer, had become a massive controversy in both Europe and the United States by then, with voices across the social spectrum clamouring for the Pope to return Edgardo to his parents.

[62] The pro-Church articles often took on an overtly antisemitic character, charging, for example, that was hardly a surprise that coverage in Britain, France or Germany was critical, "since currently the newspapers of Europe are in good part in the hands of the Jews".

One of the delegates proposed that the Church should not give so much credence to Morisi's testimony, given her spurious morals, but the Pope countered that, regardless of her character, so far as he could see the servant had no reason to invent such a story and, in any case, Momolo Mortara should not have employed a Catholic in the first place.

"[70] The Italian Jewish appeals came to the attention of Sir Moses Montefiore, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, whose willingness to travel great distances to help his co-religionists, as he had over the Damascus blood libel of 1840, for example, was already well known.

[73] After unsuccessfully attempting to have the British government lodge an official protest with the Vatican, Montefiore resolved to personally travel to Rome to present a petition to the Pope calling for Edgardo to be returned to his parents.

[74] On his return to Britain, more than 2,000 leading citizens, including 79 mayors and provosts, 27 peers, 22 Anglican bishops and archbishops and 36 members of parliament, signed a protest message calling the Pope's conduct a "dishonour to Christianity", "repulsive to the instincts of humanity".

By the end of the same day, the papal colours flying in the squares had been replaced with the Italian green, white and red, the cardinal legate had left the city, and a group styling itself Bologna's provisional government had proclaimed its desire to join the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Feletti replied: "I commiserate with the Mortara parents for their painful separation from their son, but I hope that the prayers of the innocent soul succeed in having God reunite them all in the Christian religion ... As for my punishment, not only do I place myself in the Lord's hands, but I would argue that any government would recognise the legitimacy of my action.

[89] The prosecutor, Radamisto Valentini, a lawyer fighting his first major case, declared that Feletti had ordered the removal alone and on his own initiative, and then turned his focus to Carboni's second point about how the authorities in Rome could have possibly concluded that Morisi's story was genuine.

[90] He then highlighted the inconsistencies between her testimony and the other accounts, condemned Morisi as a silly girl "corrupted by the foul breath and touch of foreign soldiers ... [who] rolled over without shame with them", and finally charged that Feletti had ordered the removal himself out of megalomania and "an inquisitor's hatred of Judaism".

A reduced incarnation of the Papal States, comprising Rome, its immediate environs, and Lazio, endured outside the new kingdom because of Napoleon III's reluctance to offend his Catholic subjects by withdrawing the French garrison.

As he recounted it, his saga was the stuff of faith and hope: A story of how God chose a simple, illiterate servant girl to invest a small child with the miraculous powers of divine grace, and in doing so rescued him from his Jewish family – good people but, as Jews, on a God-forsaken path.

The same year, Marianna travelled to Perpignan in south-western France, where she had heard Edgardo was preaching, and enjoyed an emotional reunion with her son, who was pleased to see her, but disappointed when she refused his pleas to convert to Catholicism.

[109][verification needed] The Mortara case was, in the view of Timothy Verhoeven, the greatest controversy to surround the Catholic Church in the mid-19th century, because it "more than any other single issue ... exposed the divide between supporters and opponents of the Vatican".

[110] Abigail Green writes that "this clash between liberal and Catholic worldviews at a moment of critical international tension ... gave the Mortara affair global significance – and rendered it a transformative episode in the Jewish world as well".

[14] According to Dov Levitan, the basic facts of the Mortara case are far from unique, but it is of particular importance nevertheless, because of its effect on public opinion in Italy, Britain and France, and as an example of "the great sense of Jewish solidarity that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century [as] Jews rose to the cause of their brethren in various parts of the world".

[114] Kertzer takes a similar view: "The refusal to return Edgardo contributed to the growing sense that the Pope's role as temporal ruler, with his own police force, was an anachronism that could no longer be maintained.