Pope Pius IX and Judaism

While Pius rejected charges of antisemitism, the rift created by the Mortara Affair, undermined his moral authority in the eyes of some during the rest of his pontificate.

The precise legal difference is difficult to pin down, as there existed no bill of rights or even a clear collection of laws in the Papal States at the time of Pius IX.

Early in his pontificate, in 1847, Pius IX baptized four Roman Jews and welcomed them personally with warm words into the Catholic Church.

After French troops brought him back to power in 1850,[3] the Pope issued a series of anti-liberal measures that eliminated even some of his earlier openings, including re-instituting the Ghetto.

[4] In 1858 in a highly publicized case, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was seized from his parents by the police of the Papal States.

At that time, the Papal States law forbade Christians being raised by Jews, even their own parents, and considered the informal baptism performed by the teen-age servant a valid religious conversion.

In 1912, in his written statement in favor of the beatification of Pius IX, Edgardo Mortara recalled his own feelings about the abduction: "Eight days later, my parents presented themselves to the Institute of Neophytes to initiate the complex procedures to get me back in the family.

Based on the Catholic teaching, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus ("outside the Church, there is no salvation"), the servant girl feared that Mortara would have gone to Hell for all eternity.

[16] In Italy, Jewish leaders and some Catholic scholars warned that the canonization of Pius IX will undermine the goodwill engendered by recent Vatican attempts to atone for Christian Europe's history of anti-Semitism.

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."