The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 17
The Università Israelitica document provides a glimpse of the Mortaras’ state of mind during these visits, and of how, despite all the negative signs, they remained hopeful that their son would soon be released:
Up until this moment, the direct relations with the Rector and his brother had stayed within the bounds of a certain politeness. The souls of Monsieur and Madame Mortara were torn between hope and fear. They awaited the decree that would produce either their consolation or their eternal sorrow. They could not resign themselves to the idea that, having traveled so far, having presented so many arguments in their favor, having produced so many documents and cited so many authorities, they would not succeed in the end.
These hopes were very much on their minds as they held Edgardo in their arms on the morning of November 9. Across the room stood the Rector and his brother, with a few nuns at their side. The priests, talking loudly enough to be heard across the room, spoke of the airtight arguments being prepared by the Church authorities as the basis for what would be the Pope’s final refusal of the request to let Edgardo return home. A dramatic encounter followed, as described in the Università Israelitica account:
The poor parents begged the two speakers not to poison their conversation with such words, but rather than go along with this reasonable request, the two clerics exclaimed that it would be contrary to their duty, which was to exhort the parents to follow their child in his new faith. It was only by embracing Christianity that they would be permitted to see their son; if they converted, they would be treated with the greatest respect. They added that far from returning to the religion into which he was born, the new son of the Church was destined by God to become the apostle of Christianity to his family, dedicated to converting his parents and his siblings.
The three Jews clutched one another as—in an account eerily echoing the one that Anna Del Monte told about the same place a century before—both the priests and the sisters got down on their knees before an image of Jesus and began reciting heartfelt prayers for the conversion of the entire Mortara family. “The boy did not follow his teachers’ example, although they would have liked to make him kneel down with them. He stayed by his parents’ side. But Momolo and Marianna could not stand it any longer, and despite the enormous wound that they suffered, they were careful not to say a single word as they made their way out of the room.”
As his parents were leaving, Edgardo threw himself in his mother’s arms. The effect of the scene—the priests and sisters on their knees, begging Jesus to show them the light—was
to redouble the tears, the kisses, and the sighs, while the poor mother pressed the boy to her breast until finally the Rector came to tear the boy away, saying, “That’s enough.”
One can well imagine the state that Monsieur and Madame Mortara were in as they returned to their room, and how they were stunned and completely done in by the scene they had witnessed. The mother’s pain exploded into atrocious convulsions, which lasted all day, and from that fatal moment she has not been able to get out of bed.4
As the moving accounts of the poor mother’s torment circulated through Italy and beyond, a very different story began to appear in papers sympathetic to the Church. It tells of a child terrified of his mother, a woman who will not leave him in peace while all he seeks is the comfort of his new family, the Church. In the first of these stories in the stridently pro-Vatican newspaper L’univers, its French readers learned of Edgardo’s horrified reaction when his mother told him to remain faithful to the religion of his ancestors. Edgardo told the Rector that if she returned, he would go and hide, for he could not bear to hear such awful words again.5
The most influential Catholic report of the mother’s first meetings with her son appeared in the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica. The long story in the November issue sketched out the main lines of counterattack to be used in the battle against all those forces—Jewish, liberal, anticlerical—that were, in the Catholic view, maligning the Pope and the Church over the Mortara case. The defense had two components. One, involving Church law and precedent, we will look at later. The other focused on Edgardo’s actual behavior and on his attitude toward his parents and toward the Church. In the Civiltà Cattolica account, Edgardo had clearly made his choice.
Critics had accused the Church of flagrantly violating one of its own cardinal principles, indeed one of the Ten Commandments: a child should be taught to honor his father and his mother. Civiltà Cattolica responded that Edgardo’s tutors had done nothing to compromise the boy’s respect and love for his parents. The transformation that had come over him on entering the Catechumens, thanks to the miracle of the baptismal sacrament, was instantaneous, but the journal reported, “that did not detract one whit from his affection [for his parents], nor from his filial devotion.” In fact, when, in his first few weeks at the Catechumens, he was taught the rudiments of reading and writing, the first little letter he asked to write was to his mother (this was before her first visit), and he signed it “your most affectionate little son.”
This, of course, did not mean that he wanted to go home to be with his mother, for then he would have to live among Jews, which he did not want to do; indeed, he had reason to fear. “He begged to be brought up in a Christian home,” the Civiltà Cattolica recounted, “to escape the seductions and perhaps too those acts of violence that, beneath the paternal roof, would more than likely have met him.”
The choice of a new religion meant a choice of a new family, or perhaps it was the other way around. Escaping the threat of violence at the hands of his parents—Jews who would stop at nothing to keep their child from enjoying the spiritual liberation he had attained through baptism—Edgardo turned to his new father and his new family: “ ‘I have been baptized,’ he said, with a wisdom and a precision far from childlike; ‘I have been baptized, and my father is the Pope.’ ”
The Jesuit journal went on to report that the boy’s sentiments were warmly reciprocated by the Pontiff, who indeed had come to view Edgardo as his new son: “Nor did His Holiness delay in responding with paternal solicitude to this new son that Providence, in such an unforeseeable way, had added to the great Catholic family.” The Pope lost no time in calling the fortunate little boy to him; he embraced him warmly and, “with his august hand, made the holy sign of the cross on his forehead, and presented the boy to the distinguished priest taking care of him at the House of the Catechumens as someone who was most precious to him.”
For the Jesuit journal, as for the Catholic press throughout Europe, the proof that the Church had acted properly lay in Edgardo’s attitude toward his parents. More than that, his behavior demonstrated the truth of the Catholic religion. The child’s firm desire to “persevere at any cost,” his “calm wish to remain far from his own,” could be explained only as the special workings of holy grace, divine testimony to the fact that he had indeed been baptized. The Church officials had paraded the little boy before a wide assortment of “important persons, clerical and lay, dignitaries, and diplomats,” who had interrogated him. Moreover, the Church had let his parents visit him frequently. “In all these circumstances,” the journal reported, “he never has wavered for a moment.”
As for the behavior of Edgardo’s parents, Civiltà Cattolica painted a very different picture from that found in the Jewish and the liberal press. Momolo and Marianna’s anguish was the result not of losing a son but of their hostility toward the Church. Edgardo’s fears about his parents, the journal reported, were well founded. “They act with such desperation not so much because one of their eight children has been temporarily taken away, for they still have seven left at home, but rather because it is the Catholic Church that has acquired him.”
The Jesuit author told of speaking with Edgardo a few days after his first meeting with his mother at the Catechumens. The little boy told him a dramatic story of the encounter. As his mother embraced him, he reported, she noticed the medallion of the Blessed Virgin that was hanging from his neck. Enraged at the sight, she ripped it off. Edgardo was aghast but, out of respect for his mother, said nothing. Yet, he told his Jesuit visitor, “I kept repeating to myself: ‘I am a Christian by the grace of God, and a Christian I want to die.’ ”
All this, the Jesuit journal reported, put the question of whether a child should obey his parents in an entirely different light. The real issue was this: “Should a Christian son be returned to a Jewish father?” And it asked, “Is it right to allow the father to freely abuse his paternal authority to make him become an apostate?” The author concluded: “Having posed the question in this way, it requires only common sense and a little faith in the supernatural to respond that one cannot, and one ought not. It would be inhuman cruelty to do so, especially when the son has the insight to see the danger himself, and himself begs for protection against it.” If nature gives the father full responsibility for the care of his son, it is not so that the father can do as he pleases, but so that the son’s interests can be protected. How can anyone think that such authority should be left to the father when “it is almost certain that it will be employed not for the son’s good but rather for his supreme ruination?… Does not civil law provide that one should take a child away from a cruel and murderous father in order to protect his life? And why, then, should it be unjust to do for someone’s eternal life that which seems so just when it concerns his temporal existence?”
The rest of the pro-Church press hammered away on the same theme. The image of the furious Jewish mother ripping the sacred medallion from her son’s chest struck a deep chord. And the notion that what bothered the Jewish parents was not the loss of their son’s company but the fact that he was being turned into a Christian redirected the attention of the readers from their feelings of commiseration as parents to their ancient anger at the perfidy of the Jews. In Bologna in December 1858, the weekly Il vero amico left nothing to its readers’ imaginations. Further embellishing the story, the paper reported that Marianna, on seeing her son, was “filled with anger and ripped the medallion from his chest, saying scornfully, ‘I’d rather see you dead than a Christian!’ ”6
Civiltà Cattolica brought all these themes together in concluding its counterattack, portraying a boy besieged by his cruel Jewish parents, a boy graced by God, begging the Church for its spiritual and physical protection.
“Now does it seem right and generous to abandon this poor, weak, solitary creature and cast him off into the middle of a Judaic family that, without making any bones about it, shows that it is disposed to employ any means of enticement, of persuasion, and perhaps even of violence to drive him to an easy victory for apostasy?” In a final appeal, the author asks, “Would it seem right and generous to place this innocent boy on this cross, subject him to these torments, to the torture that it would be to find himself day in and day out exposed to his mother’s tenderness and his father’s severity?” The author reported that when he talked to little Edgardo, the boy had bravely assured him that were he to face such torture, he would not give in but would “recite the Christian prayers from morning to night and persuade his little brothers and sisters to imitate him.”7
These accounts of the divinely inspired Edgardo battling heroically against his infidel parents resonated profoundly among the faithful. The little boy became a martyr, ready to die for his newfound religion while standing up to (although unfailingly showing the proper respect for) his parents, who were prepared to murder him should their campaign of psychological terror fail.
Having spent practically six weeks in Rome, the Mortaras were now resigned to going home without their son. Marianna’s promise to Edgardo would have to be broken. Around them swirled an international controversy as irate citizens gathered in protest meetings on both sides of the Atlantic and a chorus of voices, from Jewish ragpickers in Rome to international bankers, from Protestant ministers in England to the French emperor himself, urged that Edgardo be returned to his parents. Yet so far the Pope was standing firm.
The Mortaras’ trip to Rome in October had been an easy one, and during their voyage they had been filled with an anxious hope. Their return to Bologna was another matter, and their coach mates might have been pardoned if they thought that they were traveling with Job himself.
When he reached Florence, two-thirds of the way to Bologna, in early December, Momolo wrote to Scazzocchio to tell of their misadventures: “Our voyage up to Siena was anything but good. Four miles out of Rome, Marianna suffered from a powerful fainting spell, which lasted until a stranger gave up his good seat so that she could lie down all the way to Viterbo, where we arrived at three.” In Viterbo, they went to the home of a woman they knew, who kindly prepared Marianna’s favorite dish, a chicken soup. But as the coach continued on its way, torrential rains fell, and the driver informed his passengers that the swollen streams made the road impassable. Although the already anxious Mortaras said nothing, other passengers argued with the driver, urging him to go on. Reluctantly, he continued through the downpour until the coach reached a stream that had turned into a rushing river, through which there was no hope of passing. Yet they could not turn back, for the streams behind them had come up as well.
They traveled two miles down the stream in search of roadmen who could help them, and eventually they located four workers. Offering to pay the men out of their own pockets, the passengers got them to return to the crossing and work on a washed-out bridge. “It was a horrendous night,” Momolo wrote.
I leave to your imagination the hours of pain we passed there. Finally, at 4 a.m., one of the roadmen came to tell us that they had done what they could in the way of repairs, and that we could make an attempt to get through those dangerous, badly swollen streams, but that it would be best to take everything we could out of the coach to lighten the load. And so all of the men—there were six of us—got out, and the five women stayed in the coach. The coach then set off, passing through the streams with great difficulty, particularly the third, while we walked behind, fording through the water, not without a certain degree of danger.… God saved us, but I assure you that though it may seem romantic, it was a scene of great horror.8
The trip continued, but mishap piled on mishap. The horses became mired in the mud, and there was no new team to replace them, as there was supposed to be, along the way. Meanwhile, in Rome, things were looking no better.
CHAPTER 13
The International Protests
Spread
IN HIS November 21, 1858, entry, the diarist Giuseppe Massari, who chronicled Italian events of the mid-nineteenth century, told of running into his friend Boggio, from Piedmont. Boggio was extremely upset. The previous Sunday he had been scheduled to serve as godfather for the baptism of a friend’s child in the Piedmontese city of Ivrea. Just before the ceremony, however, the Bishop of Ivrea informed him that he would not be allowed to do so because he was a well-known liberal and opponent of the Papal States. Humiliated, Boggio told Massari he wanted to take the Bishop to court for the affront. The diarist concluded the entry by noting, drolly, “Boggio is jealous of the Mortara boy’s fame.”1
The case of the jilted godfather is revealing both for what it shows about the relations between the Church and the liberals in Italy at the time and as a reflection of just how deeply the Mortara case had entered public consciousness. The battle for Italian unification, the dream of Italian patriots for decades, was finally coming to a head. For the Church, stung badly by the revolts of 1848, the liberal ideas of the Risorgimento were anathema, and their champions were condemned. For the liberals, on the other hand, the Church itself was one of the principal obstacles to national unification and the construction of a modern, constitutional state. The pope-king was a medieval vestige, a national embarrassment. In Piedmont, where the state allowed them, antipapal pamphlets abounded. For the opponents of papal rule, the taking of the Mortara boy was manna from heaven, a publicist’s dream.
No one was in a better position to make political capital out of the Mortara affair than Count Camillo Cavour, prime minister of the government of the kingdom of Sardinia and mastermind of the plan to unify Italy by the annexing of lands to the realm of King Victor Emmanuel II. Cavour saw in the Mortara case the perfect vehicle for demonstrating the anachronistic nature of the Papal States. The case could be used to undermine support for the Pope’s temporal power among Catholics—at least among those who had been affected by the winds of modernity and the talk of equality and human rights—and to inflame the simmering antipapal sentiments of Protestants throughout Europe.
Cavour, in Turin, kept a close eye on developments in the Mortara case with the help of Count Dominico della Minerva, his emissary in Rome. On October 9, 1858, Minerva sent Cavour a copy of the appeal to the Pope prepared by the Università Israelitica in Rome the month before. The emissary went on to report the impact that the case was having: “This fact, which has so upset public opinion in France and which, justly, the periodical press has taken up, has recently become the object of great interest in the Capital of the Catholic world thanks to the lively interest that the French Ambassador has taken in it.” So far, Minerva recounted, all the semiofficial channels that had been used to get the Church to release the child had proven useless. As a result, the Ambassador had decided to send Cardinal Antonelli an extremely strong note “in which he rightly stigmatized, in the harshest terms, a fact that is contrary to the first principles of natural right.”
When the Duke de Gramont, the French ambassador, received no reply to his note, he went to see the Secretary of State personally to complain. Not only did the French government, given all it was doing for the Pope, deserve a response, he argued, but it was in the Holy See’s own interest to provide a written account of its reasons for not returning the young Jew to his family. The exchange was far from friendly: “All this took place not without considerable animation and bitterness on both parts. But the French ambassador, unhappy at the indifference shown by the Cardinal to his pleas, took advantage of the prerogatives connected to his high rank and, a few days ago, without first asking either the Secretary of State or anyone else of the papal court, went directly to speak to His Holiness about the matter.”
