The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 19
Not all of the protests in the United States leaned so heavily on the Know Nothing slogans that the Jews imbibed as part of their acculturation. In early December, at Mozart Hall in New York, a citywide gathering of Jews was called, the first in eighteen years, to protest the Mortara abduction. For hours more than two thousand New Yorkers heard speaker after speaker call for Edgardo’s liberation. Anti-Catholic rhetoric in New York was more muted than in Boston. The most enthusiastically received speaker, Raphael De Cordova, a popular Jewish humorist, asked, irreverently: Could it be true that a Jewish baby baptized surreptitiously by a nurse was thereby made Catholic? What if, he ruminated, a band of Jews, armed with a razor, were to sneak into the Vatican, seize the Pope, and, while holding the protesting Pontiff down, perform a circumcision? “Surely,” he concluded, to the chuckles of the appreciative audience, “that would not make the Pope a Jew, any more than the sprinkling of water made a child of a Jew a Christian.”14
The rallies continued. In San Francisco, in January, more than three thousand people listened to the speeches of prominent Protestant clergymen, assorted other Christian community leaders, and the Jewish organizers themselves. Most of the speakers adopted a respectful attitude toward Catholicism, and some were deferential to the Pope as well. But others portrayed the Mortara case as but the last in a long line of outrages performed by a Church that was a menace to the rest of the world. F. P. Tracy, one of the Protestant speakers, recalled a visit to Rome in 1847 when, he said, he saw Cardinal Antonelli sitting beside Pius IX (which seems most unlikely, as Antonelli was not yet Secretary of State). “Like Mephistophiles, cold and unimpassioned,” Antonelli—thundered Tracy—whispered instructions in the pliant pope’s ear “and changed the character of him who otherwise might have been a kind and patriarchal ruler.” Tracy warned his audience that they had to take matters into their own hands, since no decency could be expected from the Vatican: “The Pope would baptize every one of us, if he only had the power.”15
The Mortara case had become a cause célèbre among non-Jews as well as Jews. In the month of December 1858 alone, The New York Times published more than twenty articles on the case; the Baltimore American published thirty-one major articles on Mortara from October 1858 through January of the following year; and the Milwaukee Sentinel ran twenty-three stories in November and December 1858. At the beginning of March 1859, when popular interest in the case in Europe had already subsided, the New York Herald claimed that American interest in the Mortara affair had reached “colossal dimensions.”16
Flexing their still puny political muscles, the incensed American Jews, following the example of their European brethren, tried to get their government to speak out against the abduction and send a protest to the Vatican. They got nowhere. The American secretary of state replied to the cascade of letters by saying that it was the government’s policy not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Finally, the President himself, James Buchanan, thought it necessary to respond to the pleas personally, and on January 4, 1859, he wrote to a representative of the New York Jewish community: “I have long been convinced that it is neither the right nor the duty of this Government to express a moral censorship over the conduct of other independent governments and to rebuke them for acts which we may deem arbitrary and unjust towards their own citizens or subjects.”17
For Buchanan, the matter was delicate, for the Jews’ unhappiness was the least of his worries. The nation was on the verge of civil war over slavery, and abolitionists were calling on the enlightened powers of Europe to add their weight to the antislavery campaign. The President was hardly eager to set an example in the case of an Italian Jew that could later be used against him. And his own moral position was not very strong. How could he rail against a government that allowed a child to be forcibly separated from his parents when the same thing happened all the time in the slaveholding portions of his own country? As the President squirmed, the abolitionist newspapers became the unlikely ally of the American Catholic press as each, for its own reasons, attacked what it saw as the hypocrisy of the movement to free the Jewish child.
Catholic defenders of the Church published their own version of events, echoing the Catholic press in Europe. One pamphlet, published in New York in November 1858 under the pseudonym of “Fair Play,” typical of these broadsides, branded the “alleged Mortara kidnapping case” a “windfall to the enemies of God’s Church.” Blaming the child’s baptism on Momolo Mortara for breaking the Papal States’ law that prohibited Jews from having Christian servants, it argued that no one, not even a pope, could “unbaptize a Christian child.” Not only was it unthinkable that a Christian government “could leave a Christian child to be brought up a Jew,” but another principle, that of religious liberty, was also at stake, “the liberty of a child to be a Christian, and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew.” Edgardo (described as 11 years old, rather than 7) was begging to remain a Christian: “To have surrendered him would have been an eternal ignominy. To clamor for his surrender is an outrage upon Christianity, and a shame to Christendom.” And Fair Play concluded, grandiosely, “The Holy Father’s protection of the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen for ages.”18
CHAPTER 14
The Church Strikes Back
WITH PROTESTS mounting on both sides of the Atlantic, worried Church officials hastened to prepare their defense. For the members of the hierarchy, the abuse aimed at the Church was but the latest of a string of anti-Catholic outrages. Throughout its history the Church had treated its Jews in much the same manner as it had in the Mortara case, and no one—other than a handful of frightened Jews, on their knees—had ever said anything. In matters of Church dogma, this was as it should be. But now, with the forces of secularism, godlessness, and materialism sweeping Europe, respect for the word of God and His instrument on earth was rapidly eroding. True, the Church had been having to fight this battle in some form ever since the Reformation, when Church authority was first contested. But in the heartland of world Catholicism, the pontifical state itself, it was unthinkable that the Pope’s spiritual authority should be challenged by such a motley assortment of schismatics and infidels.
The battle over the Mortara boy coincided with struggles within the Church over the extent to which all power should flow from the Pope. The modern low point of papal authority was reached in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Civil rulers begrudged the Church its autonomy and opposed any practice that suggested that affairs in their own states were being decided by a foreign power, namely the pope and his representatives. Autocrats’ desires to reign uncontested and unconstrained mixed with Enlightenment-generated ideas to create a movement against special privileges for the Church. The Jesuits, the embodiment of the Church as foreign power, and champions of an ideology in which the wishes of the secular rulers were subordinated to the word of God as interpreted by Rome, came in for special attack. They were chased from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Spain in 1767, and from Naples the following year. The anti-Jesuit outcry became so great that, in 1773, Pope Clement XIV abolished the Jesuit order altogether. In Vienna, in 1762, the publication of papal encyclicals was made contingent on prior approval from the Habsburg ruler. In the decades that followed, secular rulers throughout Catholic Europe wrested control over censorship from inquisitorial hands and barred the Church from putting their subjects on trial. The state claimed a monopoly on the power to arrest and try its subjects.
On his accession to the Austrian throne in 1780, Joseph II denounced the existing concordat and moved energetically to restrict the rights of the Church, seeking to build a modern, secular state. Ecclesiastical exemption from taxes was abolished, the Holy Office of the Inquisition suppressed, and the policy of closing monasteries and convents given new impetus. Throughout most of the lands in which Catholics lived, similar attacks on Church authority put the hierarchy on the defensive, and the prestige of the papacy suffered.
The Napoleonic conquests in Europe, and the years of French rule, accelerated the decline in prestige and power of the centralized Church. But in the aftermath of Napoleon’s fall, the attitude of most of Europe’s secular rulers changed. While in intellectual circles the Enlightenment ideas of equality had spread, among the governors and the elites who supported them antagonism toward the Enlightenment and the notion of a society based on the use of reason brought about a strengthening of Church authority. In historian Stuart Woolf’s words, “The only hope was to revert to an earlier, uncontaminated society, in which order and hierarchy were respected and the theocratic basis of monarchy consecrated by an infallible pope or divine revelations.”1 The result was the revival in the use of the Church as a bulwark of secular rule. Throughout Europe, the Jesuit order was restored and popular expressions of devotion—cults of apparitions and Marian worship, among others—were given new life. New concordats were eventually negotiated—Viale-Prelà’s work as papal nuncio in Vienna constituted a part of this process—marking the harmony, once again, of Church and state.
The autonomy of national churches—championed in the past not only by secular rulers who were hostile to control from Rome but also by major sectors of the Catholic population and clergy in France, Austria, and elsewhere—was during this Restoration period increasingly challenged by the growth of the “ultramontane” movement. The ultramontanes argued that local churches everywhere should come under the strict control of the Holy See. They sought to bolster the power and the prestige of the Pope, and they championed the supremacy of Church law over secular legal principles. In all this, they fought not only the liberal movement but their opponents within the Church as well, those who, from the ultramontanes’ perspective, were poisoned by Enlightenment ideas that were at odds with the Church’s mission.
The Pope’s refusal to return Edgardo to his family became a sacred cause for the ultramontane forces, involving the prestige and authority of the papacy as well as the supremacy of divine law over modern ideas of individual rights and religious equality. The campaign took various forms. Diplomatic efforts were under Cardinal Antonelli’s control, but the counteroffensive among the general population was entrusted to the large European network of Catholic newspapers. Among these, two occupied an especially influential place: the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica, advised directly by the Pope and regarded as speaking in his name, and the feisty L’univers, published by the greatest ultramontane champion of them all, the Frenchman Louis Veuillot.
Among the first Catholic newspapers outside Italy to comment on the Mortara affair was the Belgian Journal de Bruxelles. Its September 18 story is revealing, not only in sketching out the first lines of Church defense, but also in the embellishments that had crept into the Church narrative.
According to the Belgian paper, far from coming out of the blue, the decision to remove Edgardo from his parents was made only after rumors of the boy’s baptism had become the talk of Bologna. The baptism was so well known that the Archbishop, Cardinal Viale-Prelà, had no choice but to see that basic canon law was applied “or else run the risk of an immense scandal in the eyes of the Catholics.” The reluctant but principled archbishop, faced with this situation, repeatedly offered Momolo Mortara the chance to keep his son, as long as he would promise to see that he was raised as a Christian. “After repeated refusals, the Archbishop of Bologna simply did his duty,” the paper reported. The boy was taken to the Catechumens in Rome, but his father was immediately invited to follow him to see for himself “that his son was not being sequestered, nor being made to break his natural ties, nor even being constrained by corporal or moral pressure to profess his faith.” Rather, the boy was being kept in what amounted simply to a comfortable lodging so that he could be provided with “a religious education sufficient to afford him, if he chose, the grace of his baptism, since certainly, if he had continued to live in Bologna with his family, he would never have been able to know even what the sacrament was that had made him a child of God and of the Church.” Indeed, the Journal de Bruxelles reported, the boy’s father had recently visited him in Rome and “was able to see for himself that, far from being constrained by tyrannical and external influences to follow the grace that had been bestowed on him, his son obeyed with the most admirable spontaneity.”2
The claim that Edgardo’s parents, seeing how happy he was and how well he was being cared for in the Catechumens, were pleased to see him remain there was picked up by L’armonia della religione colla civiltà. Published in Turin by a priest, Giacomo Margotti, the paper fought the ultramontane battle in hostile territory, at the heart of the kingdom of Sardinia. Margotti’s stream of stinging polemics against the liberal state and the liberal wing of the Church not only earned him frequent visits from government censors, who periodically shut the paper down, but, two years before the Mortara case, had led to a physical assault that almost killed him. Emotions ran high on both sides.
L’armonia ran its first Mortara article on August 17, 1858, and published a score more by the end of the year.3 In its October 17 story, the newspaper reported news of Edgardo’s family: “No one is posing the least opposition. The Mortara boy’s parents themselves are now pleased that he is being educated in the Catechumens.”4
None of these papers had as great an impact as Civiltà Cattolica. When the controversy first began to heat up, in August, both Church partisans and opponents began to look to the paper to see when the Vatican would make its position known and respond publicly to its growing army of critics. The Jesuit journal’s reputation for being the mouthpiece of the Holy See was such that, Momolo later recounted, it was in reading their first article on the case, published on October 30, that he realized that the Pope had decided not to let Edgardo go.5
That article, as we have already seen, relied heavily on Edgardo’s own miraculous transformation, and his consequent desire to stay where he was, in arguing that he should not be returned to his family. But other arguments were pursued as well.
In the article, sections of which were republished by Catholic papers throughout Europe, the journal assured its Catholic readers that the crucial question of whether the child had in fact ever been baptized had been thoroughly investigated. The Mortaras’ lawyers had understandably focused much attention on this, the crucial issue, and had produced sworn statements from various people to discredit the servant’s account. But, the journal reported, it took only a single witness to make a baptism valid, and that witness, Anna Morisi, had not changed her story. The widespread reports in the anticlerical press that there had been no baptism were preposterous: Isn’t it strange, asked the author, that the rumormongers in France and Germany should be considered better informed about what had happened than Church authorities in Bologna and Rome, where an official investigation had been conducted? The parents had produced a doctor’s statement that the child’s illness at the time had not ever threatened his life. But this claim—suspicious itself in the hazy recollections of a physician six years after the fact—meant little. Even if the child had not been in danger of dying, he was baptized, and therefore a Christian.
Once the investigations had verified that Edgardo had been baptized, the Church had no choice but to take the action that it had. Here lay the heart of the matter. “Although the Voltairian unbelievers and the Jews claim to be scandalized and dumbfounded by it, for the true Christian no shadow of doubt is permitted. For, given that this seven-year-old child has been baptized, the question of whether he should be left with a Jewish father becomes another: Should someone who has been baptized become a Christian or a Jew? for in the end, the man will become what his upbringing makes him.”6
Taking up another theme that was to be repeated in hundreds of Catholic articles on the Mortara case, the Jesuit journal asked whose fault it was that the Mortaras’ son had been taken from them. It was their own fault, the author responded, for none of this would have happened if they had obeyed the law of the land in which they lived, which, to avoid uncomfortable situations such as this, forbade Jews to employ Christian servants. As residents of the Papal States, Jews such as the Mortaras tacitly accepted the laws under which they lived. If they found these too onerous, “they were fully free to move somewhere else.” For the Jews to blame the Church for what had happened as a result of their flouting of the law was particularly galling. “If they and their fellow believers want to remain there, they show poor grace to pretend that the laws can be changed just to suit the Judaic people.”7
As for why the Mortara case had occasioned such a commotion in the press throughout Europe, why the Church had become the victim of such abuse, the Civiltà Cattolica had an explanation: it was the power of the Jews. Since the members of the family of Jacob, the journal explained, “are extremely rich in Europe today, indeed in possession of the most powerful libertine newspapers in Germany, Belgium, and France, it is hardly surprising that these same papers band together in their defense, especially when they can at the same time assault the Pontiff and his government.”8
Reports had reached Rome’s Università Israelitica that the Civiltà Cattolica was planning a major statement on the Mortara case, and as a result, Scazzocchio and Samuele Alatri, head of the Jewish community, sent a letter to Father Carlo Curci, the Jesuit founder and director of the journal, pleading for favorable consideration. On October 30, the same day that the fateful issue of the journal went to press, Father Curci replied in a brief note, stating that “we desire only the truth and justice” and enclosing a statement on the Mortara case. “If you and the distinguished Signor Alatri remain unchanged in your opinion on the matter,” Curci wrote, “that does not prevent me from expressing my sincere respect for both of you.”
No sooner had they received this letter than Scazzocchio prepared a new plea to the Jesuit editor, accompanying it with various supporting documents. Curci’s response, written on November 1, offers a glimpse into the mind of one of the Pope’s most influential defenders. “I thank you for your kindness in sending me new clarifications on the noted affair,” he wrote, adding that they had not altered his views, which they would find in the article that was currently in press in his journal. “You and your brethren might find that article to be rather severe,” he continued, but he hoped that they would understand his situation. He was compelled to respond “to the wild invectives against the Catholic Church and its august head that so many newspapers in Europe have published on this affair.”9
