The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 2
In fact, with Lucidi’s permission, Momolo had sent Riccardo to alert Marianna’s brother and uncle, and to fetch their elderly Jewish neighbor Bonajuto Sanguinetti, whose wealth and community position, Momolo hoped, might ward off the impending disaster.
Hurrying back to the cafe where, less than an hour before, he and his father had left them, Riccardo came upon his two uncles, Angelo Padovani, his mother’s brother, and Angelo Moscato, husband of his mother’s sister. Moscato later described the encounter:
“As I sat with my brother-in-law at the Caffè del Genio on via Vetturini, my nephew Riccardo Mortara came running up, in tears and disconsolate, telling me that the carabinieri were in his house, and that they wanted to kidnap his brother Edgardo.”
The two men rushed to the Mortaras’ apartment: “We saw the mother, devastated, and in such a sorry state that it’s impossible to describe. I asked the marshal of the gendarmes to explain what was going on, and he responded that he had an order—though he never showed it to me—from the Inquisitor, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, to take Edgardo because he had been baptized.”
Marianna was “desperate, beside herself,” as her brother, Angelo Padovani, recalled. “She lay stretched out on a sofa which they also used as a bed, the sofa on which Edgardo slept, holding him tightly to her chest so that no one could take him.”
Trying to find some way to stop the police from making off with Edgardo, Padovani and his brother-in-law persuaded the Marshal not to remove the child before they could consult with their uncle, who lived nearby. The uncle, Marianna’s father’s brother, whose name was also Angelo Padovani, was still at work in the small bank he ran in the same building in which he lived.
After his nephews filled him in on the dramatic events at the Mortara home, Signor Padovani decided that their only hope was to see the Inquisitor. While the younger Padovani rushed back to inform the Marshal of the need for further delay, the other two men made their way to the convent.
At 11 p.m., they presented themselves at the forbidding gate of San Domenico and asked to be taken to the Inquisitor. Despite the hour, they were rushed up to the Inquisitor’s room. They implored Father Feletti to tell them why he had ordered the police to take Edgardo. Responding in measured tones, and hoping to calm them, the Inquisitor explained that Edgardo had been secretly baptized, although by whom, or how he came to know of it, he would not say. Once word of the baptism had reached the proper authorities, they had given him the instructions that he was now carrying out: the boy was a Catholic and could not be raised in a Jewish household.
Padovani protested bitterly. It was an act of great cruelty, he said, to order a child taken from his parents without ever giving them a chance to defend themselves. Father Feletti simply responded that it was not in his power to deviate from the orders he had received. The men begged him to reveal his grounds for thinking that the child had been baptized, for no one in the family knew anything about it. The Inquisitor replied that he could give no such explanation, the matter being confidential, but that they should rest assured that everything had been done properly. It would be best for all concerned, he added, if the members of the family would simply resign themselves to what was to come. “Far from acting lightly in this matter,” he told them, “I have acted in good conscience, for everything has been done punctiliously according to the sacred Canons.”
Seeing that it was impossible to get Father Feletti to reconsider his order, the men pleaded with him to give the family more time before taking the boy. They asked that he suspend any action for at least a day.
“At first,” Moscato later recounted, “that man of stone refused, and we had to paint a picture for him of the sad state of a mother who had another child she was nursing, of a father who was being driven almost out of his mind, and of eight [sic] children clutching at their parents’ and the policemen’s knees, begging them not to take their brother away from them.”
Eventually, the Inquisitor did change his mind and allowed them a twenty-four-hour stay, hoping that in the meantime the distraught mother could be made to leave the apartment, thereby heading off what threatened to become an unfortunate public disturbance. He asked Moscato and Padovani to promise that no attempt would be made to help the boy escape, an assurance they gave only reluctantly.
Father Feletti later recounted what went through his mind as he weighed the risks of permitting the delay. He knew full well, he said, of the “superstitions in which the Jews are steeped,” and so he feared not only that “the child might be stolen away,” but indeed that he might perhaps even be “sacrificed.” His was a belief shared widely in Italy at that time, for it was thought that Jews would rather murder their own children than see them grow up to be Catholic. He would take no chances. In the note he prepared for Padovani to give to Lucidi, he ordered the Marshal to keep Edgardo under constant surveillance.
Meanwhile, the vigil at the Mortara apartment continued as other friends and neighbors converged on the home. Among these was the Mortaras’ 71-year-old next-door neighbor, Bonajuto Sanguinetti, like Momolo a transplant from the Jewish community of nearby Reggio Emilia, in the duchy of Modena. Sanguinetti had already gone to bed when Riccardo, after fetching his two uncles at the cafe, came to his home and told the servant what was happening.
Sanguinetti described his first reactions when his servant woke him up: “I went to the window and saw five or six carabinieri walking about under the portico, and at first I was a little confused, thinking that they had come to take one of my own grandchildren.”
He rushed to the Mortaras’ home: “I saw a distraught mother, bathed in tears, and a father who was tearing out his hair, while the children were down on their knees begging the policemen for mercy. It was a scene so moving I can’t begin to describe it. Indeed, I even heard the police marshal, by the name of Lucidi, say that he would have rather been ordered to arrest a hundred criminals than to take that boy away.”
At half past midnight, the eerie vigil at the Mortara home was interrupted by the arrival of Moscato and Padovani, brandishing the piece of paper that they had extracted from Father Feletti. Marshal Lucidi was astonished that the Jews had had any success with the Inquisitor. He had assumed that he would not be leaving the apartment that night without the boy.
“I could see,” the Marshal later recalled,
that Signor Padovani was an erudite person, of dignified demeanor, a man who was looked up to and respected by his coreligionists, and they counted heavily on him. Indeed, they had good reason to do so, for it must have taken someone of great influence to obtain a stay in the decree, and in my opinion others would not have succeeded in getting one, all the more so when I learned that the order came from the highest level, and that the Father Inquisitor himself was not in a position to change it.
When the Marshal departed, he left a scene that he described as a teatro di pianto e di afflizione, a “theater of tears and affliction.” Aside from the ten members of the Mortara family and the two policemen guarding Edgardo, he left behind Marianna’s brother, her brother-in-law, her uncle, and two family friends.
Momolo reacted to the news of the stay with relief, saying later it gave them “a ray of hope.” He was less happy, though, to discover that in putting into effect the Inquisitor’s admonitions to guard Edgardo closely, the Marshal had ordered two of the policemen to remain with the child in the Mortaras’ bedroom.
It was a terrible night for Momolo and Marianna: “Both of the policemen stayed in our bedroom, with the guard changing from time to time with others replacing them. You can imagine how we passed that night. Our little son, though he didn’t understand what was happening, slept fitfully, shaking with sobs every now and then, with the soldiers at his side.”
The only hope left to the family was finding someone in a position to overrule the Inquisitor and vacate his order. There were only two men in Bologna who, in the view of the men of the Mortara and Padovani families, might have such power: the Cardinal Legate, Giuseppe Milesi, and the city’s famous but controversial archbishop, Michele Cardinal Viale-Prelà. Encouraged by the diplomatic success enjoyed by Marianna’s brother-in-law and uncle the night before at San Domenico, Momolo and Marianna asked them to undertake this new mission. In midmorning, on June 24, they set out.
They did not have far to go. Indeed, Angelo Moscato had been sitting practically in the shadow of the imposing building in which the Cardinal Legate worked when, the previous evening, the breathless Riccardo had brought the news about Edgardo.
The hulking government palace, the old Palazzo Comunale, loomed over the city’s central square, the Piazza Maggiore. Opened as the center of government in 1336 and built up further over the next two hundred years, it was as much a fortress as an administrative center. Its opening had coincided with the completion of the vast, imposing wall that surrounded the city, a wall nine meters in height that made a lopsided circle seventy-six hundred meters around the old city. Each night the great gates closed their portals to protect the city’s inhabitants (and rulers) from their enemies. When the palace and the outer wall were built, Bologna was an autonomous city-state, battling, among others, papal forces that sought to subdue it. It was a struggle that the city ultimately lost, and with the triumphal entry of Pope Julius II into Bologna in 1506, the city and its territories were annexed to the Pontifical State.
Giuseppe Milesi Pironi Ferretti had come to Bologna just two months earlier, having at age 41 been simultaneously named a cardinal and appointed legate to the province of Bologna. Arriving to take up his new duties in Bologna on the evening of April 30, 1858, he was met with due ceremony as he made his way to his offices and apartment in the government building. The resident Austrian troops sounded an artillery salute.
Not everyone in Bologna, however, was pleased about the Cardinal Legate’s arrival, for hostility against papal rule, and against the Austrian troops who for years had enforced it, pervaded the city. Enrico Bottrigari, one of those Bolognesi influenced by the ideas of the Risorgimento, the national unification movement that one day in the not very distant future would help drive Milesi out of the city, described the Cardinal Legate’s arrival:
“Hardly had he arrived in his quarters when the senior senator of Bologna came to pay his respects in diplomatic style, followed by many noble personages and citizens, the usual ones who bow before power! Those who have seen him say that the new legate, at first sight anyway, has the appearance of a man cold as ice, a person graced with little intelligence.”2
The Inquisitor had given both Cardinal Milesi and the Archbishop advance notice of the planned seizure of the Jewish child. When Angelo Padovani and Angelo Moscato reached the gate of the Cardinal Legate’s headquarters, they were told that His Eminence was not in Bologna. There was little they could do but try to find the one other person they believed could help them: Bologna’s archbishop, the redoubtable Michele Viale-Prelà.
Once again, they did not have far to go, for the archdiocesan headquarters, connected to the cathedral of San Pietro, was no more than a stone’s throw from the government palace. The two Jews were not optimistic, for in the brief time that the famous cardinal had been in Bologna, he had developed a reputation as the leader of the Church movement against liberalism, a crusader for religious purification and morality, a friend of the Inquisition, and a steadfast warrior in the battle to protect the Pope’s position as a temporal ruler.
The previous night, when the Mortara family and their friends in Bologna’s tiny Jewish community had gathered at their home, desperately casting about for a way to prevent the police from taking Edgardo, Sanguinetti had suggested that they try to bribe someone in the Church hierarchy. The idea was not shocking to them, for it was an approach that Italian Jews over the past centuries had occasionally used with success, even with popes. However, no one thought Viale-Prelà was the sort to be bought off.
As it happened, Padovani and Moscato would not even have the chance to try, for they received the same reception at the Archbishop’s as they had at the Cardinal Legate’s: they were told that the Archbishop was on a trip outside Bologna and would not be available that day.3 The priest with whom they spoke, upon hearing what lay behind their pressing request to see the Archbishop, threw up his hands and told them he had no idea what they could do.
It was noon by now and time was running out. Angelo Moscato gave up: “Seeing that all hope was lost, we decided to let things take their unhappy course. I decided not to return to the Mortara home, for it would have only made me more bitter.”
At the Mortara apartment, the tension was unbearable. Marianna’s sister, Rosina, arrived in midmorning and found Marianna still clutching Edgardo, sobbing. As Rosina moved to comfort Edgardo, he gave his aunt a kiss and, gesturing toward the policemen who remained ever at his side, told her simply, “They want to take me away.”
Rosina did the only thing she could think of to help. She took her other nieces and nephews back to her home to join her own six children. “I didn’t want them to see their mother in such a state any longer,” she said.
While Rosina took the children away, the men gathered in the apartment decided that something had to be done about Marianna herself. She had spent all night in Edgardo’s sofa-bed with him in her arms and still would not let go of him. They feared what would happen if she were home when the carabinieri came that night to tear her son from her grip. And they were worried, too, about little Imelda, whose hungry cries were being ignored by her preoccupied mother.
Momolo explained: “As the day passed, amidst anxiety and fear, seeing my wife in a deplorable state, indeed driven almost insane, I decided it was best if she were taken from the house so that she wouldn’t be made to see the separation, for the sight would have killed her.” The Mortaras’ 52-year-old friend Giuseppe Vitta, a fellow Jew from Reggio who lived near the Mortaras in Bologna, offered to take Marianna to his own apartment, where his wife was waiting. Vitta, along with Momolo and Marianna’s brother, spent two hours trying to convince her that it would be best if she left: there was nothing she could do there, and Imelda’s health depended on her getting away.
Finally, Marianna relented, but as Vitta waited for her she found it hard to stop kissing Edgardo. The men had to carry her out of the building and into the closed carriage, for her strength had left her. As they took her out, she cried so pitiably, said the family’s servant, that it broke the hearts of all who heard her. Indeed, during the short trip to the Vitta home, Marianna’s wails were so piercing that, although the carriage was covered, the unsettling noise brought people throughout the neighborhood hurrying to their windows.
Momolo had one last hope: the Inquisitor. Only he could call a halt to the looming disaster. Accompanied by Marianna’s brother Angelo, Mortara set out for San Domenico.
At five o’clock, the two men arrived at the convent and were ushered into the Inquisitor’s rooms. Momolo, in a loud but unsteady voice, declared that there had surely been some mistake about the supposed baptism of his son, and asked Father Feletti to tell him what grounds he had for thinking that the child had been baptized. The Inquisitor would not respond directly. The rules of the Holy Tribunal had been scrupulously followed, he said, and there was no point in asking for any further explanation. When Momolo begged for another delay, Father Feletti told him it would serve no purpose.
Momolo should not worry, the Inquisitor said, for his son would be treated well; indeed, little Edgardo would be under the protection of the Pope himself. He suggested that Momolo prepare some clothes for the boy; he would send someone to pick them up. Having a nasty scene when the police took Edgardo away, the Inquisitor warned, would benefit no one.
When Momolo returned home, he realized that time had run out on him. The house had emptied. Marianna and baby Imelda had been taken to the Vitta home; the rest of the children were with their aunt. Other relatives and friends had found the Mortara home too painful to endure and so remained at home, awaiting word of what was to come. Aside from the two policemen, who would not even allow Edgardo to go to the lavatory by himself, there remained only Momolo, his brother-in-law Angelo, and Giuseppe Vitta, back after having delivered Marianna to his wife’s care.
Marshal Lucidi had meanwhile prepared carefully for the child’s departure. Brigadier Agostini, Lucidi’s silent companion of the night before, was assigned the task of driving Edgardo away, and for this had been given the best coach the Bologna police possessed. Lucidi came in a separate carriage, with a supporting police contingent. He arrived at the apartment at about eight o’clock. Accompanied by a number of his men, he climbed the stairs. In the apartment, Momolo held Edgardo in his arms; the boy remained calm, perhaps not comprehending what was about to happen. When Lucidi took Edgardo from his father’s trembling arms, tears flowed from the eyes of the two policemen who had been guarding the boy.
Vitta ran desperately down the stairs first, followed by the policemen, and then a stricken Momolo. The sight of his son being carried off, draped from the policeman’s shoulders, drained Momolo of his little remaining strength, and as he followed Edgardo he fell in a dead faint. As the boy was passed to Brigadier Agostini in the carriage, Vitta tried to calm him. “Don’t worry,” he said, “your father and I will follow you in another carriage.” Vitta assumed, as did the rest of the Mortara family, that Edgardo’s ride would be a short one, that his destination lay within the city walls. In this they were mistaken.
On the sidewalk, the frantic Vitta spied a Catholic neighbor, Antonio Facchini, a 31-year-old merchant, who happened to be passing by. Facchini tells of the startling encounter:
As I was walking down via Lame, I found a carriage standing in front of the house that the Mortaras were then living in, and I saw a policeman stationed at the door. I was stupefied by this, all the more so when I heard shouts coming from the stairs from someone, and then I saw another person rushing out of the door calling to me, “Come! Come see, Facchini! what a pathetic picture!” It was the Jew Vitta, a friend of mine. When I asked him what was going on, he told me to come in. I went into the building with him, and saw at midstairs a policeman who was coming down with a boy in his arms, and just behind him, out cold and lying across the stairs, the Jew Mortara.… We rushed to help him, and carried him into his home, where we put him down on a sofa.
