The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 37
In Rome, a siege mentality prevailed. The panic felt at the time of Sir Moses Montefiore’s hasty departure in 1859—when news of victorious Italian armies on the march had sent so many in Rome’s foreign community packing—subsided somewhat, but the threat of invasion remained. Although cooler heads realized that the Italian troops were unlikely to attack, for they would have had to fight the French, the Vatican had other armed patriots to worry about as well—most notably Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers, men inspired by dreams of a united Italian nation, with Rome its capital.
The gates of the city were barricaded. After 9 p.m. no one could enter or leave. On every street corner, it seemed, stood two armed guards, checking the papers of passersby. Many of the guards were members of the Vatican’s own defense force, volunteers and mercenaries from various European nations. Most spoke no Italian, and although French had become the lingua franca of the protectors of the Holy See, most spoke no French either. For the Romans, tension became a way of life. Year followed year, and Pope Pius IX, with the assistance of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, held on, an ecclesiastical island in an Italian sea. Pilgrims continued to make their way to Rome; the cardinals could still be seen, resplendent in their purple robes; bishops clutched their ornate miters; and the Swiss guards, with their broad-striped tunics, lent a carnivalesque air to the area around the Vatican, set in colorful contrast with the guard of noblemen clad in their black velvet cloaks.2
The military defeats suffered by Pius IX, far from leading him to make peace with the new regime, prompted him to go newly on the attack. In 1862, his allocution, Maxima quidem laetitia, reaffirmed that the Pope could not be free to do his spiritual duty without temporal power, and on December 8, 1864, he issued one of the most famous—and controversial—encyclicals of modern times, Quanta cura, with its accompanying Syllabus of Errors.3
The idea of preparing an inventory of the errors of modern times had long been championed by the Jesuits of Civiltà Cattolica. A team of Vatican experts drew up the list, and the Pope’s encyclical and the Syllabus were sent out together to all bishops with a cover letter sent from Cardinal Antonelli. The Cardinal explained: “The Pope has already in Encyclicals and Allocutions condemned the principal errors of this most unhappy age.… Therefore the Pope wished a Syllabus of these Errors to be drawn up for the use of all the Catholic bishops that they may have before their eyes the pernicious doctrines that he has proscribed.”4
For the Pope’s enemies, the Syllabus simply confirmed their belief that the pontifical state—if not the papacy itself—was a glaring anachronism in the nineteenth century. Among the pernicious doctrines the Pope condemned were that people should be free to profess whatever religion they thought best; that even those not in the Catholic Church could aspire to eternal salvation; that Catholics could disagree with the need for the Pope to have temporal power; that there should be a separation of Church and state; and “that the Pope could and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”5
Even many loyal Catholics—perhaps most—were shocked by the Syllabus, in which the Pope seemed to condemn progress and modern civilization. For the anticlerical forces, the Syllabus was “manna from heaven,” in the words of Roger Aubert, Pius IX’s biographer. One Piedmontese newspaper, noting that the Pope had condemned modern science, delightfully (if maliciously) asked whether he now planned to ban trains, telegraph, steam engines, and gaslights from his—albeit recently reduced—lands.6
In 1864, another episode involving a Jewish boy demonstrated anew the Vatican’s intention to hold out against the forces of secularization. The case involved 9-year-old Giuseppe Coen, who lived in Rome’s ghetto. One day Giuseppe failed to return home from his job at a nearby cobbler’s shop. His parents soon discovered that he had been taken to the House of the Catechumens, forced there, they said, by the Catholic cobbler. For the Jews and the enemies of Church temporal power, this had all the makings of Mortara redux.7
At the beginning of August, when protests about the new case began to appear in the liberal press, the church-allied Giornale di Roma painted its own picture of what had happened. Giuseppe Coen, a Jewish boy of the Rome ghetto, had long nourished the wish to become Christian, along with the fear that he would be severely punished if his parents heard of it. “For fifteen days he begged his employer to take him to the House of the Catechumens.” Finally, on July 25, taking advantage of the visit by a relative of the cobbler who happened to have a priest with him, Giuseppe’s pleas were answered. They took him to the Catechumens, where the boy convinced the Rector of his fervent desire to become a Christian.
The Coens had wasted no time in seeking French aid, for in the wake of the Mortara case they had no illusions of getting their son released simply by petitioning the Church. Three days after the child’s disappearance, the French ambassador went to see Cardinal Antonelli on their behalf, and he returned to the Vatican the following morning to renew his angry protests.
The French liberal press quickly took the case up, demanding to know why French soldiers were standing by while Jewish children were being stolen from their parents. On August 13, the papal nuncio in Paris wrote to Cardinal Antonelli to report on his recent unpleasant meeting with the French minister of foreign affairs, Drouyn de Lhuys. The Minister railed against the holding of the boy, calling it an action contrary to the laws of nature, “carried out and sanctioned by the Holy See under the eyes of the French troops.” The nuncio reported, “I responded that France’s protection of the pope’s temporal power did not give it the right to involve itself in measures and actions that regarded the Pontiff’s spiritual jurisdiction.”8
At the same time the Secretary of State was receiving this report from Paris, he was also given a long letter that the delegates of Rome’s Università Israelitica had written to the Pope, pleading for the Coen boy’s return. The delegates wrote that they had evidence enabling them to “exclude entirely” the notion that Giuseppe had acted on his own.
Giuseppe’s mother was, meanwhile, arrested outside the House of the Catechumens as she tried to get a glimpse of her son, or so at least the papers of Italy reported.9 The Rector’s request to the Secretary of State to do something about the noisome woman produced some help, in the form of police patrols, but Giuseppe’s mother was not easily discouraged.
Finally, on October 1, a Bologna paper reported the departure of what remained of the Coen family for Livorno, in Tuscany. They had to leave, the paper claimed, “to remove the boy’s mother from the violent pain that afflicts her every day as she wanders around outside the House of the Catechumens, where her son is kept, and from which she is often brutally chased away by the police.” In a story later taken up by the liberal press throughout Europe, it was reported that “the wretched woman is seriously threatened with dementia.”10
If revulsion at the Pope’s refusal to release Edgardo Mortara had contributed to Napoleon’s decision to back the plan to take the Legations from the Pontiff, his anger over the Coen case, according to some observers, contributed to his next step: pulling French troops out of Rome. According to La nation, when the French ambassador had spoken to Cardinal Antonelli about the Coen boy, he had warned him that “if the pontifical court persists on a path that so conflicted with the general direction of modern ideas, and particularly of French ideas, the Emperor’s government, despite its great sympathy for the pontifical court … would be constrained to abandon the Pope to his own forces.”11 And, indeed, just a few weeks after the ambassador’s request for Giuseppe’s restitution was denied, the French signed an agreement with the Italian government to begin removing all French troops from Rome. Although the agreement bound the Italians not to attack Rome, the Pope had little confidence that the promise would be kept once the French left. A few years later, when the paltry papal guard was finally overrun by Italian troops, the Austrian ambassador in Rome, referring to Giuseppe Coen, told his sovereign, Franz Josef: “Italy should be erecting arches of triumph in honor of this little Jew.”12
With the phased French withdrawal from Rome under way, the city’s status once more became the question of the day. Some conservatives favored a compromise by which Rome would become part of Italy, but with the Pope enjoying special powers over the city. But even then, several years after Edgardo was taken, the Mortara case continued to cast its shadow. In July 1865, when Marco Minghetti, until recently Italian prime minister, explained his opposition to this proposal, he said that Italian soldiers could not replace the French in protecting papal rule in Rome, for “we cannot go to guard the Mortara boy for the Pope.”13
By this time, Edgardo had already spent half of his life in the Church. Memories of his parents were getting hazy, for he had not seen or heard from them since their last visit to the Catechumens in 1858.
By the time he was thirteen, Edgardo had decided to devote his life to the Church, and he became a novice in the order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran, on his way to becoming a friar himself. He took the name of Pio, honoring his new father and protector, Pius IX. At the initiation ceremony, Father Strozzi, General of the Order, preached on Isaiah 65:1: “I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me.” The Old Testament passage had itself been quoted by Paul in Romans 10:20, in which Paul expresses his heartfelt wish that all the Jews be saved by embracing Jesus.14
On April 12 of the following year, 1866, when the Pope made his annual visit outside the city walls to the church of Sant’Agnese, 14-year-old Edgardo was given a special honor. Stepping out from a group of young seminarians, he recited by heart an original poem of fulsome praise to the Pope. Each of the eighteen flowery verses had eight lines.15
Shortly thereafter, in 1867, the Pontiff sent the boy a message that shows, almost a decade after Pius IX’s first defense of the decision to hold on to Edgardo, the Pope’s unchanged view that he had done God’s will, and that for doing so he had suffered grievously. He wrote:
You are very dear to me, my little son, for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at a high price. So it is. I paid dearly for your ransom. Your case set off a worldwide storm against me and the apostolic See. Governments and peoples, the rulers of the world as well as the journalists—who are the truly powerful people of our times—declared war on me. Monarchs themselves entered the battle against me, and with their ambassadors they flooded me with diplomatic notes, and all this because of you.… People lamented the harm done to your parents because you were regenerated by the grace of holy baptism and brought up according to God’s wishes. And in the meantime no one showed any concern for me, father of all the faithful.16
Later that year, in the wake of Garibaldi’s unsuccessful attempt to conquer Rome, French troops flooded back into the Holy City. For Edgardo, now a novitiate of the Canons Regular, the year was memorable for a more personal reason as well. He had finally heard from his parents. “I wrote letters to my parents many times,” he later recounted, “dealing with religion and doing what I could to convince them of the truth of the Catholic faith.” Unfortunately, he added, “they could see that these letters, however much they were the expression of my own strong personal conviction, could not have been exclusively my own work, and so they did not respond.” It was only in May of 1867 that they did reply, perhaps in the hope that Rome was about to be freed from papal rule and that they would soon be reunited with him. As Edgardo later described the letter: “After they assured me of their unshakable affection, they noted that if they hadn’t yet responded to my letters, it was because they had nothing of me in them outside of my name and signature, but that they now hoped that I would be able to correspond with them without any surveillance.” Momolo and Marianna still clung to the hope that their son, deep down, had remained faithful to his family and, what came to the same thing for them, to his religion.17
The Mortaras’ prayers that the Pope’s rule in Rome would fall before the advancing armies of Italian unification were, at long last, answered in 1870, eleven years after the demise of the pontifical state in Bologna. For the past decade they had been following political events closely, praying for the day when Edgardo would be free to return home. He was 6 when the papal police came to take him from their Bologna home. He was now 18.
In July 1870, France made the mistake of declaring war on Prussia, and in a matter of weeks the French army was crushed by Prussian troops. The remaining French soldiers in Rome were withdrawn, Napoleon himself was deposed, and a new French republic was proclaimed. With the French troops gone and France itself no longer a threat, the Italian parliament authorized that military action be taken, if necessary, to establish Rome as the nation’s capital. In a last-minute effort to avoid bloodshed, King Victor Emmanuel sent a letter to the Pope, asking him to accede to the Italian army’s march into Rome and guaranteeing the Pope full spiritual independence for the Holy See. Pius IX, however, would have no part of such a devil’s pact, and stood his ground.
General Raffaele Cadorna subsequently led the Italian army into the region of Lazio, moving to the outskirts of Rome without encountering resistance. On September 20, 1870, the troops opened a breach in the city walls at Porta Pia. Following a brief battle with the hopelessly outmanned pontifical forces, they brought papal rule of Rome to an end. The Pope took refuge in the Vatican, whose buildings and grounds had been left alone. Six weeks later, portraying himself as a captive in the Vatican, Pius IX issued an encyclical branding the Italian occupation of the territories of the Holy See “unjust, violent, null, and invalid” and excommunicated the King of Italy and all those who were involved in the usurpation of the Papal States.18
General Cadorna, in his memoirs, recalled the giddy early days of Italian occupation of Rome as a time when old wrongs could be put right. Of all these wrongs, the one he singled out for special attention was the taking and holding of Giuseppe Coen, “a fact,” he wrote, “that six years earlier had upset the entire civilized world.”
The General reported what happened when, within two weeks of the battle of Porta Pia, Giuseppe’s parents returned to the city and headed for the Church institute for orphans where their son had been living for the past six years. On knocking on the door, he wrote, the Coens were “brusquely turned away by the director.” With an ever-growing crowd of Jews milling angrily in the streets, Rome’s police chief himself decided to take the matter in hand. He went to the orphanage but was told that the boy was no longer there; he had fled. “However,” wrote the General, “he had in fact been spirited away, and we found where he was being hidden.” One of the priests who worked at the orphanage had taken Giuseppe, both man and boy in civilian disguise, to the home of a lay employee of the orphanage. There the police tracked them down and handed the boy over to his parents.
In General Cadorna’s report to his superiors on the conquest of Rome, he described all this and discussed the ticklish question of what action to take against those who had kept the boy from his parents. “Although the pontifical laws left me in doubt about the possibility of applying a penalty against those who originally took Coen, I believed it right to order, on my own responsibility, the arrest of the Rector of the Institute of the Orphans and the person who was involved in hiding the boy, in order to satisfy the public conscience. Thus the judicial authorities are proceeding with the case.”19 Both the Rector and the employee who had hidden the boy were thrown in jail.
From the perspective of Rome’s Jews, as well as for Italy’s liberals, what might have been a triumphal ending to a sad story became, instead, something quite different. When Giuseppe’s mother, who had not spoken with her son since he went off to work at the cobbler’s shop half a dozen years earlier, finally got to see him again, she threw her arms around the now 16-year-old boy and covered him with kisses. Yet, wrote Cadorna, it was “all in vain. The voice of blood had been snuffed out, he didn’t give a rap for his mother, and the cynical rector of the institute said, ‘He should be considered to be no longer part of his family.’ ” Nonetheless, the Rector could not prevent the Coens from taking their son back with them, and on October 9 Giuseppe was consigned to his mother. But, as a local liberal correspondent described the scene, “for his desperate, weeping mother he had only words of disdain and rage, saying he no longer had anything in common with her.”20
Despite the boy’s opposition, a court had ordered his return to his parents, on the ground that his father enjoyed legal rights over him. Hoping that, by removing their son from Rome, his old loyalties would reemerge, the Coens took him to Livorno.21 Yet Giuseppe never did change his mind, and as soon as he could, he returned to Rome and became a priest.
The Mortara family was also living in Tuscany, having moved from Turin to Florence in 1865, the year in which Italy’s capital made the same move. Like Michele and Fortunata Coen, Momolo Mortara trailed the Italian army into Rome hoping to reclaim his son. He may not, however, have been the first in his family to reach Rome, for, according to some accounts, his son Riccardo preceded him. It was the same Riccardo who, twelve years earlier, on that traumatic night in June, had run through the streets of Bologna searching for his uncles, tearfully telling them the news of the police who had appeared in his home in search of his younger brother. Perhaps as a result of that experience, Riccardo had chosen to join the Italian army and, at the time of the battle of Porta Pia, was a young infantry officer.
Although militarily the battle was a travesty of mismatched forces, patriots did what they could to puff it up. As the Italian troops poured through the gate, Riccardo, fighting behind General Cadorna, raced to San Pietro in Vincoli, where he knew that his brother was being held. When, however, Riccardo appeared in the doorway of Edgardo’s convent room, wearing the uniform of the Italian light infantry, he was in for a rude welcome. His 19-year-old brother, dressed in an initiate’s robes, placed one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sacrilegious sight and raised the other in front of him, signaling Riccardo to stop where he was. “Get back, Satan!” Edgardo shouted. But, the crestfallen Riccardo replied, “I am your brother.” To this Edgardo responded, “Before you get any closer to me, take off that assassin’s uniform.”22
