The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 5
The baptismal program outlined by the Archbishop was not aimed at Bologna’s few Jews, but it was based on the same theology that lay behind the boy’s abduction. Since his arrival in the city, Viale-Prelà had sought a way to involve the children of his diocese in his missionizing efforts, for he was troubled by the sad moral state of the youth. Clearly they were in dire need of religious education. He had begun the initiative shortly after arriving, and in a letter he sent to all parish priests in the diocese in September 1858, three months after Edgardo was taken, Viale-Prelà instructed all parishes to participate.
The letter alerted his flock to the barbarous custom in China of abandoning babies, a practice found all too frequently among the world’s non-Christians. “This execrable custom is so widespread among those teeming hordes,” he wrote, “that we see hundreds of thousands of these poor little creatures, shortly after birth, being drowned in the sea, or in the rivers, or eaten by animals, or trampled by carriages or by horses.” He called on every child in the diocese to make a small weekly contribution to the Church’s effort to save these unwanted children. Not only would their lives be spared if the Church could find them in time, but “in addition, they can be regenerated through the waters of Holy Baptism, so that if they die at an early age, they become little angels who fly up to heaven, and should they survive, they will be educated in the true faith, destined to spread Christianity in those lands in which today reigns an idolatry both sacrilegious and stupid.… Oh, what a blessing God will bestow on our families whose contributions will have sent Angels to Heaven!”7
The Archbishop made his own modest, if unusual, contribution to the winning of heathen souls in the year of Edgardo’s abduction, a victory that gave him particular satisfaction because it came at the expense of just the kind of public indecency he was committed to curbing. One of the many circuses that traveled town to town in Italy had set up its show of wild animals and wonders in Bologna. Among its biggest attractions was a black youth touted as a real live cannibal. Indeed, he looked fierce, dressed in an animal-pelt outfit reeking of savagery. Word of the display reached the Archbishop, who had the matter looked into. The “cannibal,” it turned out, was an illiterate boy of sixteen. Investigation revealed that he had indeed come from Africa and was not baptized. In order to get the boy away from his French keepers—for it was a French circus troupe—the Archbishop had to buy him, at considerable cost.
Thus procured, the boy was sent to a local Church institute where he was instructed in the catechism and the principles of the Catholic religion and then baptized. The following summer, in 1859, the circus manager paid an unexpected visit to the Archbishop. It seems the circus was suffering as a result of the loss of its most exotic attraction, but his pleas that the “cannibal” be returned were refused. The young convert, described by the priest in charge of his education as blessed with a gentle and loyal disposition, became a servant for one of Bologna’s most illustrious families.8
Viale-Prelà’s arrival was a boon to the demoralized corps of conservative Catholics in Bologna. Among his most ambitious efforts was the founding of a newspaper, L’osservatore bolognese, designed to combat the liberal ideas that had gained so much currency. The first issue of the weekly appeared on April 9, 1858, two and a half months before Marshal Lucidi appeared at the Mortara home. Its first article on the Mortara case did not appear until early October, when the paper expressed its shock over the massive scale of the protests against the Mortara abduction, which had spread throughout Europe and beyond. Titled “The Jew of Bologna,” the article dismissed the hundreds of critical stories devoted to the case as a jumble of “fantasy, tall tales, insolence, blasphemies,” and branded the papers that published them as “irreligious, heretical, Judaic.”9
To nourish a renewed religious commitment, the Archbishop also organized a campaign of missions to the parishes of his diocese. In this, he joined a larger movement that was sweeping Catholic Europe. Skilled Church orators—typically Jesuits—traveled from parish to parish organizing brief periods of intense preaching and prayer. Cardinal Viale-Prelà’s reputation among his critics for excessive attachment to the Jesuits was reinforced by his heavy reliance on the order for this campaign, inaugurated in April 1857. The Jesuits began their work of proselytizing and spiritual renewal by visiting each of the city’s parish churches in turn. Bologna liberals’ views of the campaign are pithily reflected in Bottrigari’s diary: the Jesuits, he wrote, were spreading “ideas that were not only retrograde but entirely opposed to people’s civil and moral progress.”10
The Archbishop’s spiritual-regeneration campaign had scarcely begun when exhilarating news arrived: the Pope had decided to make a journey to the Legations, and would be spending a full two months in Bologna, aimed at showing the world how fond his subjects were of him and how committed they were to continued pontifical rule.
It was the papal Secretary of State’s idea that a grand tour of this kind be made. Not only did Cardinal Antonelli hope to shore up internal support for papal rule in the Legations, he was also worried about the Holy See’s precarious diplomatic position. The previous year, 1856, Europe’s major powers had gathered at the Congress of Paris, where they heard formal protests on behalf of the people of Bologna and the rest of the Legations. The petitioners accused the papal regime of administrative ineptitude, financial mismanagement, and an inability to curb rampant lawlessness. Only the presence of Austrian troops, the petitioners argued, prevented the Pope’s disgruntled subjects from rising in revolt. The prelates were no longer capable of governing; the territories should be freed from papal rule. At the same conference, Count Camillo di Cavour, representing the kingdom of Sardinia, had pressed for the annexation of the duchies of Modena and Parma to the Piedmontese state, and the withdrawal of Austrian forces from the peninsula.
The Pope was stung by these attacks and by the reproaches voiced by the English and French delegates to the conference, who blamed the Vatican’s governmental incompetence for provoking the prolonged Austrian occupation of the Legations. Pius IX was also worried about the movement for national unification, which was showing signs of new vigor in the peninsula. It was, in fact, in 1857 that the National Society was formed, based in Turin and dedicated to the unification of the Italian nation under the crown of Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia.11
Of course, the idea of a caravan carrying a divinely ordained ruler to bless his far-flung subjects is an ancient one, the royal progress long a favored means of “demonstrating sovereignty to skeptics,” in Clifford Geertz’s felicitous phrase.12 The Pope had a recent example before him, for earlier in 1857, the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, had visited his own restless subjects in Lombardy and Venice. The idea, in short, was to stimulate popular enthusiasm throughout the Pope’s realm and convince England, France, and Piedmont of the solidity of his rule.
Bologna was to be the principal destination of Pius IX’s voyage, and the Archbishop, the Cardinal Legate, and the local Austrian military command worked hard to make the occasion sufficiently magnificent. The Austrian general wanted to deploy heavy artillery in the middle of Piazza Maggiore to discourage would-be protesters during the Pope’s visit, but Church officials, sensitive to the unfortunate impression this might create, prevailed on him to find a less visible site for his cannons.
Pius IX’s procession into Bologna the evening of June 9 was suitably grand. Striding in front of the beautiful horse-drawn coach bearing the Pope down the old Roman road, Strada Maggiore, military trumpeters announced the Pontiff’s impending arrival. His coach was surrounded by a guard of nobles, with a high official of the pontifical militia riding alongside one door and an Austrian official aside the other. Behind the coach rode an impressive assortment of full-dress generals, followed by coaches bearing members of the noble papal court, and then, stretching far down the road, a line of carriages carrying the local nobles who had come to greet the Pope.
As the lurching procession neared the city, it came to a triumphal arch, constructed just for this occasion, covered with buntings on which the colors of Bologna and the papacy were superimposed. There the carriages stopped, and the Pope was welcomed by a delegation of the city’s nobility, who presented him the key to the city, nestled atop a plush cushion. Pius IX ascended a luxurious throne by the side of the arch and proceeded to give his blessing to the assembled dignitaries. He then returned to his carriage, in which the archbishops of Ferrara and Pisa awaited him. The papal procession got moving again, making its way through the great Porta Maggiore and into the city, passing through streets festooned with brightly colored banners and buntings. The papal carriage finally stopped at Bologna’s cathedral, where Cardinal Viale-Prelà extended his arm to help the Pontiff out. Together they entered the church, where fourteen bishops greeted them.
Just what impression the Pope’s arrival made on the people of Bologna is difficult to say. The many hagiographic accounts of the triumphal entry published by the Church in the wake of the visit paint a moving picture of adulation and devotion. In a typical example of this genre, the streets were described as lined with a multitude of people, “full of life, energized, happy, prostrating themselves as the papal carriage passed in a sign of religious reverence.” The author recounts that the people appeared as “children happily pressing up to their father, and in every possible way showing their joy.” The presence of “a few angry souls who tried to somehow disturb that joy” was unhappily noted, and likened to the lamentable presence, in even the best of families, of the occasional undisciplined child.13
Enrico Bottrigari, who also witnessed the evening’s events, paints a different portrait. “In the soul of the crowd,” he observed, “one saw the stimulus of curiosity rather than devotion, much less enthusiasm.”14
The evening proceeded in eye-popping, ear-splitting style. After saying mass in the cathedral, the assembled clerics made their way to the nearby Piazza Maggiore, where a multitude of military and civilian bands played. The festivities stopped long enough to allow the Pope, from a balcony above the central piazza, to bless his subjects. The displays that followed were indeed impressive, with the Austrian troops marching through the square on horses decked with colored lanterns and torches. The spectacle pleased the Pope, who smiled his delight from the window, his hand held up in benediction.
Although government authorities from Rome had prohibited any signs of protest in the towns that lay along the Pope’s route, a petition of grievances had been drawn up in Bologna, signed by a hundred of the city’s elite. The petitioners’ plan to present it to the pontiff during his visit, however, came to naught.15
The Pope did meet some prominent critics while he was in Bologna, men who begged him to reform the Papal States before it was too late. Among these was Count Giuseppe Pasolini, who a few years later would join the cabinet of the new Italian government. At the time, though, the Pope considered him a loyal friend. Indeed, the Count had briefly served as his minister of commerce in 1848. The meeting was an emotional one, two luminaries of an older world uncertainly confronting the new.
Pius IX was pained to hear Pasolini’s view that the Pontiff was set on a disastrous course of intransigence, and that he was unwittingly playing into the hands of revolutionaries bent on destroying the old order. At the end of the unhappy encounter, the embattled and emotional Pope, in tears, asked, “So you too, my dear Count, are leaving me?” “No, Your Holiness,” Pasolini replied, “it is not we who are leaving you, but you who are abandoning us.”16
While the Pope was in Bologna, the friars of San Domenico invited him to join them in celebrating Saint Dominic’s day, on August 8. Along with his Dominican brothers, Father Feletti—until recently prior of the convent as well as its longtime inquisitor—was thrilled to hear that the Pope would indeed be coming.
The Dominicans were doubly pleased about the Pope’s visit, because they hoped to enlist his aid. Since the Napoleonic army had evicted them from their church and convent at the end of the previous century, they had succeeded in regaining only a part of their former vast complex. Unfortunately for them, the Austrians’ military headquarters for Bologna was across the street, and a substantial portion of the Dominicans’ buildings had been converted to barracks for the troops.
Following the celebration of a mass honoring their founder, the Dominicans took the Pope on a tour of their library. Once one of Italy’s foremost book collections, it had been sadly reduced as a result of the Napoleonic depredations. Not only had large portions of it been carried off by the French, but a good deal of the rest had been seized to stock the city’s municipal library. After the tour, the friars took their guest to a reception in his honor. There they asked him to order the removal of the Austrian troops from their convent.
To show their appreciation, Father Feletti and the other convent leaders presented the Pontiff with a beautiful reliquary in which they had placed a fragment of Saint Dominic’s bones. There was no greater gift they could offer. Although San Domenico boasted many treasures, none was more precious to the friars than the holy remains of their founder.17
Pius IX accepted the reliquary with gratitude, for he was a man with a deep appreciation of the holy and a firm belief in the powers of the spiritual realm. Two years later, the Dominicans’ wish would be fulfilled, and the entire Austrian military force in their complex hustled out, though hardly in the way they anticipated on that glorious August morning.
A week later, Pius IX left Bologna. His old friend Count Pasolini sadly described the scene: “A touching and lonely departure. You could see Pius IX’s hand reach out from the door of the papal carriage, blessing the German troops who, silent, standing at attention, in single file, presented their arms. Nobody else was on the roads.”18
CHAPTER 4
Days of Desperation
FRIDAY, June 25, 1858, the day after 6-year-old Edgardo rode down Bologna’s cobblestone streets in the arms of the police, Momolo was still bewildered. He did not know who was supposed to have baptized his son, when they had done it, or how the Inquisitor had come to hear of it. The one thing he did know—he thought—was that his son was still somewhere in the city, most likely in the convent of San Domenico itself. Just before Marshal Lucidi took Edgardo away, Momolo’s friend Vitta demanded a receipt for the boy. The note Lucidi scrawled read: “I have received and been consigned by Sig. Momolo Mortara his son Edgardo, aged 7 [sic], who by order of the Holy Father Inquisitor General is to be deposited in that Convent.”1
At the moment, Momolo’s only hope of contacting his son was through Father Feletti. Momolo recalled the Father’s suggestion that he prepare some clothes for the boy, and although the Inquisitor had said that he would send someone to pick up the package, Momolo decided to take it to the convent himself to see if he could learn where his son was.
After lunch, he prepared a little bundle—the boy had left with only what he was wearing—and asked his brother-in-law, Angelo Moscato, to return with him to San Domenico. When they arrived at the splendid church courtyard, a lay Dominican brother informed them that Father Feletti was away and suggested they come back the next day. On their return the next morning, Edgardo’s clothes again in hand, they were ushered into the Inquisitor’s quarters.
Father Feletti received them graciously, but told Momolo that his son would have no need of the clothes after all. Edgardo was doing just fine, although just where the boy was, the Inquisitor would not say. I have entrusted your son, he reassured Momolo, to someone who is a good family man himself, a man who can be counted on to treat Edgardo with a father’s care. What Momolo was not told was that the family man in question was a person he had recently met—Brigadier Agostini.
Momolo and his brother-in-law could get nothing more from the Inquisitor and returned dejectedly home, where friends and neighbors soon brought the news that the carriage that had made off with Edgardo had been spotted as it sped out of the city. It had not gone to San Domenico at all.
Momolo was in shock. His wife, Marianna, was, according to some reports, going out of her mind. They knew only too well the fate that had befallen them, for it was one that they, their relatives, and their Jewish friends had feared all their lives.
Once a Jewish child had been baptized, the child was in the eyes of the Church no longer a Jew and could not remain with his or her parents. In Catholic theology, baptism is viewed as a practice instituted by Jesus himself; its effects are instantaneous and irreversible. Through baptism, the individual becomes part of the mystical body of Jesus Christ and thereby a member of the true Church. Baptism releases the recipient from original sin and all other sins committed up to that time, and allows the beneficiary to enjoy eternal life. The practical requirements of the ceremony are modest. Water must be sprinkled on the person’s head while the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” are said. Although sanctified water is preferred, the baptism is valid regardless of the kind of water used. Under normal circumstances a priest should officiate, but anyone can carry out the rite as long as the baptizer has the proper intention. Indeed, not only can baptism be performed by someone who is not a priest; it can be performed by someone who is not even a Christian.2
Reggio and Modena, where Momolo and Marianna had grown up, were no strangers to such cases of police appearing in the night and demanding that a baptized Jewish child be turned over to them. They could scarcely have forgotten what had happened in Reggio less than a month before their first child was born there.
It was the evening of July 12, 1844. Police appeared at the home of Abram Maroni and his wife, Venturina, and informed them that their 19-month-old daughter, Pamela, had been secretly baptized. They wrested the child from her parents’ arms and left. Abram learned that the alleged baptism had been administered by a young Catholic woman who had worked in their home for a few days. The family’s protests—to the Archbishop, the Duke of Modena, and even the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome—were to no avail. Pamela was taken to the local Casa dei Catecumeni—House of the Catechumens, the Church institution founded in the sixteenth century for the conversion of Jews and other infidels—and her parents were forbidden to see her until she became an adult.3
