Edgardo Levi Mortara (Bologna, Papal States, August 27, 1851 – Liège, Belgium, March 11, 1940) was a Roman Catholic priest who was born and raised Jewish during only the first six years of his life, until he was seized and taken from his family by papal authorities. Mortara became the center of an international controversy when he was removed from his Jewish parents by authorities of the Papal States and raised as a Catholic. Church authorities took custody of the boy after receiving a report that he had been given emergency baptism by a domestic servant during a serious infantile illness. The rationale for this action was that in the Papal States, it was against the law for non-Catholics to raise Catholic children. Mortara was adopted by Pope Pius IX and entered the seminary in his teens.
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On 23 June 1858, in Bologna, in the Papal States, police arrived at the home of a Jewish couple, Salomone ("Momolo") and Marianna Padovani Mortara, to take one of their eight children, six-year-old Edgardo, and transport him to Rome to be raised as a ward of the state.
The police had orders from Holy Office authorities in Rome, authorized by Pope Pius IX.[1] Church officials had been told that a fourteen-year-old[2] illiterate Catholic servant of the Mortaras, Anna Morisi, had baptized the infant Edgardo while he was deathly ill because she hoped to secure eternal life for him. Under Catholic doctrine, "emergency" baptism may be performed by anyone, man or woman, even if non-Christian, and is considered a valid type of baptism. This baptism meant little Edgardo was henceforth a Catholic Christian. According to canon law, which was also the law in the Papal States, non-Christians could not raise a Christian child, even if the Christian child was their own. In 1912, in his testimony in favour of the beatification of Pope Pius IX, Edgardo himself noted that the laws of the Papal States did not allow Catholics to work in the homes of Jewish families (one reason being to prevent this very situation from happening).[3] That law was widely disregarded due to the necessity for Catholic servants, who could work on the Jewish Shabbat when Jews cannot perform any kind of work (see shabbos goy).[2]
David Kertzer has questioned whether the baptism, which had no witnesses, actually took place. In his 1997 book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Kertzer investigates the story and quotes from contemporary testimony. It appears that Morisi told the local priests her story at a time when she was seeking to obtain a dowry from the Church, and investigations on behalf of the Mortaras revealed that she was reputed to be a thief. It was reported that Edgardo's illness had not been life-threatening, thus not requiring an emergency baptism. On the other hand, other testimony was consistent with Morisi's story, and the Church authorities were evidently persuaded that she was telling the truth.
Edgardo was taken to a house for Roman converts (a "House of Catechumens"[2]) in Rome, maintained at state expense. His parents were not allowed to see him for several weeks, and after this period were not allowed to see him unsupervised. Pius IX took a personal interest in the case (Kertzer confirms that the pope helped raise Edgardo), and all appeals to the Church were rebuffed. Church authorities told the Mortaras that they could have Edgardo back if they would convert to Catholicism, but they refused. According to Kertzer, the Mortaras had several audiences with the pope regarding the matter.
The incident soon received extensive publicity both in Italy and internationally. In the Kingdom of Sardinia, the largest independent state in Italy and the centre of the liberal nationalist movement for Italian unification, both the government and the press used the case to reinforce their claims that the Papal States were ruled by medieval obscurantists and should be liberated from Papal rule.
Protests were lodged by both Jewish organizations and prominent political and intellectual figures in Britain, the United States, Germany, Austria, and France. Soon the governments of these countries added to calls for Edgardo to be returned to his parents. The French Emperor Napoleon III, whose troops garrisoned Rome to protect the Pope against the Italian anti-clerical unificationists, also protested.
When a delegation of prominent Jews saw the Pope in 1859, he told them, "I couldn't care less what the world thinks."[4] At another meeting, he brought Edgardo with him to show that the boy was happy in his care. In 1865 he said: "I had the right and the duty to do what I did for this boy, and if I had to, I would do it again."[5][6] In a speech in 1871 defending his decision against his detractors, Pius said: "Of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places."[7][8]
The Mortara Incident may have helped persuade opinion that the Papal States should be conquered. When the French garrison was withdrawn in 1870, and the Italian army assaulted the city, Rome too was annexed by the newly unified, liberal Kingdom of Italy.
The Mortara affair resulted in the origin of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860. Adolphe Cremieux and other French-Jewish leaders formed the Alliance to protect all Jews who faced such persecution.[9]
In 1859, after Bologna had been annexed to Piedmont, the Mortara parents made another effort to recover their son, but he had been taken to Rome. In 1870, when Rome was captured from the Pope, they tried again, but Edgardo was then 19 and therefore legally an adult, and had declared his firm intention of remaining a Roman Catholic. In that year, he was assigned to France. The following year, his father died. In France, he entered the Augustinian order, being ordained a priest at the age of 23, and adopted the spiritual name Pius.[10] Fr. Edgardo Mortara was sent as a missionary to cities such as Munich, Mainz and Breslau to preach to the Jews there. He became fluent in a variety of languages. As he traveled widely, his effort to convince Jews to convert was mostly unsuccessful.[10]
During a public-speaking engagement in Italy he reestablished communications with his mother and siblings. In 1895, he attended his mother's funeral, led by the rabbi of Bologna. His nieces and nephews, as adults, recalled the frequent visits from the priest.[11]
In 1897, he preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, but Michael Corrigan, the Archbishop of New York, told the Vatican that he opposed Mortara's efforts to evangelise Jews on the grounds that such efforts might embarrass the Church in the eyes of the United States government. Fr. Mortara had asked Bishop Corrigan for financial support. The Archbishop refused.[10]
Mortara died in 1940 at the abbey of Bouhay in Bressoux, near Liège in Belgium, having spent his last years there.[12] He was 88 years old.
Civil law in the Papal States did not permit baptized Christians to be raised by non-Christians. Pope Pius IX, who had partially emancipated the Jews living in the Papal States, found himself in a quandary. The Mortara case was the catalyst for far-reaching political changes; its repercussions are still being felt within the Catholic Church and in relations between the Church and some Jewish organizations. The incident, in its briefest outline: Mortara was kidnapped from his home, raised a Catholic, ordained a priest, and remained a priest for the rest of his life. In §1672 of his testimony for the beatification of Pius IX, Mortara stated "I greatly desire the beatification and canonization of the Servant of God (Pius IX)."[3][13]
The Mortara affair increased discontent with the temporal power of the papacy within Italy and produced calls from around the world, including Emperor Franz Josef and Napoleon III, for Mortara to be returned to his parents, including 20 editorials in The New York Times.[14]
The Mortara case has attracted new attention in recent years because of the campaign to secure canonisation for Blessed Pius IX.[10] Jewish groups and others, led by several descendants of the Mortara family, protested the Vatican's beatification of Pius in 2000. In 1997 David Kertzer published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which brought the case back to public attention.
The story became the subject of a play, Edgardo Mine by Alfred Uhry, and an opera, "Il Caso Mortara" by Francesco Cilluffo, premiered February 25, 2010, by Dicapo Opera in New York City. An Irish film titled Edgardo Mortara, based on the play and Kertzer's book, had been planned to begin production via Miramax in October 2002 but the project was halted for lack of funds.[15]