The Mortara case and the issues it raises

M

aybe it’s the long-term fallout from reading Marcus Lehman’s The Family y Aguilar as a child, but whatever its roots, the terrifying reality of Jewish life in Inquisition-era Spain has resonated deeply within me from a young age.

At some point I was shocked to learn that the Inquisition was not a phenomenon limited to 15th- and 16th-century Spain, but a permanent institution of the Catholic Church that continued to hunt and punish infidels for hundreds of years after that time in numerous countries where the Church held sway. In fact, it officially continues to exist to this day; called the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, or the Holy Office, it’s the office within the Vatican hierarchy responsible for defending Catholic doctrine.

That long-ago sense of terror recently resurfaced ever so faintly when I read an essay published in the journal First Things, in which a Catholic priest vigorously defended the kidnapping in 1858 of Edgardo Mortara. Readers may recall that last summer, I wrote about the priceless Judaica collection of the renowned philanthropists and ArtScroll Shas patrons Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein, and one of the pieces I described was an 1862 oil painting by the German-Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim called The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. The painting, of a little Jewish boy surrounded by his distraught parents on one side and a Catholic priest, monk, and nun on the other, was based on a seminal event that had occurred just four years earlier: the seizing by Church authorities of six-year-old Edgardo Mortara, one of eight children in a Jewish family, from the family’s home in Bologna, Italy, whose gentile servant girl had secretly baptized him when he was gravely ill.

Despite his parents’ desperate pleas and the intercession of Moses Montefiore, the Rothschilds, rabbis across the globe, and even Napoleon III, the boy was brought to Rome and raised under the tutelage of Pope Pius IX, eventually becoming a priest. Edgardo’s abduction was an international cause célèbre that some historians credit with helping to bring about the end of the pontifical state.

And now, 159 years later, a Boston-based Catholic seminarian named Romanus Cessario has written a review of the just-published English translation of Mortara’s memoirs. Tragically, Mortara remained in the Church until his death in 1940, and he not only expressed gratitude to the pope but even the hope that he would be granted sainthood. In his essay, Cessario unabashedly defends Pius’s actions as the necessary outgrowth of Catholic belief, writing that “divine Providence kindly arranged for [Mortara] being introduced into a regular Christian life.”

The essay has stirred significant controversy in Catholic circles, with a small group of ultratraditionalists defending Cessario and a larger group of prominent figures expressing outrage, such as Princeton’s Robert George, who wrote that the kidnapping was an “abomination and defending it is an embarrassment… Christians, including popes, can commit, and sometimes have committed, profoundly un-Christian acts…. This, shamefully, was such a case.”

In the Public Discourse online journal, Catholic legal scholar Robert T. Miller severely criticized Cessario’s review and called on the editor of First Things, R.R. Reno, to disavow it. Subsequently, Reno defended the publication of the essay, while calling what Pius did a “grievous act” that was “a stain on the Catholic Church.”

Today, the Catholic Church is a beleaguered institution, and the threat of abduction of children by Church authorities is a thing of the distant past. Still, it’s not easy to read an essay in 2018 by a priest outright defending the kidnapping of a Jewish child.

Other than as a window into the divergent views of contemporary Catholics, is this controversy at all relevant? It may yet be, because although the current flap will blow over, this may not be the last we hear about Mortara and Pius.

For the last several years, a famous motion picture producer has been planning a film adaptation of the Mortara saga, which will certainly bring it again to wide public attention. Moreover, Pius has been under consideration for years now for canonization as a saint, in which case this controversy will surely flare anew and even more fiercely.

But the Mortara case and the issues it raises about familial autonomy versus the power of the state may have other lessons to teach. As conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher puts it, “what would Cessario and those who agree with him say to radical Muslims today who kidnap non-Muslim children, compel them to say the shahada, then refuse to return them to their parents because they cannot let a Muslim child be raised by infidels? <em> Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 695. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com