The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (23 page)

The rest of the pro-Church press hammered away on the same theme. The image of the furious Jewish mother ripping the sacred medallion from her son’s chest struck a deep chord. And the notion that what bothered the Jewish parents was not the loss of their son’s company but the fact that he was being turned into a Christian redirected the attention of the readers from their feelings of commiseration as parents to their ancient anger at the perfidy of the Jews. In Bologna in December 1858, the weekly
Il vero amico
left nothing to its readers’ imaginations. Further embellishing the story, the paper reported that Marianna, on seeing her son, was “filled with anger and ripped the medallion from his chest, saying scornfully, ‘I’d rather see you dead than a Christian!’ ”
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Civiltà Cattolica
brought all these themes together in concluding its counterattack, portraying a boy besieged by his cruel Jewish parents, a boy graced by God, begging the Church for its spiritual and physical protection.

“Now does it seem right and generous to abandon this poor, weak, solitary creature and cast him off into the middle of a Judaic family that, without making any bones about it, shows that it is disposed to employ any means of enticement, of persuasion, and perhaps even of violence to drive him to an easy victory for apostasy?” In a final appeal, the author asks, “Would it seem right and generous to place this innocent boy on this cross, subject him to these torments, to the torture that it would be to find himself day in and day out exposed to his mother’s tenderness and his father’s severity?” The author reported that when he talked to little Edgardo, the boy had bravely assured him that were he to face such torture, he would not give in but would “recite the Christian prayers from morning to night and persuade his little brothers and sisters to imitate him.”
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These accounts of the divinely inspired Edgardo battling heroically against his infidel parents resonated profoundly among the faithful. The little boy became a martyr, ready to die for his newfound religion while standing up
to (although unfailingly showing the proper respect for) his parents, who were prepared to murder him should their campaign of psychological terror fail.

Having spent practically six weeks in Rome, the Mortaras were now resigned to going home without their son. Marianna’s promise to Edgardo would have to be broken. Around them swirled an international controversy as irate citizens gathered in protest meetings on both sides of the Atlantic and a chorus of voices, from Jewish ragpickers in Rome to international bankers, from Protestant ministers in England to the French emperor himself, urged that Edgardo be returned to his parents. Yet so far the Pope was standing firm.

The Mortaras’ trip to Rome in October had been an easy one, and during their voyage they had been filled with an anxious hope. Their return to Bologna was another matter, and their coach mates might have been pardoned if they thought that they were traveling with Job himself.

When he reached Florence, two-thirds of the way to Bologna, in early December, Momolo wrote to Scazzocchio to tell of their misadventures: “Our voyage up to Siena was anything but good. Four miles out of Rome, Marianna suffered from a powerful fainting spell, which lasted until a stranger gave up his good seat so that she could lie down all the way to Viterbo, where we arrived at three.” In Viterbo, they went to the home of a woman they knew, who kindly prepared Marianna’s favorite dish, a chicken soup. But as the coach continued on its way, torrential rains fell, and the driver informed his passengers that the swollen streams made the road impassable. Although the already anxious Mortaras said nothing, other passengers argued with the driver, urging him to go on. Reluctantly, he continued through the downpour until the coach reached a stream that had turned into a rushing river, through which there was no hope of passing. Yet they could not turn back, for the streams behind them had come up as well.

They traveled two miles down the stream in search of roadmen who could help them, and eventually they located four workers. Offering to pay the men out of their own pockets, the passengers got them to return to the crossing and work on a washed-out bridge. “It was a horrendous night,” Momolo wrote.

I leave to your imagination the hours of pain we passed there. Finally, at 4 a.m., one of the roadmen came to tell us that they had done what they could in the way of repairs, and that we could make an attempt to get through those dangerous, badly swollen streams, but that it would be best to take everything we could out of the coach to lighten the load. And so all of the men—there were six of us—got out, and the five women stayed in the coach. The coach then set off, passing through the streams with great difficulty, particularly the third, while we walked behind,
fording through the water, not without a certain degree of danger.… God saved us, but I assure you that though it may seem romantic, it was a scene of great horror.
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The trip continued, but mishap piled on mishap. The horses became mired in the mud, and there was no new team to replace them, as there was supposed to be, along the way. Meanwhile, in Rome, things were looking no better.

CHAPTER 13
The International Protests
Spread

I
N HIS
November 21, 1858, entry, the diarist Giuseppe Massari, who chronicled Italian events of the mid-nineteenth century, told of running into his friend Boggio, from Piedmont. Boggio was extremely upset. The previous Sunday he had been scheduled to serve as godfather for the baptism of a friend’s child in the Piedmontese city of Ivrea. Just before the ceremony, however, the Bishop of Ivrea informed him that he would not be allowed to do so because he was a well-known liberal and opponent of the Papal States. Humiliated, Boggio told Massari he wanted to take the Bishop to court for the affront. The diarist concluded the entry by noting, drolly, “Boggio is jealous of the Mortara boy’s fame.”
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The case of the jilted godfather is revealing both for what it shows about the relations between the Church and the liberals in Italy at the time and as a reflection of just how deeply the Mortara case had entered public consciousness. The battle for Italian unification, the dream of Italian patriots for decades, was finally coming to a head. For the Church, stung badly by the revolts of 1848, the liberal ideas of the Risorgimento were anathema, and their champions were condemned. For the liberals, on the other hand, the Church itself was one of the principal obstacles to national unification and the construction of a modern, constitutional state. The pope-king was a medieval vestige, a national embarrassment. In Piedmont, where the state allowed them, antipapal pamphlets abounded. For the opponents of papal rule, the taking of the Mortara boy was manna from heaven, a publicist’s dream.

No one was in a better position to make political capital out of the Mortara affair than Count Camillo Cavour, prime minister of the government of the kingdom of Sardinia and mastermind of the plan to unify Italy by the annexing of lands to the realm of King Victor Emmanuel II. Cavour saw in the Mortara case the perfect vehicle for demonstrating the anachronistic nature of the Papal States. The case could be used to undermine support for the Pope’s temporal power among Catholics—at least among those who had been affected by the winds of modernity and the talk of equality and human rights—and to inflame the simmering antipapal sentiments of Protestants throughout Europe.

Cavour, in Turin, kept a close eye on developments in the Mortara case with the help of Count Dominico della Minerva, his emissary in Rome. On October 9, 1858, Minerva sent Cavour a copy of the appeal to the Pope prepared by the Università Israelitica in Rome the month before. The emissary went on to report the impact that the case was having: “This fact, which has so upset public opinion in France and which, justly, the periodical press has taken up, has recently become the object of great interest in the Capital of the Catholic world thanks to the lively interest that the French Ambassador has taken in it.” So far, Minerva recounted, all the semiofficial channels that had been used to get the Church to release the child had proven useless. As a result, the Ambassador had decided to send Cardinal Antonelli an extremely strong note “in which he rightly stigmatized, in the harshest terms, a fact that is contrary to the first principles of natural right.”

When the Duke de Gramont, the French ambassador, received no reply to his note, he went to see the Secretary of State personally to complain. Not only did the French government, given all it was doing for the Pope, deserve a response, he argued, but it was in the Holy See’s own interest to provide a written account of its reasons for not returning the young Jew to his family. The exchange was far from friendly: “All this took place not without considerable animation and bitterness on both parts. But the French ambassador, unhappy at the indifference shown by the Cardinal to his pleas, took advantage of the prerogatives connected to his high rank and, a few days ago, without first asking either the Secretary of State or anyone else of the papal court, went directly to speak to His Holiness about the matter.”

Count Minerva describes the Duke’s difficult meeting with Pius IX, affording Cavour an excellent view of the Pope’s attitude toward the Mortara case: “The Holy Father said that he was sorry about what had happened and was even more pained by the impossibility of ordering Mortara returned to his family, for to return the boy would be repugnant to his conscience. He was truly persuaded that the baptism was valid and that, given this fact, he could not permit a Christian to be raised in the Jewish religion.” The Pope informed
the Ambassador that he was having a document drafted which laid out the theological bases for the decision and that it would soon be available. Minerva concluded his report to Cavour by observing that the Mortara case had poisoned relations between France and the Vatican. The Pope’s refusal to bend had been taken as a great affront by the French.
²

On the same day, in a separate, confidential letter to Cavour, the Piedmontese emissary added a dramatic detail. He had spoken with Gramont following the duke’s stormy session with Cardinal Antonelli and before he had seen the Pope. Gramont had made a startling suggestion: “The Duke de Gramont’s irritation over the case of the Jew Mortara has reached the boiling point in the last few days. Walking with me, he asked me if, should the boy be put on a boat to Genoa, there would be any difficulty in accepting him there.” Genoa was part of the kingdom of Sardinia. The plan was to seize Edgardo by force—not in itself a difficult matter for the Ambassador, given that it was French troops who patrolled the streets of Rome—and send him to the safety of the one part of Italy where Jews were free. Count Minerva, although surprised that Gramont would be considering such a move, assured him that arrangements could be made to receive the child in Genoa. The Ambassador said that after kidnapping Edgardo, he would have him put on a French steamship. “He urged me, however, to maintain the most absolute silence so that the element of surprise could be kept and thus play a bad trick on the priests.” Minerva concluded his letter, “I don’t know whether after his audience with the Pope he was still of the same idea.”
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When, two weeks later, Minerva again encountered the French ambassador, the subject of the kidnapping came up, but the Duke had by then calmed down, his enthusiasm no doubt cooled by his government’s alarm upon hearing of his plan. He told Minerva, however, that the reason he had abandoned it was that, while it would liberate the Jewish child, “it would not save the principle.” Yet Gramont persisted in his belief that, given the Pope’s obstinacy, the only way to get Edgardo back was to kidnap him. Indeed, in a conversation with Minerva in mid-November, the Duke criticized the “imbecility of the Jews,” who, instead of going around complaining about the Mortara boy’s situation and expecting someone else to help, should “at this very moment be arranging for him to escape.” Cavour’s emissary thought this unkind and unrealistic: “What could these poor unfortunates do unless the French police were willing to lend them a little help?”
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In fact, the idea of kidnapping Edgardo had occurred to the Jews as well, and various plans were hatched, at least in the safety of private conversations. Not long after the Duke de Gramont asked ruefully why the Jews themselves were not organizing a rescue party, one of his Jewish countrymen issued a call for the Jews to do just that. In the December 10 issue of
Archives Israélites,
a
letter was published under the heading
“Moyen d’opérer la délivrance du jeune martyr”
(How to free the young martyr). “Let’s promise,” the take-charge author wrote, “a prize of twenty thousand francs to anyone who manages to abduct the Mortara boy and lead him to a safe place, whether in Piedmont, or in France, or any other country that has an honest government.” He offered to start the fund with his own donation of twenty francs but added expansively that if the twenty-thousand-franc figure seemed too small, “let’s double it!” His letter went into considerable detail as to how the fund would be administered (the Rothschild family would once again come to the Jews’ aid), how it would be raised (not only by Jews worldwide but by outraged Catholics as well), and how the prize would be awarded. The only details it failed to explore were just who was going to do the kidnapping and how.
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Meanwhile, the benefit of the Mortara controversy for Cavour and the Italian unification movement was becoming even clearer. In a letter to Cavour sent from Paris on November 21, the Marquis of Villamarina, ambassador of the kingdom of Sardinia in France, reported how much indignation the incident had provoked there, turning French public opinion against the pontifical state. The French Emperor, Cavour was told, continued to take a great interest in the case and had branded the Church’s action an outrageous violation of both civil and natural law.