The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (25 page)

The rallies continued. In San Francisco, in January, more than three thousand people listened to the speeches of prominent Protestant clergymen, assorted other Christian community leaders, and the Jewish organizers themselves. Most of the speakers adopted a respectful attitude toward Catholicism, and some were deferential to the Pope as well. But others portrayed the Mortara case as but the last in a long line of outrages performed by a Church that was a menace to the rest of the world. F. P. Tracy, one of the Protestant speakers, recalled a visit to Rome in 1847 when, he said, he saw Cardinal Antonelli sitting beside Pius IX (which seems most unlikely, as Antonelli was not yet Secretary of State). “Like Mephistophiles, cold and unimpassioned,”
Antonelli—thundered Tracy—whispered instructions in the pliant pope’s ear “and changed the character of him who otherwise might have been a kind and patriarchal ruler.” Tracy warned his audience that they had to take matters into their own hands, since no decency could be expected from the Vatican: “The Pope would baptize every one of us, if he only had the power.”
¹⁵

The Mortara case had become a cause célèbre among non-Jews as well as Jews. In the month of December 1858 alone,
The New York Times
published more than twenty articles on the case; the
Baltimore American
published thirty-one major articles on Mortara from October 1858 through January of the following year; and the
Milwaukee Sentinel
ran twenty-three stories in November and December 1858. At the beginning of March 1859, when popular interest in the case in Europe had already subsided, the
New York Herald
claimed that American interest in the Mortara affair had reached “colossal dimensions.”
¹⁶

Flexing their still puny political muscles, the incensed American Jews, following the example of their European brethren, tried to get their government to speak out against the abduction and send a protest to the Vatican. They got nowhere. The American secretary of state replied to the cascade of letters by saying that it was the government’s policy not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Finally, the President himself, James Buchanan, thought it necessary to respond to the pleas personally, and on January 4, 1859, he wrote to a representative of the New York Jewish community: “I have long been convinced that it is neither the right nor the duty of this Government to express a moral censorship over the conduct of other independent governments and to rebuke them for acts which we may deem arbitrary and unjust towards their own citizens or subjects.”
¹⁷

For Buchanan, the matter was delicate, for the Jews’ unhappiness was the least of his worries. The nation was on the verge of civil war over slavery, and abolitionists were calling on the enlightened powers of Europe to add their weight to the antislavery campaign. The President was hardly eager to set an example in the case of an Italian Jew that could later be used against him. And his own moral position was not very strong. How could he rail against a government that allowed a child to be forcibly separated from his parents when the same thing happened all the time in the slaveholding portions of his own country? As the President squirmed, the abolitionist newspapers became the unlikely ally of the American Catholic press as each, for its own reasons, attacked what it saw as the hypocrisy of the movement to free the Jewish child.

Catholic defenders of the Church published their own version of events, echoing the Catholic press in Europe. One pamphlet, published in New York in November 1858 under the pseudonym of “Fair Play,” typical of these broadsides,
branded the “alleged Mortara kidnapping case” a “windfall to the enemies of God’s Church.” Blaming the child’s baptism on Momolo Mortara for breaking the Papal States’ law that prohibited Jews from having Christian servants, it argued that no one, not even a pope, could “unbaptize a Christian child.” Not only was it unthinkable that a Christian government “could leave a Christian child to be brought up a Jew,” but another principle, that of religious liberty, was also at stake, “the liberty of a child to be a Christian, and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew.” Edgardo (described as 11 years old, rather than 7) was begging to remain a Christian: “To have surrendered him would have been an eternal ignominy. To clamor for his surrender is an outrage upon Christianity, and a shame to Christendom.” And Fair Play concluded, grandiosely, “The Holy Father’s protection of the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen for ages.”
¹⁸

CHAPTER 14
The Church Strikes Back

W
ITH PROTESTS
mounting on both sides of the Atlantic, worried Church officials hastened to prepare their defense. For the members of the hierarchy, the abuse aimed at the Church was but the latest of a string of anti-Catholic outrages. Throughout its history the Church had treated its Jews in much the same manner as it had in the Mortara case, and no one—other than a handful of frightened Jews, on their knees—had ever said anything. In matters of Church dogma, this was as it should be. But now, with the forces of secularism, godlessness, and materialism sweeping Europe, respect for the word of God and His instrument on earth was rapidly eroding. True, the Church had been having to fight this battle in some form ever since the Reformation, when Church authority was first contested. But in the heartland of world Catholicism, the pontifical state itself, it was unthinkable that the Pope’s spiritual authority should be challenged by such a motley assortment of schismatics and infidels.

The battle over the Mortara boy coincided with struggles within the Church over the extent to which all power should flow from the Pope. The modern low point of papal authority was reached in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Civil rulers begrudged the Church its autonomy and opposed any practice that suggested that affairs in their own states were being decided by a foreign power, namely the pope and his representatives. Autocrats’ desires to reign uncontested and unconstrained mixed with Enlightenment-generated ideas to create a movement against special privileges for the Church. The Jesuits, the embodiment of the Church as foreign power, and champions of an ideology in which the wishes of the secular rulers were subordinated to the word of God as interpreted by Rome, came in for special
attack. They were chased from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Spain in 1767, and from Naples the following year. The anti-Jesuit outcry became so great that, in 1773, Pope Clement XIV abolished the Jesuit order altogether. In Vienna, in 1762, the publication of papal encyclicals was made contingent on prior approval from the Habsburg ruler. In the decades that followed, secular rulers throughout Catholic Europe wrested control over censorship from inquisitorial hands and barred the Church from putting their subjects on trial. The state claimed a monopoly on the power to arrest and try its subjects.

On his accession to the Austrian throne in 1780, Joseph II denounced the existing concordat and moved energetically to restrict the rights of the Church, seeking to build a modern, secular state. Ecclesiastical exemption from taxes was abolished, the Holy Office of the Inquisition suppressed, and the policy of closing monasteries and convents given new impetus. Throughout most of the lands in which Catholics lived, similar attacks on Church authority put the hierarchy on the defensive, and the prestige of the papacy suffered.

The Napoleonic conquests in Europe, and the years of French rule, accelerated the decline in prestige and power of the centralized Church. But in the aftermath of Napoleon’s fall, the attitude of most of Europe’s secular rulers changed. While in intellectual circles the Enlightenment ideas of equality had spread, among the governors and the elites who supported them antagonism toward the Enlightenment and the notion of a society based on the use of reason brought about a strengthening of Church authority. In historian Stuart Woolf’s words, “The only hope was to revert to an earlier, uncontaminated society, in which order and hierarchy were respected and the theocratic basis of monarchy consecrated by an infallible pope or divine revelations.”
¹
The result was the revival in the use of the Church as a bulwark of secular rule. Throughout Europe, the Jesuit order was restored and popular expressions of devotion—cults of apparitions and Marian worship, among others—were given new life. New concordats were eventually negotiated—Viale-Prelà’s work as papal nuncio in Vienna constituted a part of this process—marking the harmony, once again, of Church and state.

The autonomy of national churches—championed in the past not only by secular rulers who were hostile to control from Rome but also by major sectors of the Catholic population and clergy in France, Austria, and elsewhere—was during this Restoration period increasingly challenged by the growth of the “ultramontane” movement. The ultramontanes argued that local churches everywhere should come under the strict control of the Holy See. They sought to bolster the power and the prestige of the Pope, and they championed the supremacy of Church law over secular legal principles. In all this, they fought
not only the liberal movement but their opponents within the Church as well, those who, from the ultramontanes’ perspective, were poisoned by Enlightenment ideas that were at odds with the Church’s mission.

The Pope’s refusal to return Edgardo to his family became a sacred cause for the ultramontane forces, involving the prestige and authority of the papacy as well as the supremacy of divine law over modern ideas of individual rights and religious equality. The campaign took various forms. Diplomatic efforts were under Cardinal Antonelli’s control, but the counteroffensive among the general population was entrusted to the large European network of Catholic newspapers. Among these, two occupied an especially influential place: the Jesuit
Civiltà Cattolica,
advised directly by the Pope and regarded as speaking in his name, and the feisty
L’univers,
published by the greatest ultramontane champion of them all, the Frenchman Louis Veuillot.

Among the first Catholic newspapers outside Italy to comment on the Mortara affair was the Belgian
Journal de Bruxelles.
Its September 18 story is revealing, not only in sketching out the first lines of Church defense, but also in the embellishments that had crept into the Church narrative.

According to the Belgian paper, far from coming out of the blue, the decision to remove Edgardo from his parents was made only after rumors of the boy’s baptism had become the talk of Bologna. The baptism was so well known that the Archbishop, Cardinal Viale-Prelà, had no choice but to see that basic canon law was applied “or else run the risk of an immense scandal in the eyes of the Catholics.” The reluctant but principled archbishop, faced with this situation, repeatedly offered Momolo Mortara the chance to keep his son, as long as he would promise to see that he was raised as a Christian. “After repeated refusals, the Archbishop of Bologna simply did his duty,” the paper reported. The boy was taken to the Catechumens in Rome, but his father was immediately invited to follow him to see for himself “that his son was not being sequestered, nor being made to break his natural ties, nor even being constrained by corporal or moral pressure to profess his faith.” Rather, the boy was being kept in what amounted simply to a comfortable lodging so that he could be provided with “a religious education sufficient to afford him, if he chose, the grace of his baptism, since certainly, if he had continued to live in Bologna with his family, he would never have been able to know even what the sacrament was that had made him a child of God and of the Church.” Indeed, the
Journal de Bruxelles
reported, the boy’s father had recently visited him in Rome and “was able to see for himself that, far from being constrained by tyrannical and external influences to follow the grace that had been bestowed on him, his son obeyed with the most admirable spontaneity.”
²

The claim that Edgardo’s parents, seeing how happy he was and how well he was being cared for in the Catechumens, were pleased to see him remain
there was picked up by
L’armonia della religione colla civiltà.
Published in Turin by a priest, Giacomo Margotti, the paper fought the ultramontane battle in hostile territory, at the heart of the kingdom of Sardinia. Margotti’s stream of stinging polemics against the liberal state and the liberal wing of the Church not only earned him frequent visits from government censors, who periodically shut the paper down, but, two years before the Mortara case, had led to a physical assault that almost killed him. Emotions ran high on both sides.

L’armonia
ran its first Mortara article on August 17, 1858, and published a score more by the end of the year.
³
In its October 17 story, the newspaper reported news of Edgardo’s family: “No one is posing the least opposition. The Mortara boy’s parents themselves are now pleased that he is being educated in the Catechumens.”
⁴

None of these papers had as great an impact as
Civiltà Cattolica.
When the controversy first began to heat up, in August, both Church partisans and opponents began to look to the paper to see when the Vatican would make its position known and respond publicly to its growing army of critics. The Jesuit journal’s reputation for being the mouthpiece of the Holy See was such that, Momolo later recounted, it was in reading their first article on the case, published on October 30, that he realized that the Pope had decided not to let Edgardo go.
⁵

That article, as we have already seen, relied heavily on Edgardo’s own miraculous transformation, and his consequent desire to stay where he was, in arguing that he should not be returned to his family. But other arguments were pursued as well.