The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (6 page)

The new archbishop’s entrance into the cathedral was witnessed by Enrico Bottrigari, an acute, if less than sympathetic, observer: “A solemn mass was celebrated, with grand music. In the middle of the mass His Eminence read a long sermon, full of repetitions, and boring not only in its content, but also because of the orator’s monotonous voice. At the end, he gave the papal blessing to the numerous people in attendance.” The Archbishop then retired to his official residence while a choir gathered outside to sing a song in his honor. That night his palace was ablaze, illuminated by gaslights.

Bottrigari concluded: “The reputation that our new pastor brings with
him is not particularly flattering. They say he is too fond of the Jesuits, and an overly zealous priest. The work he did in Austria, with the all-too-famous Concordat, tells us what we need to know about him!” In a city that had suffered seven years of occupation by Austrian troops, the Archbishop’s famed friendship with Prince Metternich and the rulers of the Austrian Empire did little to endear him to his new flock.
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Michele Viale-Prelà was the second of four sons of a wealthy Corsican family of Genoese origin. Born in Bastia, Corsica, in 1798, he was virtually predestined for high clerical office. His maternal uncle, Tomaso Cardinal Prelà, was physician to two popes, Pius VI and Pius VII. In deference to his uncle’s role in his upbringing, Michele added his mother’s maiden name to that of his father, Paolo Viale. Once ordained, in 1823, Michele entered the fast track of the papal diplomatic corps, serving from 1828 to 1836 as assistant to the papal nuncio to the Swiss Confederation. After two years back in Rome working with the papal Secretary of State, Viale-Prelà was sent to Munich, where he became nuncio himself and was named a bishop. Finally, in 1845, he moved to Vienna to become nuncio to the Imperial Court of Austria. While there, in 1853, he learned he had become a cardinal.
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Word of his appointment as Archbishop of Bologna reached Viale-Prelà in Vienna as bishops were gathering from throughout central Europe for the signing of the concordat he had negotiated. Accompanied by a personal note from Pope Pius IX, the news was an unwelcome surprise. The Cardinal had thought that, after all his years of service abroad, it was time for him to return to Rome. He had looked forward to this prospect not only for professional reasons but for personal ones as well. He had lived for much of his youth in Rome and would have enjoyed spending the rest of his years in the Eternal City. There was also the attraction of being close to his brother, Benedetto, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Rome and, continuing the family tradition, physician to Pius IX.

Viale-Prelà’s appointment as spiritual leader of the contentious Bologna diocese was surprising for another reason, for in his brilliant career the Corsican priest had never had a pastoral role. He was a man clearly suited for the highest positions of Vatican governmental service; indeed, he was rumored to be the leading candidate to replace the widely reviled but powerful Secretary of State, Giacomo Antonelli. Those who favored such a move suspected that behind the unexpected assignment of Viale-Prelà to Bologna was none other than the crafty Secretary of State himself. They were sure that Antonelli had used his much-lamented influence with the politically naïve pope to keep his Corsican competitor far from his fellow cardinals, foiling their efforts to plot against him.

Although the new archbishop of Bologna was no more enthusiastic about
his arrival in the towered city than were many in his new flock, he nonetheless threw himself into the task. As he saw it, his predecessor, well-meaning but overly indulgent and in failing health in recent years, had left him with a population that had slid perilously away from proper religious observance.
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The result, according to some Bolognesi, not averse to hyperbole, was a drive reminiscent of the worst days of the Inquisition. Indeed, in a typical account, Cardinal Viale-Prelà was charged with working closely with the Dominican inquisitor, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, to introduce more effective surveillance of the population. The Cardinal issued large manifestos, which were attached to the doors of all diocesan churches, sternly reminding his flock of the requirements of the Friday fast. He was said to send olfactory spies around the diocese on Fridays, sniffing out those boiling pots from which wafted the odor of forbidden meats. Viale-Prelà’s authoritarian reputation was not helped by reports that one day shortly after his arrival, spotting a man who failed to doff his hat as he passed by, the Cardinal had stopped his entourage and ordered the man to uncover his head.
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Viale-Prelà also became known for his displeasure with the proliferation of popular theater in Bologna. He could not have been pleased to learn that, at the time of his arrival to take the helm of his archdiocese, the talk of the town was the sensational American Miss Ella, performing at the dazzling Teatro del Corso. The Bolognesi were smitten by the amazing acrobatic feats she performed—with a ballerina’s grace—while riding on the back of a horse.
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A glimpse of the austere orthodoxy promulgated by the Archbishop can be gleaned from his annual pastoral letters. In the letter he sent to all the diocesan clergy to be read to the faithful on Christmas 1858, he explained his view of Church teachings. “No,” Viale-Prelà exhorted his flock, “this life has not been given to us so that we can use it to enjoy the pleasures of this world, pleasures that alienate us from God, that pervert the heart, that cloud our judgment, that overwhelm our will, pleasures that unfortunately simply produce agitation, rancor, competition, jealousy, affliction, and unhappiness.”

In that same end-of-year message, the Archbishop stressed that there was no higher or more noble human activity than the winning of the souls of unbelievers to the mercy of Jesus Christ through baptism. He made no mention of the case near to home, although by the time this letter appeared, the controversy over Edgardo Mortara’s baptism and kidnapping was creating a great uproar.

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!”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.