The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (14 page)

On August 11, shortly after the meeting with the Secretary of State but before Momolo’s first meeting with Edgardo, Scazzocchio wrote to Angelo Padovani in Bologna, who, on behalf of his kin, had begged for news from Rome now that Momolo was there. While Momolo was in a hopeful mood at the time, Scazzocchio was alarmed by the news he was getting. “The obstacles to be overcome today,” he wrote, “are two: the resistance shown by Edgardo, and the fact of the baptism that was conferred.” As for the second point, Scazzocchio and the other experts in Rome knew that the Church rarely gave up a Jewish child who was baptized, even if it could be shown that the child should not have been baptized in the first place. The first point, though, was the more discomfiting. Insistent reports from Church sources claimed that Edgardo was happy to be in the Catechumens, that he wanted nothing more than to be a Catholic, and that he did not want to return to his Jewish parents.

In writing to Mortara relatives of this concern, the Roman Jewish Secretary sought to ease the pain a bit by adding that Edgardo’s attitude “can be easily explained by the thoughtlessness of a child entranced by the idea of an entirely new life.” Scazzocchio added his hope that the boy’s “trance” would
be broken upon his first encounter with his father, which was to take place in a few days’ time. However, he was clearly nervous about the reunion, noting that it would take place under conditions adverse to the change in heart that they were all praying for.

Shortly after this letter was sent to Bologna, Momolo had his first meeting with Edgardo in the Catechumens. Momolo’s nervousness at the prospect of seeing his son for the first time since he was taken from his home was great, all the more so because of the reports that Edgardo was pleased to be where he was. Sitting by Edgardo’s side at the first meeting, as at all subsequent meetings, was the Rector. In addition, various other religious personnel of the Catechumens, including the Rector’s own brother and sister, were often present as well.

What took place at these tense encounters is a matter of dispute. According to Momolo and to accounts published in the Jewish and the liberal press, Edgardo lovingly told his father that his most ardent wish was to return home, and he took comfort in Momolo’s assurances that he would not leave Rome without him. Momolo also complained that Sarra and his ecclesiastical colleagues, who never left him alone with his son, intimidated Edgardo and made it impossible for the boy to say what he really felt. Nor did Momolo appreciate the conversionary sermons directed at himself, which would be a constant refrain in his visits to the Catechumens and in the later visits of his wife: There is an easy and blessed solution to your woes. If you become Catholics, you will have your beloved son once again, and share with him in the joys of eternal salvation.

For the Catholic press, and the faithful whose view of the events was shaped by it, Edgardo’s early meetings with his father followed the traditional narrative form of the triumph of Christianity and righteousness. Having been graced by divine light on his way to Rome, Edgardo, although only six, was blessed with a spiritual strength well beyond his years. Indeed, the story was so inspiring that it continued to be told for many decades—with significant variations in detail, though always with the same basic outline.

In all versions of the story, Edgardo, on entering the Catechumens, eagerly sought to learn all he could about his new religion. Most accounts report the dramatic scene in which Edgardo’s eyes fixed wonderingly on the painting of Our Lady of Sorrows as taking place during his trip to Rome. In others, this happens only after he arrives at the Catechumens. In one such version, Edgardo asks the Rector who the woman in the painting is and why she is crying. The Rector replies that she is the most holy Madonna, mother of Jesus Christ, and that she is crying for the Jews, who refuse to become Christians, and for all sinners.

“Then she is crying for me too,” the boy responds.

“No,” replies the Rector, “for you are Christian, and you will be good.”

“Ah, then,” he says, “she is crying for my father and my mother.”
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Joseph Pelczar, a Polish bishop and turn-of-the-century biographer of Pope Pius IX, narrates the epic battle between father and son. Soon after the boy’s arrival in Rome, Pelczar recounts, Edgardo’s conversion was powerfully reinforced by his first visit to the Pope. “Clutching him affectionately to his breast,” Pius IX “made the sacred sign of the Cross on his forehead.” Spiritually fortified, the boy could now see his father without fear.

On first setting eyes on his son, according to the Bishop, Momolo “broke out into torrents of tears and, holding the boy tightly to his breast, kept repeating that everyone in his family would be unhappy until he returned home. The boy turned white, he could not stop his tears, but he stood firm. After a few moments, he told his father: ‘Why do you cry? You see that I am fine here.’ ” Although his father kept trying to convince him otherwise, the boy would not yield. Indeed, by the time Momolo left, Edgardo felt hope that his father would see the light and convert too. In this, Pelczar added, “he was to remain disappointed.”
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Pelczar’s rendition of Edgardo’s first encounter with his father bears uncanny, though hardly coincidental, resemblance to one New Testament tale of Jesus himself. In Luke (2:41–50), the 12-year-old Jesus leaves his parents and goes off to the Temple in Jerusalem, where, after three days spent searching all over for him, his parents find the boy engaged in learned theological discussion with legal scholars. His mother says: “My son, why have you behaved like this with us? Don’t you see, your father and I have been looking for you and have been so worried about you?” To which Jesus replies: “Why are you looking for me so much? Didn’t you know that I have to be in the house of my Father?” These words, according to Luke, Jesus’ parents could not understand.
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French readers at the time were learning about Momolo’s dramatic first meetings with his son in the pages of
L’Univers,
an outspoken voice of Catholic conservatism and upholder of the temporal power of the papacy, put out by that fiercest of all defenders of papal powers, Louis Veuillot, a layman, and a convert (from Protestantism) himself. Veuillot would eventually devote hundreds of pages to the Mortara case and, indeed, would himself soon get to meet the famous boy in Rome.

In 1858, the paper carried what purported to be an eyewitness account of Momolo’s first visit to the Catechumens:

The first impression we have of this man seeing his son was most vivid. He momentarily lost the use of his reason altogether. But in a few moments he clutched the boy in his arms, he covered him with kisses,
with caresses, and with tears, telling him of his desire, and that of his mother, to see him back in his own house, telling him that the whole family was, because of him, suffering the most painful desolation. By the end, such was the power of paternal love and pain that tears began to run down the boy’s cheeks.
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In another Catholic account, someone asked the boy why he spoke so little when his father visited him. Edgardo replied that it was because whenever he tried to speak, his voice trembled and he began to cry, since he could see the doleful effect his words had on his father. The child saw the love his parents and siblings had for him, “but the desire to be a Christian won out over it.”

One day, this same correspondent recounted, Scazzocchio accompanied Momolo to the Catechumens and, as they were leaving, leaned over to give Edgardo a kiss. Filled with revulsion by this unwanted attempt at intimacy, six-year-old Edgardo, with Scazzocchio already through the door, said: “If that man comes with my father again and wants to kiss me, I’ll take out an image of the Madonna and tell him to kiss it instead!”
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In these narratives, whenever Momolo visited him in the Catechumens, Edgardo could think of nothing except how much he wished his father would convert. One of the most prominent Church-linked papers in Italy at the time,
L’armonia della religione colla civiltà,
published a story titled “News of the Young Christian Mortara.” It described how Edgardo had gone off to the Catechumens “with extraordinary happiness.” The boy’s transformation was miraculous. He had entered the Catechumens with a single idea already “stamped on his forehead, and even more in his heart—the great benefit for him of being Christian, the singular grace that he had received through Baptism and, by contrast, the immense misfortune for his parents of being and wanting to remain Jews.”

In this version of the redemption story, when Edgardo heard that he was about to see his father for the first time, he was delighted, because “he hoped to be able to convert his father and make him Christian just the same as he.” But when the meeting took place and Edgardo discovered that despite his fervent pleadings his father remained obstinately attached to his religion, the boy broke into terrible sobbing.

L’armonia
carried a report from an eyewitness at the Catechumens claiming that the little boy’s miraculous transformation was continuing at breathtaking speed. “Within a few days he had learned the catechism to perfection, and he makes the fullest and most exact professions of faith. He always insists on telling the Rector and others he speaks with that the Jews have no altars, no Madonna, no Pope, and he wants everyone to know that the
Jews are not Christians. He declares that he wants to convert them, and he feels God’s grace speaking eloquently through him.”

The boy was a prodigy: “The Pope wanted to see him, and was enchanted by him. The child blesses the servant who baptized him, and who thus opened the door to the Catholic Church to him.” When someone asked him if he knew who Jesus Christ was, his face turned red with shame—the shame of his ancestors—as he replied, “Jesus Christ is the Savior of mankind, whom the Jews crucified.” The Catholic paper concluded by asking facetiously, “And they would like a boy so full of faith to be sent back into the Ghetto?”
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Reports of this kind, flooding out of Rome and reproduced by the Catholic press throughout Europe, came in response to the mounting movement being organized to win Edgardo’s release. Had the boy really been so transformed? Momolo and Marianna angrily denounced the Catholic accounts as infamous lies, but some of their allies, including Scazzocchio, who had sat in on a few of the disputed meetings that Momolo had with Edgardo, were not so sure where the boy’s loyalties now lay.

From the perspective of the liberals of Europe, the Church story had a fatal weakness: it was, on its face, absurd. A booklet published in Brussels in 1859, denouncing the Church for its kidnapping of Edgardo, first offers an account of what it says really happened, before then taking aim at the version of events that had been published in a Belgian Catholic newspaper:

“His father follows him to Rome, where he is permitted to see his child, who does not want to be separated from him any longer. The boy is afraid; he wants to see his mother and his sisters. He says that he will travel all through the night, if necessary, to see them. He wants to leave, but Church canons are against him.” The Church then mounts its counterattack. “The comedy is launched, aimed at stifling the scandal: The child is said to feel an irresistible calling. He cries; no longer is he in his father’s arms, no longer is he asking for his mother, but rather at the foot of a cross, calling for the sacred Virgin. He wants to be baptized again. He wants to baptize all the Jews. He will be a missionary so that he can convert them. All this at age six and a half!”

Which side was lying and which telling the truth was self-evident:

Between the miracle of a six-year-old apostle who wants to convert the Jews and the cry of a child who keeps asking for his mother and his little sisters, we don’t hesitate for a moment. The nature of the truth is too obvious when set alongside the clear signs of deceit. When nature appears, when the heart speaks (and only the heart can speak at that age), the conviction is irresistible. There is not a person who loves their children, not a father, nor a mother, nor a brother, nor sister, who believes the account given in
L’Indépendance.
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Defenders of the Church appeared not to realize that, to many, their account sounded too good to be true. The single most influential Church article on the taking of Edgardo, which appeared in
Civiltà Cattolica
in November 1858 and was subsequently excerpted in Catholic papers throughout Europe, recounted the miraculous transformation that came over the boy as soon as he set foot in the House of the Catechumens. The effects of the baptismal sacrament erupted in the child:

“He is mentally sharper and more perceptive than is usually to be found in a boy who is barely seven.” On entering the Catechumens, “he showed a marvelous happiness. He declared that he did not want to be anything other than what he was, that is, a member of Christendom.… As for his attitude toward his parents, the change that came over him was practically instantaneous.” He implored the Rector not to let his parents take him away: “He begged to be raised in a Christian home, to avoid those seductions and perhaps even the violence that, under the paternal roof, would most likely have met him.”

The
Civiltà Cattolica
account sketched a central theme in the Catholic narrative: Edgardo had a new father—“I am baptized,” he said, “I am baptized and my father is the Pope.”
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He had a new mother, the sacred Virgin Mary, and a new family, the
“grande famiglia cattolica.”

One day, according to yet another Catholic version of Edgardo’s early encounters with his father at the Catechumens, “his father reminded him of the fourth of the Ten Commandments, that he should obey his parents and return home. ‘I will do,’ he responded, ‘just exactly what the Holy Father says. Here he is,’ and he points to the bust of the reigning Holy Pontiff.” Later, seeing a sister’s habit laid out, and knowing that it belonged to the mother of another boy who was a neophyte in the Catechumens, he was silent for a moment and then said wistfully: “Oh, if only my own mother were to wear a sister’s habit!”
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