The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (15 page)

If Edgardo in fact told his father that he did not want to return with him, that he now regarded the Pope as his true father and wanted to devote his life to converting the Jews, this message seems not to have registered with Momolo. Momolo’s own impressions of his meetings with his son were very different from those reported in the Catholic press, and his concerns focused not on his son’s loyalties or supposed conversion but on the obstacles he faced in getting Church authorities to release Edgardo from captivity.

In early September, after having seen Edgardo several times, Momolo got more bad news. The experts of the Rome Jewish community had prepared a brief for the Pope, bringing together citations from twenty different Church authorities, aimed at convincing the Pontiff to have Edgardo returned to his family. On September 7, a delegation from the Jewish community presented it
to Cardinal Antonelli. To their surprise, even before reading the document, the Secretary of State told them not to expect a positive response. As one of the delegation wrote the next day to Baron de Rothschild in Paris, “His Eminence expressed himself in such a way as to remove any hope on the matter.”
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A blow of a different kind came a few days later, when Momolo received an unsettling letter from Bologna jointly written by Marianna’s brother Angelo Padovani and her brother-in-law, Angelo Moscato. They could hold off no longer, they wrote, for “if up to now we tried to spare you further unhappiness, we think it our duty to delay no further, since we see that only your presence here might repair things.” His business, they told him, faced collapse as a result of his absence, and they warned that “if you do not return right away, you and your family may be ruined. Get back while there is still time, and get here without delay.”

Nor was this all. Although, they wrote, it broke their hearts to have to add to his miseries, they felt duty-bound to report that Marianna,

who, from the fatal moment when her son was torn from her, has always been in poor health, is now reduced to a truly pitiable state. When she was able to write, she always forced herself to write in a reassuring way so that you would not be alarmed on her account, and so that you would not feel so badly that it would detract from the energy you are in such great need of there. But we can no longer keep up this vain illusion, for if we did, when you do come back and see her in such a bad way, you would be doubly pained.

You well know the one medicine that would bring her back to life! the news that you were bringing your son back with you to put in her arms! Ah, if you could only send a telegram with such news, you would without doubt find her in a very different state.

Knowing that Momolo had promised Edgardo that he wouldn’t leave Rome without him, and knowing how much it would pain Momolo to break that promise, Padovani and Moscato added, “Assure your son that your absence will only be temporary, and that you will return soon to embrace him and to take him back to the bosom of his family.” They added that Momolo could comfort Edgardo with assurances that, in his father’s absence, other members of the Jewish community—such as Scazzocchio—would be allowed to visit him.
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The letter jolted Momolo, and he hurriedly made arrangements for the long return trip by coach to Bologna. He would have to leave Edgardo behind. On September 25, back in the city where it all began, Momolo wrote to Scazzocchio in Rome. The letter reveals a man buried beneath a cascade of miseries,
yet neither bitter nor consumed by anger, a loving father and dedicated husband, still hopeful that the Pope would release his son.

Having left Rome with a broken heart, after a very pleasant trip I arrived in the bosom of my poor family. Unfortunately, I found them in a state of desolation, and my business in total disorder. I will do everything possible to repair the latter, but as for the sad state in which I found my wife, the possibility of a cure remains rather far off. She asks for nothing except news of our kidnapped son, she wants nothing other than him, and she will have neither peace nor health until he is returned to her. For that, I have unwavering faith in the unquestionable sense of justice of the High Pontiff, in the strength of the arguments we have already presented, and in the new documents that we will send in soon which, as they say, will cut the head from the bull. God willing, my presentiments will soon be borne out.

Momolo had another worry as well, for Marianna’s distraught state had robbed her of her once plentiful milk, and little Imelda was suffering as a result. Even if they had not suffered the death of their baby boy the previous year, they would have been concerned about Imelda’s health, for they lived at a time when a quarter of all children died before their first birthday, and when there was no good alternative to breast milk.

For now, I have the consolation that despite the fact that my wife has suffered so and suffers still, Heavenly Providence will not allow my little baby daughter to suffer and will, by some miracle, ensure that she grows normally. However, so that we don’t lose our new one, the doctor thinks we should not further abuse her by continuing to feed her milk that has for too long been unhealthy. Within the week, despite what we would like, we have to wean her. We will have to wait and see what becomes of her then.

Job-like, Momolo added, “Ah! my dear Signor Secretary, unfortunately one misfortune brings with it a hundred others!”

“I fervently pray,” he wrote, “that you go often to see my beloved son, shower him with kisses for me, comfort him all you can and assure him of my unceasing efforts to get him back, to bring him back to me and to his mother, his brothers, and his sisters.”

CHAPTER 8
Pope Pius IX

E
DGARDO’S NEW FATHER
, Pius IX, may well be the most important pope in modern history. The fact that his reign, from 1846 to 1878, was the longest of any pope since Peter himself was merely a demographic achievement, a product of his relative youth at ascension to office and his longevity. But his reign marked a watershed, the uneasy transition from an outworn medieval papacy, uncomfortably combining the roles of temporal prince and spiritual head, to one presiding over no armies and no state. This transition to modernity, however, came not because of the Pope’s efforts but despite them.

Born in 1792 in Senigallia, near Ancona, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was the last of nine children, his father a count. It was common at the time for a younger son of a noble family to dedicate himself to a high clerical career, and in Mastai-Ferretti’s case there were a number of signs that the fit might be a good one. Even as a youth he seemed to have a spiritual quality about him, and his family’s inclination to place him in the Church was reinforced when, at age 15, he began to have his first epileptic seizures. Mastai-Ferretti was never much of a student, and the upheavals caused by the Napoleonic wars and occupation disrupted his studies. Even his sympathetic biographer Roger Aubert writes that the future pope’s education was limited, and that “in history, canon law, and even in theology his notions would always be superficial.”
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In 1819, Mastai-Ferretti received ecclesiastical dispensation to become a priest despite his epileptic episodes, although with the restriction that he could not celebrate mass alone; he had to be assisted by a fellow clergyman.

Mastai-Ferretti’s career in some ways paralleled that of Michele Viale-Prelà. Both men were born to elite families in the provinces, both were younger
sons, and both had close family ties in the Church hierarchy. One of Mastai-Ferretti’s uncles was a bishop, and another was a canon of Saint Peter’s. The future Pius IX had been a priest for only a few years when he was assigned to the papal diplomatic corps and, in 1823, sent for two years to Chile. Unlike Viale-Prelà, however, he was not by temperament or ability particularly suited for a diplomatic career and was undoubtedly pleased when in 1827, at age 35, just eight years after becoming a priest, he was named Archbishop of Spoleto, in the Papal States. Five years later he became Bishop of Imola, not far from Bologna. In 1845, the year before becoming pope, Mastai-Ferretti, by now a cardinal, was called upon to fill in for his neighbor, the Archbishop of Ferrara, and, amidst great pomp, baptized a young Jewish man, Samuele Coen.
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When, on June 1, 1846, Pope Gregory XVI died, after a fifteen-year reign, hopes sprouted that the reactionary pope’s successor might be someone better suited to come to terms with the new currents sweeping Europe, the movement away from the old regimes of autocrats and noblemen toward a system of nations based on constitutional rule and the separation of Church and state. Following brief deliberations, and barely two weeks after his predecessor’s death, Giovanni Maria Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected pope, taking the name of Pius to honor Pius VII, the pope who had befriended him in his youth in Rome and who, arrested and sent into exile by Napoleon in 1809, lived to return as ruler of the Papal States upon the Corsican’s fall five years later.

People in the Papal States initially saw Pope Pius IX as the answer to their prayers. In a series of measures taken in the first eighteen months of his papacy, he set out on a reforming path. He pronounced an amnesty, releasing a thousand political prisoners; he named Pasquale Cardinal Gizzi, a noted liberal, as his first secretary of state; he named commissions to study economic, judicial, and welfare reforms; and he relaxed press censorship. In championing the introduction of gas street-lighting and the expansion of railways—two signs of modernity his predecessor had disdained—the Pope solidified his reputation. His reform movement extended to the Jews as well. He established a high-profile commission of inquiry into the conditions in the ghetto, and in response to its report, among other changes, he abolished the much-reviled forced sermons and allowed the better-off ghetto residents to petition for permission to move to homes outside the old ghetto walls.
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The reaction in Bologna was typical. In the aftermath of the papal pardon, large, enthusiastic crowds paraded through the streets of the city, carrying white banners and torches and shouting their praises to the new pope. Flowers and garlands adorned the copies of the papal edict of pardon that were posted on columns around the city, and crowns were placed atop effigies that appeared all over the city center.
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All this would soon change. In the face of the revolutionary movements sweeping Europe at the beginning of 1848, rulers throughout the continent faced the unappetizing choice of either granting constitutions—and hence turning their subjects into rights-holding citizens—or fleeing. Pius IX was a reformer in the sense that he viewed some aspects of the old system as corrupt and in need of change, but he was far from a democrat. Yet he, too, felt constrained to grant a constitution in Rome in March 1848 in the wake of the constitutions granted by the kings of Sardinia and the Two Sicilies the month before.

In Italy, the antiabsolutist uprisings embraced another goal: the ejection of the foreigners from the peninsula and the end of foreign rule. When, in March, revolution erupted in Vienna and Metternich fled, the time for driving the Austrians out and proclaiming Italy for the Italians seemed to be at hand. Giddy at the prospects of the dawning of a new age, many saw the Pope as the potential godfather of a new political union.

But on April 29, 1848, just twelve days after he had ordered the gates of Rome’s ghetto torn down, Pius IX issued an allocution that condemned the Italian nationalists, rejected the Risorgimento, and declared that the Papal States could never join in the war to drive Austrian troops out of Italy. Those who had seen in Pius IX the liberal pope who would lead the people into a new age were stunned. All the ministers of the new Roman government resigned in protest, and the paralyzed moderate nationalists gave way to the Republican movement, whose enthusiasts had long viewed the temporal power of the papacy as an anachronism, unfit for the modern age of nations.

Although Pope Pius IX championed some reforms on his accession to the papacy, he was very much a product of the Catholic frame of mind of the time. Civilization was identified with Christianity and, in historian Giovanni Miccoli’s phrase, “the only true civilization was that born and developed in medieval Europe.” The Pope believed in the virtues of tradition, hierarchy, and order. He feared the unknown and was diffident toward the new. Like others of the Church hierarchy, Pius IX viewed the changes introduced into Europe with the Enlightenment, and especially with the French Revolution, as threatening the proper order of things—indeed, as the work of the devil. It was the Church’s responsibility to block these moves toward secularization, to prevent the questioning of traditional authority.
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Following Pius IX’s late April condemnation of the nationalists, the tide of popular opinion turned against him, and his hold on Rome and the Papal States beyond weakened precipitously. He had brief hopes that his appointment of the able Pellegrino Rossi as the new prime minister would lead to the reassertion of papal authority, but these were bloodily dashed when, on November 15, as Rossi was entering the parliament building, assassins slit his
throat. With huge demonstrations demanding democratic reforms and war on Austria, the Pope, fearing for his life, donned the garb of a simple priest, tinted spectacles obscuring his well-known face, and fled the Holy City. It was the night of November 24. He crossed the border into the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, taking up residence in the fortress of Gaeta. It was not one of the Pope’s finest hours. Even for those who later sought his canonization as a saint, the flight to Gaeta was “one of the saddest and least glorious moments of his papacy.”
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