The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (28 page)

Fortunately for the Secretary of State, however, the abbot’s voice was a lonely one. In Italy, Delacouture would be hard pressed to find a clerical soul mate.

CHAPTER 15
A Matter of Principle

M
OMOLO
M
ORTARA
and those around him—both the Jews and the gentiles he knew, from the family doctor, Pasquale Saragoni, to his friend, the former judge Carlo Maggi—were all, to one extent or another, products of the Enlightenment. The influence of the French, who had occupied Emilia and Romagna for the better part of two decades, remained strong. To people in Momolo and Marianna’s circle, belief in the power of reason, the inevitability of progress, and the equality of all citizens was nearly universal. The beliefs that tradition, rather than reason or the consent of the governed, formed the proper basis for authority; that the world, as God’s creation, would not change until the millennium came; and that inequality was divinely ordained—these were part of the old, archaic worldview, a vestige of medieval times.

In the months following his son’s forced departure, while angry denunciations and counterdenunciations filled the European press, Momolo himself avoided saying anything critical of the Church, the Pope, or the Secretary of State. His goal was clear, as were his methods. Edgardo’s freedom would be won by marshaling evidence to prove that the Church had made a mistake in taking his son. Momolo had been assured early on by Cardinal Antonelli that any evidence he produced would be carefully considered and that the Church leaders were eager to ensure that justice was done. Momolo was also encouraged by the fact that the Secretary of State had received him and been so cordial. In the past, a simple Jewish storekeeper would never have merited such treatment.

The leaders of Rome’s Università Israelitica reinforced this outlook. The Rome ghetto remained an island of traditional authority. When disaster befell
a Jew as a result of the action of the Church or the pontifical state, the proper response was for the Jewish community to prepare a formal request for relief that would then be presented to Church authorities. The request should take a certain form: it should show respect and humility in the face of the Church’s awesome power; it should cite Church doctrine and the time-honored writings of the foremost Church authorities; it should discuss precedents of Church decisions that supported the case; it should point out any particular features of the case at hand that put it in a more favorable light; it should proclaim the unshakable allegiance of the Jews to the papal government; and it should appeal to the charitable nature of the Catholic religion and the kind-heartedness of the Pope.

This style was on display in all of the supplications made on the Mortaras’ behalf, including the most important of these, the Pro-memoria and Syllabus delivered to Cardinal Antonelli at the beginning of September 1858, addressed to the Pope. Following a cover letter effusive in its praise of the Pontiff, the Pro-memoria recounted the facts of the case, facts which, the Mortaras and their supporters hoped, would show that the Church had erred in seizing Edgardo. A seven-page section written in Latin cited the works of various Church authorities in support of the case for freeing the boy. The Promemoria then returned to Italian, recalling various similar instances in which the Church had decided to allow baptized children to remain with their Jewish parents. Three appendices were included: Edgardo’s birth certificate, Pasquale Saragoni’s medical report certifying that Edgardo’s illness was not life-threatening, and the text of a favorable 1639 Church decision in a case of forced baptism.

The Pro-memoria introduced the main document, the Syllabus, a fifty-page work in Latin, citing Church authorities to show why Church dogma dictated the boy’s return to his family. This was the work that the Jews of Bologna had despaired of preparing. To persuade the Church to release Edgardo, they believed, it was necessary to show that ecclesiastical law and precedent were on their side, and this could be done only by experts in ecclesiastical law and Church history. Just who prepared the Latin document remains a mystery. In Scazzocchio’s correspondence, he refers to their expert advisor with great circumspection, shielding his identity from the eyes of papal censors. The Pope himself later speculated that the Jews had had the help of some renegade priest, for who else could be so knowledgeable of canon law and Church precedent, and capable of writing a Latin text?

It is likely that the Jews did have such help, but we cannot take it for granted. Italy’s Jews had become, by sad necessity, expert in canon law on matters affecting them, and especially on the question of forced baptism, the major communities regularly exchanged documents. As a result, the archives
of these communities throughout the peninsula overflowed with lengthy extracts from relevant ecclesiastical legal sources and detailed descriptions of previous cases of forced baptism, Jewish protest, and Church response. Indeed, one of the first actions Scazzocchio had taken on behalf of the Mortaras, earlier in the summer, was to write to the representatives of the major Jewish communities in the Papal States, asking them to dig through their files and send him copies of any documents from forced-baptism cases that might prove useful in preparing the Syllabus.

The Syllabus began with a presentation of rulings of various popes in support of the Jews’ position, beginning with Pope Clement III in the twelfth century. It next extracted passages from the writings of various other Church authorities over the centuries and then used these to argue that the Church had long opposed the baptism of small children without their parents’ consent, that such baptisms were therefore invalid, and that even when Jewish children were deemed to have received a valid baptism, there was ample precedent for allowing them to be raised by their parents.
¹

The star witness in the Syllabus was Thomas Aquinas, who argued that a son should be considered a part of his father and under his authority. Saint Thomas addressed the issue of forced baptisms of Jewish children directly, saying that the Church had always opposed the practice. Among the reasons he cited for this opposition was the danger of apostasy, because baptized children, in such circumstances, would naturally feel sympathy for their parents and so continue to cling to Judaism.

But though the Church could be shown to oppose these forced baptisms, does it necessarily follow that no baptismal ceremony performed on Edgardo could have been valid? Here the question was more complicated. The Syllabus covered various bases, first arguing that forced baptisms were ipso facto invalid, but then giving ecclesiastical grounds for believing that the particular circumstances of Edgardo’s baptism rendered it invalid. For a baptism to be valid, the Syllabus argued, the person baptized must give consent, must want to be baptized. In the case of the small child, where the age of reason had not yet been reached, this consent was the sole property of the father. If the father did not consent, then it was as if the child did not consent. Various Church authorities were cited in support of the further argument that, even in the case of small children at death’s door, the father’s consent was required for a valid baptism. And should Edgardo not, in fact, have been in imminent danger of death, the Syllabus argued, canon law provided that only a priest could perform a valid baptism, for it was only in the case of the urgent need to baptize a person who was dying that the laity were permitted to take the priest’s place.

Finally, the Syllabus cited numerous cases to show that even when Jewish children were baptized, their parents did not lose their right to raise them.
Here, a number of precedents were mentioned, beginning with a case from 1547 and ending with one that was potentially the most important, both because it was so recent and because it had occurred in the Papal States. The case involved a baby born near Rome in 1840 to a French Jewish couple named Montel. Although the infant had been secretly baptized, the parents, following an investigation by the Church, had been allowed to keep her.

The Pope was not impressed by the Jews’ argument. The very idea that Jews would try to tell him what the fathers of the Church had to say, and instruct him in the basics of canon law and ecclesiastical precedent, was deeply offensive to him. He directed his legal advisors to prepare a response to the petition, one that would demolish the Jews’ case and demonstrate that Church law and, more important, the word of Jesus himself would not permit him to release Edgardo.

The resulting Church document was not aimed primarily at furnishing the Mortara family and the Jews of the Papal States with a response to their plea. There was no need to go to such trouble. But given the building international controversy and the uncomfortable pressures being directed at the Pope to change his mind, Cardinal Antonelli thought the Holy See needed to lay out the bases for its position, and the Pope himself was eager to show the fallacy of the arguments being made by his critics. Friends of the Church throughout Europe were pressing the Vatican for just such a document to help them mount a more effective defense.

The result, in mid–October, was a thirty-four-page document titled
Brevi cenni
 …, “A brief explanation and reflections on the pro-memoria and syllabus humbly presented to His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, concerning the baptism conferred in Bologna on the child Edgardo, son of the Jews Salomone and Marianna Mortara.” Bound with the Mortaras’ Pro-memoria and Syllabus, it was distributed by Cardinal Antonelli on October 23 to papal nuncios and representatives throughout Europe, as well as in Brazil, Panama, Bogotá, and Mexico. Antonelli’s cover letter explained that the document provided a refutation of the arguments found in the Jews’ Pro-memoria and Syllabus. He expressed confidence that, with
Brevi cenni
in hand, the nuncios would be “in a position to speak when necessary with the full possession of the material needed to correct the ideas others have of a fact about which those who are in the habit of looking for every occasion for spreading hatred toward the Holy See have caused such an unpleasant and harmful uproar.”
²
The Church document was subsequently made available to Catholic newspapers throughout Europe, to employ in their own counteroffensive.
³

The Vatican response began by explaining the nature of the case. Its choice of phrasing did not bode well for the Mortaras’ side: “The parents of a child who was singularly granted Divine Grace, which, having removed him
from the blind Judaic obstinacy, made him by chance a son of the Church, have petitioned and brought action all the way to the august throne of the Holy Father in order to get back their son, who has already been placed in the bosom of the Church.” The document continued: “What is more, these parents make their plea not simply with the usual appearance of humble supplicants, but with the outspokenness of those who believe themselves oppressed by an arbitrary act, asking that they receive justice, and that the object of which they think they have been unlawfully deprived be returned to them.” Especially outrageous, in the authors’ view, were the Jews’ attempts “to prove with authorities and arguments deriving from [canon] law that the Mortara couple have been the victims of an offense against them.” Examination of the works of the authorities cited in the Mortaras’ brief would reveal that they supported no such conclusion.

It is indeed true,
Brevi cenni
stated, that the Church had always opposed baptizing the children of infidels against their parents’ wishes. However, Church theologians and canon law had long recognized certain exceptions to this general principle, and one of them was operative in the case at hand, for “it is permissible to baptize those children who find themselves near death.”
⁴

As for the Church opposition to the baptism of Jewish children in the absence of consent, the Mortara plea was based on a misunderstanding. The fact that a baptized Jewish child who remained with his parents would be in grave danger of apostasy was, it is true, an argument against performing such baptisms. But the implication of this argument was precisely the opposite of that drawn by the Jews: it was just because of this danger that baptized children could not be allowed to remain with their Jewish parents. Recognizing that force would be required to remove such children from their parents, the Church had tried to prevent such baptism; nonetheless, once it has been conferred on an infidel child, “the Church recognizes it as valid, enters in control of its new son, and adopts every means, every care to distance him from the faithlessness of his parents and to nourish him and raise him in the grace of Jesus Christ.”
⁵
The Vatican brief continued: “In fact, the Canonists and Theologians are in full agreement with this truth: that in no case should a baptized child be returned to infidel parents.” Between the two competing authorities—that of God and that of the parents—God’s must prevail, for was He not the author of the natural rights that parents enjoyed? The right “acquired by the Church over the baptized infant is of a superior and more noble order” than that of the parents.
⁶

Since a baptized child could not remain with Jewish parents, the only question was whether Edgardo had been properly baptized. “Nothing more is required for the validity of the baptism than that the rite be performed according to the proper form with a suitable subject, such as even a newborn
child can be, and it may be performed by anybody as long as he intends to do what the Church intends.” Moreover, “The parents’ approval has never been required for children who have not yet reached the age of reason for the rite to be valid.”
⁷

The Mortaras’ other attempts to throw doubt on the validity of Edgardo’s baptism were likewise dismissed. The notion that, to demonstrate that a valid baptism had been performed, it was necessary to have a witness other than the baptizer had no support in canon law. “That even a woman can be the single witness whose testimony demonstrates that a Jewish child has been baptized, especially in the case of imminent death, has been the unanimous opinion of all the Theologians and Canonists.”
⁸