The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (36 page)

Papal power had fallen in Bologna, but Edgardo was in Rome, where the
Pope still ruled. Although Momolo saw no point in returning to Bologna, the crumbling of papal power there did give him hope that the rest of the Pope’s temporal kingdom would soon fall as well. Short of that, Momolo hoped that, given Pius IX’s parlous situation, the European powers could make him yield Edgardo as part of the price to be paid for continuing to rule Rome. The people whom Momolo most needed to influence, then, were to be found not only in Turin but in Paris and London, and so it was that he spent the last months of 1859 and January of 1860 in the French and British capitals, aided by funds raised by Jews not only in Italy but in France as well.

Luigi Carlo Farini’s dramatic entry in the old duchy of Modena as the champion of the people against the retrograde powers of the Church made an impression on another Mortara, Momolo’s father, Simon, who lived in Reggio. If the new ruler was promising to right the wrongs of papal rule, would he not do everything he could to undo the damage done to the Mortara family? On October 30, Simon called on the Dictator to have his grandson returned to him, and Farini obliged by ordering the newly formed Justice Department to launch an inquiry. A few days later, Farini added the role of Governor of Romagna to that of Dictator of Modena and Parma, and among his first actions, taken November 14, was the abolition of the Inquisition in all the lands under his control.

On December 30, writing from his home in Reggio, Simon pressed his plea to Farini. “My son, Momolo,” he wrote, “devastated by having his son Edgardo abducted by the Pontifical Government of Rome, is currently in London seeking the support of that Power to demand the restitution of our beloved Edgardo.” Having thus explained why it was he, rather than the boy’s father, who was making the appeal, Simon continued: “Independent of the steps that my son is able to take, and knowing of the loyalty, justice, and humanity of Your Excellency, I make so bold as to call on you and beg you with this note, in my son’s name as well, to make use of your powerful intervention to bring about the longed-for-return of my most beloved grandson Edgardo, for since the day he was taken from his family, we have had neither peace nor solace.”

Farini was a busy man, facing the daunting tasks of constructing a new government, maintaining public order, and warding off the much-feared counterattack of the armies of the ancien régime. But he gave immediate attention to Simon Mortara’s plea, and on December 31 ordered the Justice Minister to go after the “authors of the kidnapping.”
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Shortly thereafter, newspapers throughout Europe reported the arrest of the Inquisitor on the request of Edgardo’s grandfather, but they did not have it quite right. What Simon Mortara had asked Farini for was the return of his grandson, not the Inquisitor’s arrest. Unfortunately for the despondent grandfather, neither
Edgardo nor those who kept him came under Farini’s power. Father Feletti, however, did.

When, on New Year’s Eve, the order was given to proceed with the case against the Inquisitor, the man put in charge was 41-year-old Filippo Curletti, a trusted agent of Count Cavour, and director general of police for Romagna, who had been sent from Piedmont to assist Farini.
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Knowing how strongly Farini felt about the Mortara case—viewing it as the incarnation of all that was wrong with the old order of justice, and hence offering potent symbolism for demonstrating the virtues of the new—Curletti gave it top priority. Early in the morning of January 2, 1860, he left the city and took the road down the Po Valley to the town of Cento, twenty miles away. He was in search of a key witness, Second Lieutenant (formerly Brigadier) Giuseppe Agostini, the man who had taken Edgardo to Rome and whose accounts of the miracle en route had inspired Catholics across the continent.

In a second-floor room of Cento’s government palace, Curletti interviewed the 53-year-old police officer. After describing the painful siege at the Mortara home, Agostini told of the journey to Rome but made no mention of any miraculous visitations, saying simply: “Arriving in Rome in the first days of July, I took the boy to the House of the Catechumens, where the superior of that institution received him, telling me that he had already had a communication from Father Inquisitor Feletti about it.” Agostini ended his account by saying that, after leaving the boy off, he had gone directly back to his post in Lojano. But suspecting that the policeman was leaving something out, Curletti asked him if, following his return, he hadn’t spoken with Father Feletti and, indeed, received some kind of reward from him. Yes, the Second Lieutenant admitted, he had gone to see the Inquisitor at San Domenico subsequently, but only because he was ordered to do so by Colonel De Dominicis. At the convent, “after I told him I had brought my assignment to a happy conclusion, he showed great satisfaction, and as I was leaving he gave me a gift of four scudi [coins], wrapped in paper.”
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It was late in the day when Curletti finally got back to the police offices on the third floor of Bologna’s Palazzo Comunale, but despite the hour, two Bologna-based carabinieri awaited him there. Both men had recently passed smoothly from their jobs with the pontifical police to the police force of the newly organized state.
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Curletti had called them in to verify, through duly sworn legal declarations, who had ordered that Edgardo Mortara be forcibly removed from his home on June 24, 1858. Curletti was in a hurry. It was after midnight when the first of the men, Placido Vizzardelli, aged 59, Lieutenant Colonel of the carabinieri, began his testimony.

Vizzardelli recalled that one day, when he was at work at the Bologna carabinieri headquarters, his boss, Colonel De Dominicis, post commander,
told him to send a message to Brigadier Agostini ordering him to come immediately to Bologna. Agostini soon appeared, as ordered, and was directed by De Dominicis to go to the home of the Mortara boy and to take him to Rome. Vizzardelli volunteered, further, that the order had come to De Dominicis from the Dominican Father Feletti, the Inquisitor. “The ones who could give you more information on this disgusting fact,” he added, “are Agostini, whom I mentioned, and Marshal Caroli, both of whom are now under my command.”

Indeed, the other man waiting his turn to testify that night was Pietro Caroli. Aged 38, Caroli had in 1858 been vice-brigadier in the pontifical carabinieri, in charge of keeping Bologna police records. One day in June 1858, he recounted, he processed a letter in which Feletti directed De Dominicis “to go to the home of the Israelite Mortara in this city in order to take his son, who, as I well recall, was named Edgardo, and to put the boy at his disposition.” Caroli continued: “I know that this task was carried out by Pietro Lucidi, Marshal of the carabinieri, and, if I recall correctly, aided by Brigadier Giuseppe Agostini … and that the boy was taken to Rome to the House of the Catechumens by Agostini.” Caroli remembered, further, that Father Feletti’s letter warned them to be sure not to confuse Edgardo with one of his brothers.

For the police chief, Curletti, as later for the prosecutor, one of the key bits of legal evidence in fixing responsibility for the order to seize the child was the letter that Caroli had described, in which the Inquisitor ordered De Dominicis to take Edgardo. Its whereabouts interested the investigator a great deal, and it was to this topic that the interrogation of the former police record-keeper turned. Caroli informed Curletti, to his dismay, that Feletti’s letter and De Dominicis’s subsequent orders for seizing Edgardo were no longer to be found: “When the Turin newspapers began to speak of this fact, Signor De Dominicis removed the papers, which were in my hands, and from that time on, I never saw them again.” Nor were related orders to be found, for when the end of papal rule in Bologna was approaching in June 1859, Lieutenant Colonel Vizzardelli ordered the records of the pontifical police destroyed.

Marshal Caroli, perhaps feeling that he was not making the best impression on the newly appointed chief of all police in Romagna, added that shortly after the Mortara boy was taken, Father Feletti had written a letter to Agostini praising him for the happy outcome of the operation. The Inquisitor, he added, had remarked to Caroli himself how satisfied he was at the way things had gone. On the other hand, Caroli volunteered, he later heard Marshal Lucidi, who had carried out the operation, “complain about the difficulties they ran into, and protest that, should a similar case appear, he would formally refuse to take part.”
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Father Feletti was far from the first inquisitor to find his authority
contested by the secular rulers. Indeed, the history of the Inquisition in Italy is that of a struggle for power—the power to sit in judgment of the population, from pauper to prince, infidel to bishop—pitting the centralized Church against a panoply of other contenders, both civil and religious.

From its beginnings, the Inquisition had been closely identified with the Dominicans, the Church’s foremost experts on matters of theology and law. From the thirteenth century, when the first Inquisition went after heretics, most inquisitors were Dominicans. While this initial inquisitorial effort petered out, the battle against the Protestant Reformation brought a revival and reorganization of the Inquisition in Italy in the sixteenth century as the struggle against heresy took on new urgency. In 1542, Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office, composed of cardinals, to oversee the Inquisition. This centralized in Rome the battle against heresy and unorthodoxy in all their forms, from offensive profanity to satanism, from ridiculing the clergy to having sex with the devil, from reading proscribed books to founding new religions. Alongside this modern Italian, or Roman, Inquisition were two quite separate institutions: the notorious—at least among Jews—Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 by King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella, directed initially against Jews and Muslims—and the Portuguese Inquisition, begun in 1531. While both the Spanish and the Portuguese inquisitions had been abolished earlier in the nineteenth century, the Italian Inquisition remained alive.
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For the Church, the Inquisition was no minor matter. The cardinals who made up the Holy Office were among the most powerful in Rome, and its head, who sometimes chaired its sessions, was the Pope himself.
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Every inquisitor in Bologna—from the first, in 1273, to the last, Father Feletti—was a Dominican and lived in special quarters at the convent of San Domenico. One of Father Feletti’s rooms there housed the huge wooden cabinets in which the most precious of all his possessions were kept: the inquisitorial records, containing the texts of interrogations and correspondence with the Holy Office in Rome. A second room, above the first, had in the past been dedicated to the torture used to encourage confessions, although it was no longer employed for this purpose in the nineteenth century. A third room served for more traditional interrogations, and this is where Anna Morisi had been brought for her těte-à-těte with Father Feletti. It contained a leather-covered table, a leather armchair, a rush-seated chair, and a wooden bench on which sat the scribe who recorded the interrogations. Adjacent to this chamber was a little room, well insulated from the rest of the convent, which had in the past been used for difficult interrogations that were likely to be loud and unpleasant, although not requiring the special features of the torture chamber. Below was the schoolroom, where the younger Dominican brothers studied proper legal procedure so that they, too, might one day become inquisitors.
In the past, there had also been jail cells, a perennial headache for the inquisitors, both because there were not enough of them and because they were not as secure as they should be. Escape was far from unknown.
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Throughout most of its history in Bologna, the modern Inquisition focused on stamping out Protestant heresy, a task made more demanding by the fact that the city’s famed university attracted students and teachers from lands where the virus of Lutheranism and Calvinism was widespread. In the half century between its establishment and the expulsion of the Jews from Bologna, however, Bologna’s inquisitors had on numerous occasions to deal with the special problems posed by the Jews.

On August 12, 1553, the Holy Office in Rome ordered inquisitors throughout the land to collect and burn all copies of the Talmud found in Jewish homes and synagogues; four years later, it forbade Jews to own any Hebrew books other than the Old Testament.
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Just months before the Jews were expelled from Bologna and began their two centuries of exile, a Jew was arrested and charged with having destroyed a number of sacred Christian images at roadside shrines in the city. Allegro, son of Jacob, from the ghetto of Modena, was arrested together with a Christian friend, Ottavio Bargellini. Although they were found innocent of the sacrilege, the interrogations revealed their guilt of another crime against God and religion: sodomy. To that charge was added, for Bargellini, accusations of having been “Judaized” through his contact with Allegro. The two men were condemned to death.

On May 22, the day set for his execution, Allegro—no doubt hoping to win a reprieve—declared his desire to become a Christian and, indeed, was baptized at eight o’clock that very morning. But the sentence stood, and the two men were promptly led off to the special platform set up in Piazza Maggiore, where without further ado they were decapitated. Yet even under these sanguinary circumstances, the baptism of a Jew was cause for celebration. While his Christian companion’s body was unceremoniously tossed in a hole and covered, Allegro’s was laid out in San Petronio, his head placed atop his neck. That afternoon, amidst great pomp and the enthusiastic participation of large numbers of Bolognesi, his bipartite cadaver was transported to the church of San Domenico for burial. He was buried with his new name, Paolo Orsini, bestowed on him that day by his proud baptismal godfather, Lodovico Orsini. It was nine days after notices had appeared on the streets of Bologna ordering all Jews out of the city.
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