The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (44 page)

When Valentini got up to address the court, he followed the path suggested by Carboni, focusing on two grounds for the Dominican friar’s guilt. Their first claim was that Father Feletti had acted on his own, seizing Edgardo without first receiving instructions from Rome to do so. Valentini cited a variety of evidence to support this claim. Giuseppe Agostini, who had been shown the letter in which Father Feletti had ordered the operation, recalled no mention of higher authorities in it. And why would Colonel De Dominicis have been so eager to filch the letter from the police files as soon as the international cascade of protests about the case began if he were not worried that the order had been improper? Otherwise, it was this very document that would protect De Dominicis and the rest of his officers, justifying what they had done. As for the Inquisitor’s claim that he must have had authorization from Rome in advance, since the Rector of Rome’s Catechumens was waiting to take the boy in, Valentini pointed to a subtle point in Agostini’s testimony. According to Edgardo’s escort, when he arrived at the Catechumens with the boy, the Rector told him that he was expecting their arrival, because Father Feletti had already notified him. Although Father Feletti claimed that he had never been in direct contact with the Rector, and that the Rector must have been informed of Edgardo’s impending arrival by the Holy Office in Rome, this showed, the prosecutor charged, that the Inquisitor had arranged the whole affair by himself.

The Inquisitor had also lied, Valentini argued, about the Pope’s knowing about the order to take the boy, as demonstrated by his lie about the Pope sending tickets for the boy’s parents to come to Rome. And, the prosecutor asked, if the Inquisitor’s orders had come from the Holy Office, why had the Church authorities not come to his aid? “Why would they, by their silence, let an innocent man suffer in prison if he had been following their orders?… Why don’t they contribute to God’s glory by the triumph of the truth, the discovery of innocence, by making known a fact that reveals nothing that ought to be secret?”

Valentini did all he could to make the case that the friar had acted on his
own, but Carboni, who had gotten to know the prisoner well, had little confidence in this argument. He knew what kind of man Feletti was. He might, in certain respects—such as his attitudes toward the Jews—be considered a fanatic, at least from a liberal’s point of view, but he took the responsibilities of his office seriously, and the operations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were nothing if not hierarchical. That Father Feletti would have flouted proper procedure—launched an unauthorized investigation and then, without checking with his superiors, ordered police to abduct a boy from a Jewish family—seemed implausible. That he would have then sent the boy to Rome and thereby broadcast news of what he had done seemed even more farfetched. Father Feletti was no maverick, nor was he stupid.

The prosecution’s strong point was its second claim. As Valentini put it, “Let us admit, for the moment, that the Inquisitor received the order to proceed with the abduction of the boy Edgardo Mortara from the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome. Who was it who would have told them about the alleged baptism given to the boy?… If the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome was informed before the abduction that the Mortara boy had been baptized, it could only have been from Father Inquisitor Feletti.” This is a point that the Inquisitor had never denied.

If the cardinals of the Holy Office had ordered Edgardo seized, then it could only have been based on the Inquisitor’s investigation. But how, the prosecutor asked, had the Inquisitor established that Edgardo had really been baptized? Father Feletti relied on the word of one woman alone, and had made no effort to check with any other witness who could have helped verify her story, or who could have helped him determine how much faith could be put in her words. Instead, thanks to Father Feletti, “a tender young child was torn from his beloved parents’ arms on the simple sworn statement of a woman.” Valentini added: “And we shall soon see just what kind of woman she was.”

It is one of the ironies of Italian unification, and of the fall of papal power in the Legations, that this first major trial in the new Italian region of Emilia—which had been annexed to the new kingdom only the month before—turned on a dispute over what constituted a valid baptism. The case was fought less on the ground of secular law than on the proper interpretation of ecclesiastical law. Valentini went over Anna Morisi’s account of the baptism in great detail, arguing that she did not, in fact, do it correctly if, indeed, she had done it at all. Hence it could have had no effect. For example, she had not pronounced the words at the same time she sprinkled the water on the boy’s head. If the Holy Office had known this, “they would never have claimed that he was baptized” and never have ordered Edgardo taken from his parents.

Here the prosecutor could not resist a flight of rhetoric. Speaking of the illiterate girl’s approximation of a baptism, he said:

And for this bit of silliness, was it worth upsetting and saddening a most noble city with the sudden, clamorous, violent abduction of a child by so many policemen? Was it worth throwing a quiet, honorable, industrious family … into desperate tears of pain, and ruining their health and their wealth? Was it worth putting such a strange, mean, wicked kidnapping on the lips of both friends and enemies of the Catholic Church throughout Europe and in the rancorous pens of journalists in two hemispheres?

Yet Valentini would not admit that Anna Morisi had performed even the flawed rite that she had described. During Edgardo’s illness, his parents had never left him unattended, and at the time he was sickest, Anna herself was confined to bed. In her account, the baptism occurred in the middle of winter, yet the doctor’s records provide irrefutable proof that the child’s illness took place in the summer.

“Morisi,” the Prosecutor pronounced, “was at the time a peasant girl: foolish, boorish, and a chatterbox, according to the witnesses.… She wasn’t good at taking care of the children, and she didn’t even know what
pancotto
[a dessert] was.” In short, Valentini concluded, “she had a poor background, which is to say, she had little instruction in Christian doctrine, and she herself says she didn’t know how to administer a baptism.”

This led the prosecutor to a crucial witness: Cesare Lepori. It was only through Lepori’s assistance that Anna could have baptized Edgardo, as she herself admitted. But Cesare Lepori had, under oath, sworn that he had never spoken with Anna about baptizing anyone. Moreover, he had said the same thing to witnesses in 1858, when the pontifical authorities were still in power, so this was not a matter of trying to cover up his behavior now that the papal regime had fallen.

And what of the ignorant, silly peasant girl of 1852? Had she, over the years, matured into a woman of character, one meriting our trust in her probity? “Corrupted by the foul breath and touch of foreign soldiers who were then sullying these unhappy lands, she rolled over without shame with them and then, showing that she had the dirtiest of minds, she bragged about it.” Unbeknownst to her employers, she had blithely turned their homes, day and night, into houses of prostitution, and “twice, before she got married, those soldiers made her a mother.” Her word, in short, meant nothing.

“Will Father Inquisitor Feletti’s deed go unpunished?” asked the Prosecutor. “No one thinks it will. He has already suffered the condemnation pronounced by public opinion, not only in Bologna, nor just in Italy or Europe, but throughout the entire civilized world.”

But why did the Inquisitor do what he had done? What moved him to
believe Anna Morisi’s story without checking it, or worse, to act on it without ever fully believing the shameless servant’s tale of sudden heroic piety? The Prosecutor thought he had an answer. Father Feletti had been driven by his “obsessive zeal, his mania for fame, for power, and, finally, from an Inquisitor’s hatred of Judaism.”

As Valentini neared the end of his closing argument, he issued a call of conscience, a call of the new order against the old, the new secular state against the old regime. There is no more terrible hatred among men, he said, than that motivated by religion. “A private citizen who, to satisfy his whim, abducted a boy … would be liable for punishment. Are we to believe that a high magistrate—because he induces fear, because he is inquisitor of the Holy Office, because he can take advantage of secrecy, because he can be certain not only of impunity but, indeed, of praise and reward—that he should be let free?”

The prosecutor concluded: for arbitrarily ordering the violent abduction of the little boy, Edgardo Mortara, carried out in Bologna on June 24, 1858, under the pretext of his having been baptized, and for sending him to be confined in the House of the Catechumens in Rome, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti stands charged under the legal codes that were then in force. He violated the laws directed at magistrates who abuse their power and “against those who arrest others arbitrarily and keep them imprisoned.” Valentini asked for a sentence of three years of public service, reimbursement of court costs, and payment of damages to Edgardo’s parents.
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It was now time for the flamboyant Francesco Jussi, sitting alone at the defense table. He rose to confront the six black-robed judges.

“Oh, most excellent judges!” Jussi began. “Who does not know what happened to the Mortara family … how a child was taken from them, and how this child was then taken to Rome? The fact is too well known, sirs, and thinking of the pain expressed in that poor mother’s tears tells us the story even before words do so.” Yet, nonetheless, he added, the man who stands accused of a crime for this deed has no real need for a defense, for the simple facts demonstrate his innocence.

What crime did Father Feletti commit? He testified that when the Sacred Congregation learned that Edgardo Mortara had been baptized, it ordered him to take the boy and send him to the House of the Catechumens in Rome. The Inquisitor also declared that he had sent an order to this effect to Lieutenant Colonel De Dominicis. “Where is the prosecutor’s proof that this assertion is false?” If the prosecutor has no copy of the letter to De Dominicis, this is certainly not Father Feletti’s fault. And he could not expect Father Feletti to show him the letter he received from Rome, for the Inquisitor had taken a sacred oath not to reveal the secret acts of the Holy Inquisition.

And in any case, Jussi continued, the facts speak for themselves. Father Feletti sent the boy off to Rome without ever even seeing him. “The real decision could only have been made by the bishops who compose the Sacred Congregation, whose head is the Roman Pontiff himself.” As further proof, Jussi cited an authority whom none of the judges would dispute: Marquis Gioacchino Pepoli, one of the leaders of unification forces in Bologna and cousin of the French emperor. Pepoli, describing the Mortara affair, had written: “To those who appealed to him about the taking of the little Mortara, Pius IX replied, ‘
Non possumus,’
the last word is this, he could not offer any other.” But, argued Jussi, “if the Holy Pontiff responded ‘
Non possumus’
to those who asked about the boy, he must have known that he had given that order, or at least that, as President of the Sacred Congregation, he had approved it.”

Even if the Inquisitor had in fact acted on his own, asked Jussi, what right would this court have to try him for it? “Was Father Feletti the Inquisitor of the Holy Office at the time or wasn’t he? Was there or wasn’t there this tribunal in Bologna?” Indeed, Jussi added, it had taken two acts of the new government to abolish it: the declaration that all citizens were to receive equal treatment before the law, and, later, Farini’s proclamation explicitly abolishing the inquisitorial court. “How, then, can you proceed against a magistrate for enforcing a law that it was his responsibility to enforce at a time when that office still existed?” He continued: “The new government that replaces the old can cancel the law if it doesn’t like it, but it may never proceed against those who enforced it solely out of hatred for that law or that office.”

Having thus dispensed with the first issue, Jussi turned to the charge that Father Feletti had done his job poorly, that he had deceived the Sacred Congregation, telling its members that he had determined that a valid baptism had taken place when in fact it had not. On this point, the lawyer argued, Church law was clear: Inquisitor Father Feletti’s work could be judged only by the Holy Office and the Pope, not by any secular court such as this.

“But let us suppose for a moment that it could be; what would such a trial show? Would it show that there had never been a baptism? Would it show that it was invalid? that it was not given to a person who was dying? Quite the contrary, sirs, and I believe that even the most superficial and rapid reading of the trial record is enough to convince all of you that the fact is just the opposite of this claim.…

“I call as witnesses,” said Jussi, “the Jews Padovani and De Angelis, who, as they recounted, around the end of July 1858, went to Persiceto to see Morisi to find out from her how it all happened.” Jussi quoted at length from Angelo Padovani’s recollection of Anna Morisi’s tearful account of her baptism of Edgardo, concluding with Padovani’s own testimony: “From her words, her behavior, and her tears, I was convinced that she had told me the truth.”

Anna’s story, Jussi said, had the undeniable ring of truth. What could be more natural than for a simple servant girl, when off shopping at the grocer’s, to gossip about her employers? And isn’t it the custom of grocers to try to find out all they can about what is going on in their neighbors’ houses? Jussi also made note of a police report on Lepori in the trial record, which referred to him as “an intimate friend” of the local parish priest, Don Pini, an “Austrian-loving Jesuit.”
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Lepori was clearly someone “who must have known very well how to baptize a child.” Jussi might have added, had he but known, that for years one of Lepori’s major customers was the Convent of San Domenico itself, a fact all the more striking because his was by no means the closest grocery.
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