The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (48 page)

There seemed to be no lack of conspiratorial plans for seizing Edgardo from the grip of the reeling papal forces. Even Garibaldi apparently got into the act, albeit fleetingly. In his force of volunteers—men willing to risk their lives for the ideal of a united Italy—were, curiously, many foreigners. One of these, an English Jew named Carl Blumenthal, angered by the failure of diplomatic efforts to win Edgardo’s release, came up with his own plan for rekidnapping the boy. He and three friends would dress up as friars, win admittance into the Rome convent where Edgardo was being held, and make off with him. Blumenthal asked for Garibaldi’s approval of the plan in 1860, and Garibaldi—who would later work the Mortara case into a novel of his own—gave his blessing. But the attempt never took place, aborted, it was said, by the unexpected death of one of the conspirators.
⁹

Garibaldi was not the only one to see fictional potential in the Mortara drama. A spate of plays were written and produced in the immediate aftermath of Edgardo’s abduction. Most significant was
La Tireuse de cartes
(The Fortune-Teller), whose opening in Paris on December 22, 1859, was attended by the Emperor and Empress themselves. Inspired by the Mortara case, the story was altered to appeal to a broad audience and set in seventeenth-century France. Its dramatic details were reported in the
Monitore di Bologna,
which praised the play for “re-evoking and supporting a cause that moved the whole world.”
¹⁰
It was quickly translated into Italian and put on in Bologna the same month that Father Feletti was freed from prison.
¹¹

Given the times, it is no surprise that in Italy dramatization of the Mortara case took the form of an encomium to national unification and vilification of papal rule. But to serve this purpose, a more satisfactory ending was required.
La famiglia ebrea
(The Jewish Family), the best known of these plays, written by Riccardo Castelvecchio in Milan in 1861, was set in Bologna in 1859 but had the kidnapping of the protagonist—a Jewish boy secretly baptized by the family servant—take place twenty-nine years earlier. Although he was raised by the Jesuits, the boy nourished a smoldering hatred for those who had deprived him of his parents, and he became the secret leader of Bologna’s unification forces.

In the play’s last scene, amidst the uprising of patriotic forces in Bologna,
he is at last reunited with his father, who is a rabbi. The Cardinal Legate is arrested, but before he is led off, he sneers at the Rabbi: “But you won’t get to enjoy the fruit of your triumph. I leave your family in discord: the father a Jew, his son a Christian!”

“You forget,” the Rabbi replies. “The star of freedom has arisen; the fogs of prejudice and ignorance disappear before its light. Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, will form one family alone. They will shake hands on the altar of the nation and will have but a single name: Italians!”
¹²

Curiously, both the Italian and the American play based on the Mortara story, written at the same time, renamed Edgardo with the more Jewish-sounding name of Benjamin. Without the patriotic romance that so permeates the Italian play, the American drama became simply an extension of the anti-Catholic polemics that the Mortara case had tapped into in the United States. Leaving no room for missing the point, it was titled
Mortara—or The Pope and His Inquisitors,
and the play’s characters included Mortara, his son Benjamin, Pope Pius, a cardinal, monks and inquisitors, and even an English rabbi named Montefiore.

The play could scarcely have been more melodramatic, more violent, or more anti-Catholic. The mad pope screams for the inquisitors to “imprison every Jew.” Mortara is cruelly tortured by the Cardinal, who seeks information on the Jew’s nephew, a refugee from papal justice. The Inquisitor, while gleefully dislocating Mortara’s fingers and pouring hot oil on his arms, threatens to torture his son as well: “to rack thy son and burn his eyeballs out, to flay his feet and make him walk on sand, to roast his flesh and lay him on crushed glass,” and on and on.
¹³

What both these plays make clear is the fine line that little Edgardo was walking between hero and villain. In the Italian dramatization, the boy’s father would kill him if he found that he had become a “Jesuit,” although, in keeping with the secularization of the story, the murderous sentiment is justified on patriotic rather than religious grounds. And Edgardo/Benjamin himself sees through the fact that, in educating him, the priests were simply trying to turn him, too, into “an instrument of oppression.” There again the reference is ambiguous, the oppression universalized. But for Jews in the audience, the reference was clear enough. Having endured centuries of forced sermons by converts, and having been brought up on cautionary tales of fanatic converts torching Talmuds and baptizing hapless Jewish children, they knew just what kind of devil Edgardo/Benjamin could turn into.

Fear that Edgardo himself might become the enemy of his people was voiced directly in the antipapal literature when Edgardo had barely reached his ninth birthday. A French pamphlet captured these sentiments, writing in 1860 of the fate in store for little Edgardo: “The child will become not a
Christian according to the Gospel but—the pen balks at writing it—he will be a Jesuit!… this order whose principles are in opposition to the legitimate, true Christianity. And now what will become of this innocent child, if he does not become the instrument of this order, one of its missionaries, a persecutor of the Jews, a persecutor of his own father.” And the author concludes, writing in France before the Castelvecchio play was written: “At that moment, perhaps, will we hear his parents cry, their hearts broken, ‘Would to God he were never born!’ ”
¹⁴

A story appeared in the newspaper
L’opinione nazionale
in the fall of 1860. The paper had gruesome news to report about Edgardo. It seems that Church authorities, having discovered to their delight that Edgardo had a talent for singing, had had him castrated so that he could fill a recent vacancy in the Sistine Chapel choir. The French head of papal military forces in Rome, General Lamoricière, was said to have energetically opposed the operation. The story—if not the operation—hit a nerve. Reports of such operations had long circulated. Alexandre Dumas, for one, had reported that in a trip to Rome not many years earlier, he saw a sign in a barbershop window: “Boys castrated here.” In the 1860s, the Spanish traveler to the Vatican Emilio Castelar reported hearing that the soprano ranks of the Vatican choirs were suffering “because they can’t find families who are so heartless as to be willing, for the love of gold, to sacrifice their own little sons.” For the Holy See, by contrast, the newspaper report only reconfirmed their view that the fuss over Edgardo was simply a scurrilous attack mounted by the Church’s enemies. On October 13, in the
Giornale di Roma,
the castration report was firmly denied.
¹⁵

The Pope had good grounds for feeling besieged. Not only had he lost Bologna and Romagna the previous year, but much of what had then remained of the pontifical state—the lands of the Marches and Umbria—had now been conquered as well. On November 4, 1860, a plebiscite in those two regions repeated the ritual enacted the previous year in Romagna, and of 232,685 of his former subjects voting, 230,805 voted for annexation to the kingdom of Sardinia. All that prevented the same military that had marched into these regions from continuing their march to Rome was the French troops, yet it had been the French who had unleashed the disaster in the first place, plotting with Cavour and King Victor Emmanuel. For the Pope, the presence of the French soldiers seemed scant guarantee against the invasion of the godless hordes.

Odo Russell, the British attaché in Rome who had been so helpful to Moses Montefiore the previous year, reported in early December that the Pope was in a foul temper, “although at intervals he is as cheerful and as benevolent as ever.” The bitterness with which the Pope berated foreigners for the conduct of their governments, wrote Russell, “has more than once placed
the Cardinal Secretary of State in a very awkward position towards the representatives of the Catholic powers.” And Pius IX’s feelings of persecution were now combined with the certainty that his own life was in danger. This time, he vowed, there would be no repeat of his undignified flight to Gaeta twelve years before. “His Holiness believes,” reported Russell, “that the enemies of the Church will lay violent hands on his person and that his end is nigh. He covets the palm of martyrdom which has been borne by so many of his early predecessors. He has abandoned his former plan of withdrawing to the catacombs in the hour of danger and now wishes to fall in his pontifical robes, a victim of his persecutors, on the altar of St Peter.”
¹⁶

When, the following month, the delegation of Jews from Rome’s Università Israelitica came to the Vatican for their annual meeting with the Pope, they found the pontiff in a very different position from that of their stormy meeting of two years before. But Rome was still under papal control, and the Jews showed their customary deference, although they must have been wondering whether this might be the last of their annual visits. On entering Pius IX’s quarters, however, they were surprised to discover at his side a 9-year-old boy in a seminarian’s robe whose shoulder the Pope was gently caressing. Of the Jews present, only Scazzocchio had ever seen him before. It was Edgardo Mortara.
¹⁷

By the time the Roman Jewish delegation got their fleeting glimpse of him, Edgardo had been in the Holy City for two and a half years and had not seen either of his parents for more than two years. He was, however, constantly in touch with the man he described as his other father, Pope Pius IX. Just what his fellow junior seminarians at San Pietro in Vincoli thought of this boy whose father was the Pope can only be imagined. Each month a Vatican messenger arrived at the convent bearing the sum of thirty scudi, sent by the Pope for Edgardo’s expenses. At Christmastime each year, Edgardo was called to the Vatican for a visit with the Pope. On these occasions, as Edgardo himself later fondly recalled them, Pius IX “always lavished the most paternal demonstrations of affection on me, gave me wise and useful training and, tenderly blessing me, often repeated that I had cost him much pain and many tears.” When he was still little, he recalled, the Pontiff, “like a good father, had fun with me, hiding me under his grand red cloak, asking, jokingly, ‘Where’s the boy?’ and then, opening the cloak, showing me to the onlookers.” The Pope took special pride in the strides Edgardo was making in his studies, and liked to impress his guests with the boy’s religious learning. The Pope beamed with pride as, at his prompting, the little convert translated Latin passages for him, to the delight of his visitors.
¹⁸

CHAPTER 24
Edgardo’s Escape

B
Y THE TIME
the Pope, with Edgardo at his side, met with the delegates of Rome’s Jewish community in early 1861, most of Italy had been united under the Savoyard king’s rule. Only the Veneto region, in the northeast, remained under Austrian control, while the region around Rome was all that remained of the pontifical state. At the end of January 1861, the first election of an Italian parliament was held, with the Church urging all good Catholics to boycott it. The following month the new parliament, meeting in Turin, proclaimed the formation of the kingdom of Italy, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. In March, Count Cavour, the prime minister, declared that only by liberating Rome would the new nation be whole; national pride demanded that the Eternal City become its capital. He hastened to warn, however, against any precipitate military action. Rome’s annexation should come only after agreements were reached with France, whose soldiers still guarded the papal domain.

France, which had played such a major role in triggering and protecting the Italian unification movement in 1859, remained at center stage in the emotionally fraught battle over Rome’s fate. Even though Cavour tried to reassure Catholics by offering safeguards for the Pope’s role as the spiritual leader of Catholicism worldwide, opinion in France was mightily swayed by the cries of alarm emanating from the Vatican and taken up by the ultramontane forces. With French public opinion opposed to recognizing the legitimacy of the new Italian state, and the French parliament itself showing unaccustomed independence from the Emperor in denouncing Italian designs on the papal territories, Napoleon III decided to wait until Parliament had recessed before officially recognizing the kingdom of Italy. In May, representatives from Spain
and Austria met with Napoleon and urged formation of a common Catholic front to defend the Pope’s temporal power and his continued control of Rome.
¹
Whatever his personal preferences, Napoleon felt he had no choice but to keep his troops in the Holy City.

In Rome, a siege mentality prevailed. The panic felt at the time of Sir Moses Montefiore’s hasty departure in 1859—when news of victorious Italian armies on the march had sent so many in Rome’s foreign community packing—subsided somewhat, but the threat of invasion remained. Although cooler heads realized that the Italian troops were unlikely to attack, for they would have had to fight the French, the Vatican had other armed patriots to worry about as well—most notably Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers, men inspired by dreams of a united Italian nation, with Rome its capital.

The gates of the city were barricaded. After 9 p.m. no one could enter or leave. On every street corner, it seemed, stood two armed guards, checking the papers of passersby. Many of the guards were members of the Vatican’s own defense force, volunteers and mercenaries from various European nations. Most spoke no Italian, and although French had become the lingua franca of the protectors of the Holy See, most spoke no French either. For the Romans, tension became a way of life. Year followed year, and Pope Pius IX, with the assistance of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, held on, an ecclesiastical island in an Italian sea. Pilgrims continued to make their way to Rome; the cardinals could still be seen, resplendent in their purple robes; bishops clutched their ornate miters; and the Swiss guards, with their broad-striped tunics, lent a carnivalesque air to the area around the Vatican, set in colorful contrast with the guard of noblemen clad in their black velvet cloaks.
²