The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (7 page)

Pius IX’s procession into Bologna the evening of June 9 was suitably grand. Striding in front of the beautiful horse-drawn coach bearing the Pope down the old Roman road, Strada Maggiore, military trumpeters announced the Pontiff’s impending arrival. His coach was surrounded by a guard of nobles, with a high official of the pontifical militia riding alongside one door and an Austrian official aside the other. Behind the coach rode an impressive assortment of full-dress generals, followed by coaches bearing members of the noble papal court, and then, stretching far down the road, a line of carriages carrying the local nobles who had come to greet the Pope.

As the lurching procession neared the city, it came to a triumphal arch, constructed just for this occasion, covered with buntings on which the colors of Bologna and the papacy were superimposed. There the carriages stopped, and the Pope was welcomed by a delegation of the city’s nobility, who presented him the key to the city, nestled atop a plush cushion. Pius IX ascended a luxurious throne by the side of the arch and proceeded to give his blessing to the assembled dignitaries. He then returned to his carriage, in which the archbishops of Ferrara and Pisa awaited him. The papal procession got moving again, making its way through the great Porta Maggiore and into the city,
passing through streets festooned with brightly colored banners and buntings. The papal carriage finally stopped at Bologna’s cathedral, where Cardinal Viale-Prelà extended his arm to help the Pontiff out. Together they entered the church, where fourteen bishops greeted them.

Just what impression the Pope’s arrival made on the people of Bologna is difficult to say. The many hagiographic accounts of the triumphal entry published by the Church in the wake of the visit paint a moving picture of adulation and devotion. In a typical example of this genre, the streets were described as lined with a multitude of people, “full of life, energized, happy, prostrating themselves as the papal carriage passed in a sign of religious reverence.” The author recounts that the people appeared as “children happily pressing up to their father, and in every possible way showing their joy.” The presence of “a few angry souls who tried to somehow disturb that joy” was unhappily noted, and likened to the lamentable presence, in even the best of families, of the occasional undisciplined child.
¹³

Enrico Bottrigari, who also witnessed the evening’s events, paints a different portrait. “In the soul of the crowd,” he observed, “one saw the stimulus of curiosity rather than devotion, much less enthusiasm.”
¹⁴

The evening proceeded in eye-popping, ear-splitting style. After saying mass in the cathedral, the assembled clerics made their way to the nearby Piazza Maggiore, where a multitude of military and civilian bands played. The festivities stopped long enough to allow the Pope, from a balcony above the central piazza, to bless his subjects. The displays that followed were indeed impressive, with the Austrian troops marching through the square on horses decked with colored lanterns and torches. The spectacle pleased the Pope, who smiled his delight from the window, his hand held up in benediction.

Although government authorities from Rome had prohibited any signs of protest in the towns that lay along the Pope’s route, a petition of grievances had been drawn up in Bologna, signed by a hundred of the city’s elite. The petitioners’ plan to present it to the pontiff during his visit, however, came to naught.
¹⁵

The Pope did meet some prominent critics while he was in Bologna, men who begged him to reform the Papal States before it was too late. Among these was Count Giuseppe Pasolini, who a few years later would join the cabinet of the new Italian government. At the time, though, the Pope considered him a loyal friend. Indeed, the Count had briefly served as his minister of commerce in 1848. The meeting was an emotional one, two luminaries of an older world uncertainly confronting the new.

Pius IX was pained to hear Pasolini’s view that the Pontiff was set on a disastrous course of intransigence, and that he was unwittingly playing into the hands of revolutionaries bent on destroying the old order. At the end of
the unhappy encounter, the embattled and emotional Pope, in tears, asked, “So you too, my dear Count, are leaving me?” “No, Your Holiness,” Pasolini replied, “it is not we who are leaving you, but you who are abandoning us.”
¹⁶

While the Pope was in Bologna, the friars of San Domenico invited him to join them in celebrating Saint Dominic’s day, on August 8. Along with his Dominican brothers, Father Feletti—until recently prior of the convent as well as its longtime inquisitor—was thrilled to hear that the Pope would indeed be coming.

The Dominicans were doubly pleased about the Pope’s visit, because they hoped to enlist his aid. Since the Napoleonic army had evicted them from their church and convent at the end of the previous century, they had succeeded in regaining only a part of their former vast complex. Unfortunately for them, the Austrians’ military headquarters for Bologna was across the street, and a substantial portion of the Dominicans’ buildings had been converted to barracks for the troops.

Following the celebration of a mass honoring their founder, the Dominicans took the Pope on a tour of their library. Once one of Italy’s foremost book collections, it had been sadly reduced as a result of the Napoleonic depredations. Not only had large portions of it been carried off by the French, but a good deal of the rest had been seized to stock the city’s municipal library. After the tour, the friars took their guest to a reception in his honor. There they asked him to order the removal of the Austrian troops from their convent.

To show their appreciation, Father Feletti and the other convent leaders presented the Pontiff with a beautiful reliquary in which they had placed a fragment of Saint Dominic’s bones. There was no greater gift they could offer. Although San Domenico boasted many treasures, none was more precious to the friars than the holy remains of their founder.
¹⁷

Pius IX accepted the reliquary with gratitude, for he was a man with a deep appreciation of the holy and a firm belief in the powers of the spiritual realm. Two years later, the Dominicans’ wish would be fulfilled, and the entire Austrian military force in their complex hustled out, though hardly in the way they anticipated on that glorious August morning.

A week later, Pius IX left Bologna. His old friend Count Pasolini sadly described the scene: “A touching and lonely departure. You could see Pius IX’s hand reach out from the door of the papal carriage, blessing the German troops who, silent, standing at attention, in single file, presented their arms. Nobody else was on the roads.”
¹⁸

CHAPTER 4
Days of Desperation

F
RIDAY
, June 25, 1858, the day after 6-year-old Edgardo rode down Bologna’s cobblestone streets in the arms of the police, Momolo was still bewildered. He did not know who was supposed to have baptized his son, when they had done it, or how the Inquisitor had come to hear of it. The one thing he did know—he thought—was that his son was still somewhere in the city, most likely in the convent of San Domenico itself. Just before Marshal Lucidi took Edgardo away, Momolo’s friend Vitta demanded a receipt for the boy. The note Lucidi scrawled read: “I have received and been consigned by Sig. Momolo Mortara his son Edgardo, aged 7 [sic], who by order of the Holy Father Inquisitor General is to be deposited in that Convent.”
¹

At the moment, Momolo’s only hope of contacting his son was through Father Feletti. Momolo recalled the Father’s suggestion that he prepare some clothes for the boy, and although the Inquisitor had said that he would send someone to pick up the package, Momolo decided to take it to the convent himself to see if he could learn where his son was.

After lunch, he prepared a little bundle—the boy had left with only what he was wearing—and asked his brother-in-law, Angelo Moscato, to return with him to San Domenico. When they arrived at the splendid church courtyard, a lay Dominican brother informed them that Father Feletti was away and suggested they come back the next day. On their return the next morning, Edgardo’s clothes again in hand, they were ushered into the Inquisitor’s quarters.

Father Feletti received them graciously, but told Momolo that his son would have no need of the clothes after all. Edgardo was doing just fine,
although just where the boy was, the Inquisitor would not say. I have entrusted your son, he reassured Momolo, to someone who is a good family man himself, a man who can be counted on to treat Edgardo with a father’s care. What Momolo was not told was that the family man in question was a person he had recently met—Brigadier Agostini.

Momolo and his brother-in-law could get nothing more from the Inquisitor and returned dejectedly home, where friends and neighbors soon brought the news that the carriage that had made off with Edgardo had been spotted as it sped out of the city. It had not gone to San Domenico at all.

Momolo was in shock. His wife, Marianna, was, according to some reports, going out of her mind. They knew only too well the fate that had befallen them, for it was one that they, their relatives, and their Jewish friends had feared all their lives.

Once a Jewish child had been baptized, the child was in the eyes of the Church no longer a Jew and could not remain with his or her parents. In Catholic theology, baptism is viewed as a practice instituted by Jesus himself; its effects are instantaneous and irreversible. Through baptism, the individual becomes part of the mystical body of Jesus Christ and thereby a member of the true Church. Baptism releases the recipient from original sin and all other sins committed up to that time, and allows the beneficiary to enjoy eternal life. The practical requirements of the ceremony are modest. Water must be sprinkled on the person’s head while the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” are said. Although sanctified water is preferred, the baptism is valid regardless of the kind of water used. Under normal circumstances a priest should officiate, but anyone can carry out the rite as long as the baptizer has the proper intention. Indeed, not only can baptism be performed by someone who is not a priest; it can be performed by someone who is not even a Christian.
²

Reggio and Modena, where Momolo and Marianna had grown up, were no strangers to such cases of police appearing in the night and demanding that a baptized Jewish child be turned over to them. They could scarcely have forgotten what had happened in Reggio less than a month before their first child was born there.

It was the evening of July 12, 1844. Police appeared at the home of Abram Maroni and his wife, Venturina, and informed them that their 19-month-old daughter, Pamela, had been secretly baptized. They wrested the child from her parents’ arms and left. Abram learned that the alleged baptism had been administered by a young Catholic woman who had worked in their home for a few days. The family’s protests—to the Archbishop, the Duke of Modena, and even the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome—were to no avail. Pamela was taken to the local Casa dei Catecumeni—House of the Catechumens,
the Church institution founded in the sixteenth century for the conversion of Jews and other infidels—and her parents were forbidden to see her until she became an adult.
³

Another Reggio case was no doubt known to Momolo, although he was not yet aware of its uncanny similarities to his own predicament. One day in November 1814, the Governor of Reggio ordered that a 7-year-old child, Saporina De’Angeli, be removed from her Jewish parents. A few days after police took her, the Reggio Jewish community helped the distraught father send a plea to the Governor of the province. It began: “A poor but honest man, intensely observant of the Law of Moses, yet having full respect for those principles that are professed by Christianity, Abram has been blessed by Providence with seven children, the oldest of whom has barely reached his tenth birthday. But in the midst of this, a great calumny was silently being plotted, which would reduce him to desolation and tears.”

The villain in this piece, as in the taking of Pamela Maroni in the same city three decades later, was an illiterate young Catholic woman: “It is said that a woman of the lowest classes, of whose name and morals the unfortunate man remains ignorant, claims that, on some occasion vaguely recollected in the past, she secretly baptized his daughter named Saporina. And this was enough for the police to be sent to tear the daughter from the arms of the weeping mother, and take her to the Casa dei Catecumeni.”

The woman in question was a former family servant. She claimed to have baptized Saporina years before, when she was a baby. She performed the rite, she said, because the child was ill, and she feared the consequences if the little girl died unbaptized. The protests of Saporina’s parents were in vain, and, indeed, the deputies of the Jewish community who helped them were sharply rebuked by the secretary of the Duke of Modena’s cabinet for interfering in the matter.
⁴

Rather than a flickering vestige of the dark days of the Counter-Reformation, the taking of Jewish children was a common occurrence in nineteenth-century Italy. So frequent had such cases become that in October 1851, a few weeks after Edgardo’s birth, the leaders of the Jewish communities of Reggio and Modena drew up a joint petition, which they presented to Francesco V, duke of Modena. Their supplication began with the usual profession of loyalty and appreciation but then called on the Duke to do something about “an extremely grave evil that in the recent past has afflicted us many times.” They went on: “We speak of the horrible danger that we face even today of, from one moment to the next, finding ourselves bereft of our offspring due to clandestine baptism. Experience teaches us that it is in the power of even the most abject and infamous person to reduce, in but a moment, a family to desperation, a whole Nation to mourning and fear.”
⁵