The Pope Adopts a Kidnapped Jewish Son

In Bologna in 1858 a police squad, acting on the orders of the Inquisitor, invaded the home of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara, wrenched his crying six-year-old from his arms, and rushed the child off in a carriage bound for Rome. The weeping mother collapsed, but her cries were heard across the city and reverberated over Europe. This historical moment was critical with Italy in its violent throes of unification, and the scandal, as David I. Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Knopf, 1997) demonstrates, “contributed to the collapse of the Church’s temporal power.” Modern historians have paid little attention to this riveting story, and one wonders if even after Kertzer’s study, a 2006 play, and a 2010 opera it still does not get the attention it warrants, especially from Italian historians. Like an exploding flare, the dramatic event lit up several terrains and, in impacting the geopolitical area, indirectly altered the map of Europe. The Church’s equivocal attitude toward children was also illuminated.

Couple and family therapist Joan Lachkar has remarked that Judaism is the religion of the father, Islam of the orphan, and Christianity of the son. One might rephrase that to deem it the religion of the child. The Gospels are emphatic on Jesus’ admonition to let the children come to him, for such is the kingdom of heaven, and better that a millstone be tied around one’s neck and be cast into the sea than he harm one of these innocents. However, as the early Church routed grace and salvation through an intricate network of sacraments, a hierarchical system of power arose. To receive grace, in order to become a legitimate child of God and thus be set on the path to salvation, the faithful must be baptized.

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Given the high incidence of child mortality plus the ever lurking dangers of temptation, the earlier the better, for un-baptized souls were lost for eternity.

It is here that additional terrain is illuminated. The Inquisitor’s police, we note, acted on a combination of public and ecclesiastical authority, the Papal States then being like any other civil state. The police gave no explanation for wrenching the boy from his parents, but eventually a fuller story emerged. Earlier, the family’s Catholic maid, fearing the infant Edgardo might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him, or so she claimed in her secret testimony to the Inquisition. According to Church teachings, a Christian child could not be raised by Jewish parents. Thus, despite problems with her story, the Inquisitor decided to proceed with the seizure of the child (Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, 2000, p. 41). To be on the safe side, Edgardo was re-baptized at age nine.

Initially, the boy had been whisked away to a monastery, but later was brought to Pope Pius IX who raised him as his own son, a sort of papal mascot or trophy (Wills, p. 42), an un-chosen heir to an alien faith. The Pope told the boy, “you have and I have suffered because of you,” referring to the bad publicity the case brought in a period when the Pope would lose the Papal States to Italian nationalism, and defended his action by claiming “I, too, am his father” (Wills, p. 42). To Jewish critics, he reminded them of his earlier generosity in dispensing them from “compulsory attendance at proselytizing sermons” and warned them that, but for his pity, he “could have made you go back in your hole” (Wills, pp. 42-43). The Pope blamed the brouhaha on the “freethinkers, the disciples of Rousseau and Malthus” (Wills, p. 40). When his parents were eventually allowed to visit Edgardo in the Esquiline palace, his mother ripping off his Marion medal was taken as proof of her unfitness as a mother (Wills, p. 41).

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In print, a Jesuit argued that if the boy were sent back he might be pressured and even tortured to renounce his faith. “Would it seem right and generous to place the boy on the cross?” he asked, invoking a reenactment of the alleged original Jewish crime of deicide, the rationale for centuries of oppression and persecution (Wills, p. 41). Thus in a deft reversal, the Jewish victim becomes the instigator.

For his part, Edgardo adopted the Pope as his father, declaiming a long poem in his honor, and began preparing for the priesthood. In 1870 when Rome was under siege by Italian armies and Edgardo’s father awaited his 19-year-old son’s liberation outside the Vatican walls, Edgardo opted to escape to an Austrian convent; his father was despondent (Kertzer pp. 264-245). Edgardo subsequently completed his studies for the priesthood in Poitiers and thereafter “dedicated his life to spreading the faith, singing the praises of the Lord Jesus Christ, and traveling throughout Europe, going where he was most needed” (Kertzer, p. 295). In later years he met with his mother, but was unable to convert her (Kertzer, p. 296).

The interpretive lines that open up must remain provisional. Not only is the record scanty, but recent revelations of child abuse especially within the hierarchy expose closed cultures of concealment and conspiracies of silence. Notably disturbing is the case of Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop of Brussels, who forced his young nephew into many years of sexual bondage; the boy was intimidated by Church officials who worked diligently to buy his silence (New York Times, 30 Aug 2010, p. A4).

In the absence of data regarding Edgardo’s adopted childhood, we might first consider Leonard Shengold’s Soul Murder (1989, 1999). But that concept better applies to Edgardo’s parents who were promised their kidnapped/adopted son’s return in exchange for their conversion. Spiritual se-

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duction better applies to Edgardo, and his plight corresponds to an acted-out family romance. Freud introduced the term in 1909 (“Family Romances,” Standard Edition, vol. 9). It pivots on the child reacting to inevitable disappointments with his mundane parents and coping by recasting him/herself as an orphan/foundling to be adopted by an exalted (royal, divine, etc.) set of caregivers. In this instance, Edgardo’s family romance found him, scripted and dictated by the Pope and validated in a glorious future as the Pontiff’s chosen, and reinforced by the “son’s” virtual disowning of his biological parents.

Meanwhile, let’s hope that history is not repeating itself. Pope Pius IX issued a notorious broadside attack on Modernism; our present Pope Benedict XVI rails indiscriminately against the evils of secularism. He listened with apparent approval to a sermon last spring during Holy Week wherein a Benedictine theologian compared his media travails over clerical abuse to a crucifixion. He is currently embroiled in retaining the Easter liturgical prayer for the conversion of the Jews. The papacy is slow to change.

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