The Mortara case (Italian: caso Mortara) was an Italian cause célèbre that captured the attention of much of Europe and North America in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure of a six-year-old boy named Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family in Bologna, on the basis of a former servant's testimony that she had administered an emergency baptism to the boy when he fell ill as an infant. Mortara grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX, who refused his parents' desperate pleas for his return. Mortara eventually became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the Papal State's actions contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.
In late 1857, Bologna's inquisitor, Father Pier Feletti, heard that Anna Morisi, who had worked in the Mortara house for six years, had secretly baptised Edgardo when she had thought he was about to die as a baby. The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held the view that the action irrevocably made the child a Catholic and, because the law of the Papal States forbade the raising of Christians by members of other faiths, it ordered that he be taken from his family and brought up by the Church. Police went to the Mortara home late on 23 June 1858, and took custody of Edgardo the following evening.
After the child's father was allowed to visit him during August and September 1858, two starkly different narratives emerged: one told of a boy who wanted to return to his family and the faith of his ancestors, while the other described a child who had learned the catechism perfectly and wanted his parents to become Catholics as well. International protests mounted, but the Pope would not be moved. After pontifical rule in Bologna ended in 1859, Feletti was prosecuted for his role in Mortara's kidnapping, but he was acquitted when the court decided that he had not acted on his own initiative. With the Pope as a substitute father, Mortara trained for the priesthood in Rome until the Kingdom of Italy captured the city in 1870, ending the existence of the Papal States. Leaving the country, Mortara was ordained in France three years later, at the age of 21. He spent most of his life outside Italy and died in Belgium in 1940, aged 88.
Several historians highlight the affair as one of the most significant events in Pius IX's papacy, and they juxtapose his handling of it in 1858 with the loss of most of his territory a year later. The case notably altered the policy of the French Emperor Napoleon III, who shifted from opposing the movement for Italian unification to actively supporting it. The traditional Italian historiography of the country's unification does not give much prominence to the Mortara case which, by the late 20th century, was mostly remembered by Jewish scholars. A 1997 study by the American historian David Kertzer has marked the start of a wider re-examination of it.
Background
Political context
For more than a millennium, starting around 754, the Papal States were territories in Italy under the direct and sovereign rule of the pope. Ecclesiastical rule over Central Italy started when Frankish King Pepin the Short donated its territories in the centre of the peninsula to Pope Stephen II. The Catholic Church's control over Rome and a neighbouring swathe of central Italy was generally seen as a manifestation of the pontiff's secular, "temporal" power, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the other main Italian states were the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the west, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, the Kingdom of Sardinia (governed from Piedmont, on the mainland) and the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia in the North East (under direct Austrian authority); minor entities were the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza and the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, both in Emilia. The French occupation during the 1790s and early 1800s had greatly increased the Pope's popularity and spiritual authority, but had also severely damaged the geopolitical credibility of the Papal States. The historian David Kertzer suggests that, by the 1850s, "what had once appeared so solid – a product of the divine order of things – now seemed terribly fragile".
Pope Pius IX, elected in 1846, was initially widely seen as a great reformer and a liberal moderniser, who might throw his weight behind the growing movement for unification of Italy – referred to in Italian as the Risorgimento (meaning "Resurgence"). When the revolutions of 1848 broke out, however, he refused to support a pan-Italian campaign against the Austrian Empire, which controlled Lombardy–Venetia in the north-east. That triggered a popular uprising in the Papal States, Pope Pius's flight to Gaeta, then belonging to the Two Sicilies, and the proclamation in 1849 of the short-lived Roman Republic, which was crushed by Austrian and French intervention in support of the Pope. Rome was thereafter guarded by French troops, and Austrians garrisoned the rest of the Papal States, much to the resentment of most of the inhabitants. Pope Pius shared the traditional pontifical view that the Papal States were essential to his independence as head of the Catholic Church. He regained some of his popularity during the 1850s, but the drive for Italian unification, spearheaded by the Kingdom of Sardinia, continued to unsettle him.
The Jews of the Papal States, numbering 15,000 or so in 1858, were grateful to Pope Pius IX because he had ended the long-standing legal obligation for them to attend sermons in church four times a year, based on that week's Torah portion and aimed at their conversion to Christianity. On 17 April 1848, he had also torn down the gates of the Roman Ghetto, despite the objections of many Christians. However, Jews continued to be subject to many restrictions and the vast majority still lived in the ghetto. After returning from exile in 1850, during which the Roman Republic had issued sharp anti-Church measures, the Pope issued a series of anti-liberal measures, including re-instituting the Ghetto.
Mortara and Morisi
Edgardo Levi Mortara, the sixth of eight children born to Salomone "Momolo" Mortara, a Jewish merchant, and his wife Marianna (née Padovani), was born on 27 August 1851 in Bologna, one of the Papal Legations in the far north of the pontifical state. In 1850, the family had moved from the Duchy of Modena, just west of Bologna. Bologna's Jewish population of about 900 had been expelled in 1593 by Pope Clement VIII. Some Jews, mostly merchants like Edgardo's father, had started to settle in Bologna again during the 1790s and, by 1858, there was a Jewish community of about 200 in the city. The Jews of Bologna practised Judaism discreetly, with neither a rabbi nor a synagogue. The Papal States officially forbade them to have Christian servants, but observant Jewish families perceived gentile maids as essential because they were not covered by Jewish laws, and thus provided a way for Jews to have household tasks carried out while still observing their Sabbath. In practice, Church authorities turned a blind eye, and almost every Jewish family in Bologna employed at least one Catholic woman.
A few months after Edgardo's birth, the Mortara family engaged a new servant: Anna "Nina" Morisi, a 14-year-old Catholic from the nearby village of San Giovanni in Persiceto. Like all her family and friends, Morisi was illiterate. She had come to the city following her three sisters, to work and save money towards a dowry so she could eventually marry. In early 1855, Morisi became pregnant, which was not uncommon for unmarried servants in Bologna at that time. Many employers would simply sack girls in such situations, but the Mortaras did not. They paid for Morisi to spend the last four months of her pregnancy at a midwife's home and deliver the child, then had her return to work with them. To protect Morisi and themselves from embarrassment, they told neighbours that their maid was sick and recuperating at home. Morisi gave her newborn baby to an orphanage, which the Papal States required unwed mothers to do, then returned to work with the Mortaras. She remained there until she was hired by another Bologna family in 1857. Soon after that, she married and moved back to San Giovanni in Persiceto.
Removal
Instigation
In October 1857, the inquisitor of Bologna, the Dominican friar Pier Gaetano Feletti, learned of rumours that a secret baptism had been administered to one of the city's Jewish children by a Catholic servant. If true, it would make the child a Catholic in the eyes of the Church, a fact with secular as well as spiritual ramifications, since the stance of the Church was that children who it considered to be Christian could not be raised by non-Christians, and should be removed from their parents in such circumstances. Cases like that were not uncommon in 19th-century Italy, and often revolved around the baptism of a Jewish child by a Christian servant. The official Church position was that Catholics should not baptise Jewish children without the parents' consent, except if a child was on the brink of death. In those cases, the Church considered the customary deferment to parental authority was outweighed by the importance of allowing the child's soul to be saved and go to Heaven, and permitted baptism without the parents' assent. Many Jewish families feared clandestine baptisms by their Christian maids and, to counter this threat, some households required Christians leaving their employment to sign notarised statements confirming that they had never baptised any of the children.
The servant identified in the rumours was Anna Morisi. After receiving written permission to investigate from the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (also called the Holy Office), the body of cardinals responsible for overseeing and defending Catholic doctrine, Feletti interrogated her at the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna. Morisi averred that while she was employed by the Mortaras, their infant son Edgardo had fallen gravely sick while in her care, leading her to fear that he might die. She said that she had performed an emergency baptism herself – sprinkling some water on the boy's head and saying: "I baptise you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" – but had never revealed that to the child's family. Edgardo had since recovered. Feletti had Morisi swear to keep the story quiet and sent a transcript of the meeting to Rome, requesting permission to remove the then six-year-old Edgardo from his family.
It is not known whether Pope Pius IX was involved in any of the early Holy Office discussions over Mortara, or was otherwise aware of Feletti's initial investigation. He was its official head but only occasionally attended its meetings, and was not likely to have been consulted about what the cardinals saw as routine matters. For the Holy Office, situations such as that reported by Feletti presented a profound quandary – on the one hand, the Church officially disapproved of forced conversions, but on the other, it held that the baptismal sacrament was sacrosanct and that if it had been properly administered, the recipient was thereafter a member of the Christian communion. In accordance with the 1747 papal bull Postremo mense, the laws of the Papal States held that it was illegal to remove a child from non-Christian parents for baptism (unless it was dying), but if such a child was indeed baptised the Church was held to bear responsibility to provide a Christian education and remove it from its parents.
The cardinals considered Morisi's account and ultimately accepted it as bearing "all the earmarks of the truth without leaving the least doubt about the reality and the validity of the baptism she performed". Feletti was instructed to arrange Edgardo's removal and transport to the House of Catechumens in Rome, where instruction was given to those who were newly converted or in the process of converting to Catholicism.
Removal
A detail of papal carabinieri (military police), led by Marshal Pietro Lucidi and Brigadier Giuseppe Agostini, arrived at the Mortara apartment in Bologna soon after sunset on 23 June 1858. After asking a few questions about the family, Lucidi announced: "Signor Mortara, I am sorry to inform you that you are the victim of a betrayal", and explained that they were under orders from Feletti to remove Edgardo as he had been baptised. Marianna screamed hysterically, ran to Edgardo's bed and shrieked that they would have to kill her before taking him. Lucidi said repeatedly that he was only following Feletti's orders. He reported afterwards that he "would have a thousand times preferred to be exposed to much more serious dangers in performing my duties than to have to witness such a painful scene".
Lucidi offered to let Edgardo's father accompany them to the inquisitor to discuss the matter with him. Momolo refused, but Lucidi allowed him to send his eldest son, Riccardo, to summon relatives and neighbours. Marianna's uncle Angelo Padovani, a prominent member of Bologna's Jewish community, concluded that their only hope was to appeal to Feletti. The inquisitor received Padovani and Marianna's brother-in-law Angelo Moscato at San Domenico soon after 23:00. Feletti said that he, like Lucidi, was merely following orders. He declined to reveal why it was thought that Edgardo had been baptised, saying that it was confidential. When the men begged him to at least give the family one last day with Edgardo, the inquisitor acquiesced, on the condition that no attempt was made to spirit the child away. He gave Padovani a note to that effect to pass on to the marshal. Lucidi left as ordered, leaving two men to stay in the Mortaras' bedroom and watch over Edgardo.
The Mortaras spent the morning of 24 June attempting to have Feletti's order overruled by either the city's cardinal legate, Giuseppe Milesi Pironi Ferretti, or the Archbishop of Bologna, Michele Viale-Prelà, but they found that neither was in the city. Around noon, the Mortaras decided to take steps to make the removal as painless as possible. Edgardo's siblings were taken to visit relatives, while Marianna reluctantly agreed to spend the evening with the wife of Giuseppe Vitta, a Jewish family friend. Around 17:00, Momolo visited San Domenico to make one last plea to Feletti. The inquisitor repeated all he had said to Padovani and Moscato the previous night and told Momolo not to worry, because Edgardo would be well cared for, under the protection of the Pope himself. He warned that it would benefit no-one to make a scene when the carabinieri returned that evening.