Montara affair

[mek42]

Axioms:

Moral law is timeless.

Jewishness is matrilineally determined.

The Bible is true.

Arguments:

From axiom 2 the child was Jewish. No act of man can change this.

The Tanakh specifies that Jews are held to a much higher standard of law than gentiles, as the poster ChosenPeople has previously discussed.

Since moral law is timeless, Jews remain bound to this higher standard post Christ. To argue otherwise is to say Christianity is a form of moral relativism.

By causing the child to be ignorant of the whole of the law required for the welfare of his soul, the Pope of the time actually endangered the child’s soul. Therefore the act was morally wrong.

 

[devoutchristian]

Axioms:

Moral law is timeless.

Jewishness is matrilineally determined.

The Bible is true.

Arguments:

From axiom 2 the child was Jewish. No act of man can change this.

The Tanakh specifies that Jews are held to a much higher standard of law than gentiles, as the poster ChosenPeople has previously discussed.

Since moral law is timeless, Jews remain bound to this higher standard post Christ. To argue otherwise is to say Christianity is a form of moral relativism.

By causing the child to be ignorant of the whole of the law required for the welfare of his soul, the Pope of the time actually endangered the child’s soul. Therefore the act was morally wrong.

The ceremonial laws are not timeless and moral laws are universal in application, therefore your argument is refuted…

 

[Eufrosnia]

Axioms:

Moral law is timeless.

Jewishness is matrilineally determined.

The Bible is true.

Arguments:

From axiom 2 the child was Jewish. No act of man can change this.

The Tanakh specifies that Jews are held to a much higher standard of law than gentiles, as the poster ChosenPeople has previously discussed.

Since moral law is timeless, Jews remain bound to this higher standard post Christ. To argue otherwise is to say Christianity is a form of moral relativism.

By causing the child to be ignorant of the whole of the law required for the welfare of his soul, the Pope of the time actually endangered the child’s soul. Therefore the act was morally wrong.

You are forgetting that the ceremonial law is not necessary for a baptized person

 

[mek42]

Where in the Tanakh is it given that the Chosen People will one day be free from the ceremonial laws while they yet walk this earth?

 

[AbideWithMe]

Let me try a fourth time. I believe that in the scenario I’ve thrice given there would be an outcry by christians of “brainwashing”. As I mentioned I wouldn’t call it brainwashing, and you’ve now stated that you would not call it brainwashing. But I am steadfast that such an outcry would exist, including among many of those christians who do not see the Edgardo Mortara situation as equally amoral.

So?

“So”? DevoutChristian, does “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” ring any bells?

I’m a Christian, but I’m dumbfounded by some of arguments other Christians have made on this thread.

 

[NewEnglandPriest]

I don’t think anyone here is going to claim that taking a child away from their family is a good thing (outside of extreme circumstances). But to judge a group of people we need to be able to understand their time and place. In that vein, I’d like to offer the analogy of Elián González. How many people wanted to keep Elián here in America despite his biological father wanting him back? The basic argument was that life in America was superior to life in Cuba and thus what his father wants is not necessarily the most important determining factor. How many people, even if they disagreed with that idea, sympathized with that.

In the topic of this thread, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the people of that time and place. They clearly considered the Christian way of life to be superior and thus more important than the immediate parent’s wishes. In the modern world we’ve developed and fleshed out the notions of rights and conflicting rights but we still have our debates and disagreements in particular situations.

I think we can all agree that the situation being discussed should not happen in the modern world and we’d all oppose it. However I think we need to recognize it’s very easy to be caught up in asserting the superiority of our own culture over another. It can happen to any group at any point in history…

 

[devoutchristian]

“So”? DevoutChristian, does “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” ring any bells?

I’m a Christian, but I’m dumbfounded by some of arguments other Christians have made on this thread.

“Do unto others” applies to people, not to principles. It is not violated by recognizing that the morality of an act can be effected by its purpose.

 

[AbideWithMe]

“Do unto others” applies to people, not to principles. It is not violated by recognizing that the morality of an act can be effected by its purpose.

The Mortara family were people, not principles, so I don’t know what you are trying to say. Is it really that hard to put yourself in their shoes?

I’m not meaning to pick on you, devoutchristian, but wow…I’m nearly speechless. This topic has come up several times before on CAF, including in “Ask An Apologist”, and I can’t remember seeing anyone else persist with “blame the victims” line of thought so long.

 

[devoutchristian]

The Mortara family were people, not principles, so I don’t know what you are trying to say. Is it really that hard to put yourself in their shoes?

They should have agreed to allow Mortara to be educated as a Catholic, as the law required.

 

[mek42]

They should have agreed to allow Mortara to be educated as a Catholic, as the law required.

Even if the alleged baptism was invalid or a whole fiction?

 

[devoutchristian]

Even if the alleged baptism was invalid or a whole fiction?

What evidence is their to support that claim?

 

[Birdmanman]

Agreed, although we will not agree on what “serious harm” means.

I have to give you points for originality in giving a new meaning to the word child to try and equate with that of an actual parent-child relationship.

Thanks for the originality points : ) although this is not original to me, but just a personal interpretation of what the Pope at the time gave as points defending his decision (I think I gave these earlier).

I do see how a christian could accept those defenses. To be frank, it requires not only a knowledge and belief in the Church and its teachings but also a stripping away of that which makes us human: compassion. Another thing it requires is limiting God to a being that believes in love and the bonds of family yet is incapable of finding any middle ground wherein the boy could stay with his family and hunger for the christian’s version of the word of God.

I do not think there was too little compassion in this action, since the Pope was doing it in what he thought was the best interests and the ultimate good of the child. You would call this compassion misguided since you do not believe it aided in the boy attaining the great good of eternal salvation, while I would call it well-ordered compassion. Wanting the best good for another is a part of caring for another, and I think the Pope did that here for Edgardo.

I think your seeing this as a limitation on God’s part is not legitimate, as there are many reasons He would want or at least allow this to occur, not the least of which is, rather than the boy being starved for spiritual education in the faith he was baptized into, this action permitted him to receive an appropriate Christian education, and very well may be a great help to the boy’s ultimate salvation. The middle ground you suggest could have been unideal for the child’s likelihood of having salvation.

But here again, like with my defenses of the action itself, I think neither of these responses in this post to your quoted statements will be satisfactory for you, since you do not believe in the reality of baptism, the importance and reality of salvation, meaning you will see the Pope’s compassion as misguided and the importance of the salvation of the child as less important than the emotional loss of the boy’s biological parents. This follows from your athiestic premises, I just ask that you see how my response can follow from and be consistent with my Christian premises. A debate about the truth of these premises would be more appropriate in another thread, I think, and has probably been had before. (Also, as I’ve said before, I ask that you look into your apparent belief in objective, universal morality, which is not consistent with naturalist atheism.)

A general note: A CAF apologist has answered a question on this case already; searching the Ask an Apologist Forum for this answer may prove useful.

 

[cornbread_r2]

What evidence is their to support that claim?

That’s the question that the Papal State authorities should have asked of the servant who reported the baptism. As it stands, the authorities accepted the testimony of a single, unqualified person that the boy was in danger of death when she baptized him – years previously. IMO, that should have been sufficient reason to doubt that a licit baptism had taken place. Instead, the authorities took that single, uncorroborated, unqualified opinion and used it to justify one of the most extreme things one can do to parents – take their child from them.

 

[Birdmanman]

That’s the question that the Papal State authorities should have asked of the servant who reported the baptism. As it stands, the authorities accepted the testimony of a single, unqualified person that the boy was in danger of death when she baptized him – years previously. IMO, that should have been sufficient reason to doubt that a licit baptism had taken place. Instead, the authorities took that single, uncorroborated, unqualified opinion and used it to justify one of the most extreme things one can do to parents, i.e. take their child from them.

(I don’t want to insert myself too much between this back and forth you are having (I will not be responding to a response to this post), but it seems the important issue is whether or not the boy was baptized, not whether he was in a near death situation as the maid says; even if the maid lied about the boy’s dire illness and so illicitly baptized the boy against the laws of the Papal States and the Church, the baptism would still be valid and be a real baptism if it was done as a real baptism is (Trinitarian formula, water, and so forth). If the maid did it secretly, only she would know about it, and unless the boy had recollection of it or someone else saw, her testimony is the only reasonable evidence at that time the authorities could use to determine if she had really baptized the boy; acting on all reasonably available evidence without reasonable expectation of new evidence arising does not seem to be unreasonable for the authorities to do)

 

[Kaninchen]

The Ottomans used to kidnap sturdy-looking Christian boys and, after intense training, learning Turkish, religious indoctrination and conversion to Islam, they entered the elite military force known as the Janissaries (composed of others ‘recruited’ in the same way). Thus they gave illiterate peasants a good career and ‘the true’ religion.

Similarly, Irish Catholic urchins were lifted off streets of New York to be raised by proper, Protestant and Protestant-work-ethic Americans in the West, thus being ‘saved’ and ‘Saved’ at the same time.

In reality, rather like Pio Nono with Edgardo Levi Mortara, whatever their reasoning, they all did it because they could do it. Kidnapping a Jewish child in Bologna just a very few years later would have got you into serious trouble.

Thanks in no little part to Pio Nono’s actions. Just at the point where the Papal States could have done with a few friends internationally, the scandal of the Mortara affair was just the sort of thing the propaganda machine of the new Italian state needed in its ambitions to do away with the political and territorial power of the Church.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

But I am steadfast that such an outcry would exist, including among many of those christians who do not see the Edgardo Mortara situation as equally amoral.

Birdmanman and you brought up how Edgardo was in support of the canonization of Pius IX, and that’s where I noted that there would be an outcry if the child came from a christian home (although you made it clear you would not be part of such an outcry). By your “so” I take it that you believe the outcry I mentioned was at least feasible yet you don’t see the problem of it. If it were to have occurred then those people who were in support of the action of the Papal States but not of my example scenario, did so not for any legal reason but emotional ones. More specifically they would claim to have a divine edict which means their actions would always trump those of a differing faith. It would be hypocritical.

orestesbrownson.com/178.html

That article explains why Mortara’s rights trumped his parents’ rights.

I read the article. It didn’t cover too much more ground than we’ve all done here in this thread. He does site other cases in which the faith of the parents as well as the intended rearing of the children were such that the government felt the need to take the children away (including those of poet Percy Shelley). An interesting tidbit was when Brownson lamented the control the Jews had over the media. I guess some biases never change, right? It ends with a request of non-intervention from other states.

No, but refusal to comply with the educational laws does.

But is it really an educational law? As noted, Jews were required to get weekly training in Catholic doctrine. Jews were allowed to raise their children as Jews provided they were given the additional education the States thought proper. But this was different. The dividing point is the ceremony, the act which one side holds so dear and which the other side feels is practically nothing. The problem the Papal States had wasn’t one of education but of rearing as a whole. By the account of those in charge, Edgardo had ceased being a Jew. He was now something different and (by their standards) something much better and fuller. The educational training they required of the Jews was not only insufficient for Edgardo but the kind every Jewish parent gave their children was deemed wrong and dangerous. This wasn’t an educational issue. By hook or crook they had a convert and were damned sure not willing to give him up.

I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying now. The issue is that you cannot hold a position regarding an unverifiable truth without reason. You simply do not know would be the only valid position.

Wrong. A million ways wrong. Throughout this whole discussion you have worked under the assumption that christianity is true. Here you have called an unverifiable truth when it more properly is an unverifiable truth claim. When we went over the other faiths that claim to be true, you out-of-hand stated they could not be proven true in the same way that christianity can. Let’s continue…

So if I were to say I believe in Christianity because of the resurrection of Christ. We can only look at the evidence for it. At one point, you have to decide to reject or accept it. If you reject it, you cannot then claim that therefore you are going to hold to some view that the Christian world view is false. Why? Because you lack any reason to claim the views themselves are false. At best, you can say that you lack sufficient reason to believe the resurrection.

I mentioned this before, you’re acting as if rejecting a claim is a passive act. That when someone rejects a claim (and again this is a claim not necessarily a truth) that one does so, shrugs, and then gives up any and all right to a counter-claim. So let’s take the reserruction since you’ve brought it up several times. If you’ve spent any time in the Sacred Scripture section of CAF you’ll see numerous debates as to the veracity of the Bible. Questions will arise regarding things like contradictions with known historical fact, problems with internal consistency, the ability to cite non-biblical sources, and so on. I do not wish to turn this thread into whether the resurrection occurred or not, since that is not what this whole thing is about. But please attempt to comprehend that even if us non-christians are wrong in our debates regarding things like the ressurrection that it is done not passively but aggressively in a quest for knowledge. When you say things like “Why? Because you lack any reason to claim the views themselves are false.” you are being intellectually dishonest in an attempt to brush aside all disagreement and give your views a weight you have not earned through honest critique. This is a philisophical forum, yet the only thing you are doing is special pleading.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

I don’t think anyone here is going to claim that taking a child away from their family is a good thing (outside of extreme circumstances). But to judge a group of people we need to be able to understand their time and place. In that vein, I’d like to offer the analogy of Elián González. How many people wanted to keep Elián here in America despite his biological father wanting him back? The basic argument was that life in America was superior to life in Cuba and thus what his father wants is not necessarily the most important determining factor. How many people, even if they disagreed with that idea, sympathized with that.

Yes, I could sympathize with that. I remember the main thing that swayed me towards sending Elian back to Cuba was the precedent. Every once in a while you’ll hear stories of a couple separating, then one of the parents absconds with the kid(s) in the middle of the night. I knew then that if we let Elian stay that we as a country could not with a straight face demand the reutrn of an American child taken in the same way,

I think your seeing this as a limitation on God’s part is not legitimate, as there are many reasons He would want or at least allow this to occur, not the least of which is, rather than the boy being starved for spiritual education in the faith he was baptized into, this action permitted him to receive an appropriate Christian education, and very well may be a great help to the boy’s ultimate salvation. The middle ground you suggest could have been unideal for the child’s likelihood of having salvation.

To me I think it is the believers who at times limit God if it conflicts with protocol. A few months back I was on this thread and the topic came up about Lot offering up his daughters to the mob to save the angels. I was against it and wondered why Lot didn’t instead pray to God for intercession. I got a response that prayer would not have helped – even though in the story God did intercede. It was an ultra-rare case of an atheist calling for prayer against the thoughts of a christian .

But back to to the topic at hand, I have to think that when a situation like this occurs why couldn’t they have prayed for help from a loving God who is said to judge each of his children taking into account their ability to know him? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful could there not have been a compromise that would allow the family to stay together and to allow the Mortaras to continue the promise handed down over generations to raise their son as a Jew?

 

[AbideWithMe]

They should have agreed to allow Mortara to be educated as a Catholic, as the law required.

Even if the alleged baptism was invalid or a whole fiction?

What evidence is their to support that claim?

That’s the question that the Papal State authorities should have asked of the servant who reported the baptism. As it stands, the authorities accepted the testimony of a single, unqualified person that the boy was in danger of death when she baptized him – years previously. IMO, that should have been sufficient reason to doubt that a licit baptism had taken place. Instead, the authorities took that single, uncorroborated, unqualified opinion and used it to justify one of the most extreme things one can do to parents – take their child from them.

Right. Given the paucity of evidence, and the extreme nature of the matter, the reasonable thing for the authorities to do would have been to suspend judgment.

 

[Birdmanman]

Right. Given the paucity of evidence, and the extreme nature of the matter, the reasonable thing for the authorities to do would have been to suspend judgment.

(I apologize for taking back what I said earlier about trying to stay out of this back and forth on the matter of evidence/the maid)

If I were to kill a homeless man with no family or friends, dispose of the body in a way that it was destroyed and could not be found, and dispose of the tools I used to kill the homeless man, then 4 year later confses my crime to the police; they would have only my testimony to act upon, and no other evidence (none of my friends would remember the date or night specifically and so not notice anything strange about my behavior, etc.), but do you think I would get off without punishment, and they would not view that evidence as sufficient?
In serious matters like this, I think the evidence (the testimony of the only human person who is expected to know about a ‘secretive’ baptism) is sufficient to carry out judgment, rather than risk the consequences (in ‘my’ case, letting a killer on the loose, in the other case, letting a child grow up thinking he was never baptized and failing to carry out their duty (under canon law at that time) of giving him a Catholic upbringing, and perhaps endangering his soul. Danger to the soul is far more dangerous and serious than danger to the body, and if the Catholic Papal States recognized this they would act accordingly).

 

[Birdmanman]

To me I think it is the believers who at times limit God if it conflicts with protocol. A few months back I was on this thread and the topic came up about Lot offering up his daughters to the mob to save the angels. I was against it and wondered why Lot didn’t instead pray to God for intercession. I got a response that prayer would not have helped – even though in the story God did intercede. It was an ultra-rare case of an atheist calling for prayer against the thoughts of a christian .

But back to to the topic at hand, I have to think that when a situation like this occurs why couldn’t they have prayed for help from a loving God who is said to judge each of his children taking into account their ability to know him? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful could there not have been a compromise that would allow the family to stay together and to allow the Mortaras to continue the promise handed down over generations to raise their son as a Jew?

In the case you gave, prayer surely would have helped in one way or another, but for good reasons God may have answered the prayer in such a way that would still allow for Lot to offer up his daughters (I am not speaking about this to debate the morality of Lot’s action, but to say that prayer is beneficial).

I presume that the Pope did indeed pray for help about the situation, or at least some of the theologians thinking about the matter at the time did. There may have been that compromise you suggested available as a possibility, but I do not think it should be considered the optimal or best possibility just because it ties in more with the biological parents interests, and I think God would be the perfect judge of whether this or that possibility is the best possibility, and would take into account things like the the future benefit and priestly work and hopefully salvation for the child, the free will of the parties involved, and more. (Basically, apply the point made in a legitimate theodicy to this situation, or any situation where you might ask the question “Why would God allow this to happen”?)