The Mortara Case:
During the early 1850’s, the Italian city of Bologna was still under the temporal rule of the Pope, a portion of the traditional Papal States. There was resident in Bologna at this time a certain Mortara family, Jews who, while excluded by the Pope from the privileges of citizenship, managed to make a very comfortable living among their Catholic neighbors. Encouraged by the growing revolutionary spirit of the city (which was soon to be out of Papal hands and annexed by the Masonic government of Italy), the Mortaras had lately defied the very explicit Papal law which forbids Jews to have Christian servants. A young Catholic girl of Bologna, Anna Morisi, had been hired as a domestic in the Mortara household.
One day in November of 1857, Anna was describing to a friend the highly serious illness of one of the Mortara children. At the friend’s suggestion that perhaps the child should be baptized, discreetly, before it died, Anna protested that under no circumstances could she do that. She then proceeded to unburden her Catholic conscience by revealing that once before, in a similar circumstance, she had baptized a dying Mortara baby, and the child had afterward recovered — was now, in fact, a healthy six-year-old, and being raised as a Jew!
News of the Mortaras’ baptized boy ultimately reached the Archbishop of Bologna. The sacred integrity of Baptism, and the Church’s obligation to provide for the Christian upbringing of baptized children, left only one course of action to the prelate. Under orders approved by the Holy Office, Anna Morisi, protected by Papal guards, left her Jewish employer’s house, and with her there went the baptized child, Edgar Mortara.
The arrival of Edgar in Rome, where he was to be raised as a ward of Pius IX, made hotly-protested news in every major city of Europe and America. There were cries of “Medievalism!” “Inquisition.” “Popish Tyranny!” Immediately, mass meetings of protest were organized in England and the United States. The powerful alliance of German rabbis sent a formal petition to Pius IX, demanding the Mortara child’s immediate release. Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschilds’ roving ambassador, rushed to the Papal Palace at Rome to deliver a personal protest to the Pope. Unmoved, His Holiness dispatched Cardinal Antonelli to tell Sir Moses about the Church’s ancient position in the matter of baptized children, adding that by their boldness in employing a Catholic servant, the Mortaras themselves must take full responsibility for any unpleasantness that had resulted. Other indignant callers, and many appeared, got similar receptions.
Within two years of Edgar Mortara’s arrival at Rome, the city of Bologna was seized by the Italian Kingdom. Under this new and anti-papal government, the Jews attempted to institute criminal proceedings against the servant-girl, Anna Morisi, charging her with kidnapping. Anna, however, had since entered a convent, and when it became known that the Jews were proposing to violate the sacredness of the cloister and drag a nun into the civil courts, popular indignation forced them to abandon the cause, and to consider the whole Mortara Case ended.
Actually, the end did not come until 1940. In March of that year, a white-haired Augustinian priest died at Liege in Belgium. He was nearly ninety years old and all during his priestly life he had been known as Father Pius, O.S.A., a name which he had taken in honor of his beloved guardian, Pope Pius IX. There were few who took notice of Father Pius’ death, and fewer who realized that he was the same Edgar Mortara who close to a century before had so electrified the world.
