The Mortara Case

It is charged, always without context, that Pope Pius IX during his 1846-1878 papacy removed a Jewish child from his family. However, the context makes it clear that the continued attacks can only be an attempt to persecute the Catholic Church by proxy.
Edgardo Mortara’s Jewish parents lived in Bologna in what was then the Papal States, a Catholic nation whose sovereign territory included much of present-day Italy. The Papal States had two well-known laws. The first prohibited Jewish parents from hiring Catholic servants to raise their children. Pope Benedict XIV had written on February 28, 1747:

Since this may happen, that a child of Hebrew parentage be found by some Christian to be close to death, he will certainly perform a deed which I think is praiseworthy and pleasing to God, if he furnishes the child with eternal salvation by the purifying water.

The Papal States intended this law against hiring Catholic servants to protect Jewish families. With no Catholic nannies around to baptize their children, Jewish parents could keep their families intact.

The second law required that if a gravely ill Jewish child was baptized and then recovered, he could not be raised by his parents unless they became Catholic. The Catholic faith is serious. Once a child is baptized, the Church is responsible to do all it can to protect his immortal soul by assuring that he is raised Catholic.

Edgardo Mortara’s parents, ignoring the law, hired a Catholic teen-age girl as a nanny. When Edgardo fell ill at age 17 months, the nanny prayed for the child and baptized him. Five years later, after she told her parish priest that Edgardo was not being raised Catholic, Papal States police on June 24, 1858 enforced the law and brought Edgardo to Rome. Eight days later his parents arrived in Rome where they stayed for a month and pled for his return. Edgardo, then six years old, met with his parents every day but never showed any desire to rejoin them, as he himself later attested.

Edgardo remained in Rome and was educated under the personal protection of Pope Pius IX, always free to return to his parents. At age 17 he went to Bologna to spend a month with his parents, but decided to return to Rome and become a Catholic priest.

In 1870, the Risorgimento, a Masonic-inspired movement to unify Italy and break the temporal power of the Catholic Church, brought Piedmontese troops to Rome. They hurried to the convent where they imagined that Mortara, then age 19, was being held captive, but were surprised to hear him say that he not only intended to become a priest but also to take religious vows with the Lateran Canon Regulars.

Father Mortara, reconciled with his parents, became a devout scholar, and preached throughout Europe in nine languages. He passed into eternity in 1940 at age 88.
Pope Pius IX promoted true freedom for Rome’s Jews. At his order, the gates of Rome’s Jewish ghetto were taken down. He deployed patrols in the area to protect the Jews from those who were incensed by their emancipation. Father Mortara was one of the first witnesses to give testimony in favor of Pius IX’s beatification.

The reasoning of the Church at the time was in accordance with the very strict late-medieval view of baptism. The nominalism of the schoolmen had by that time degraded theology into a web of legalistic relations comparable to the Torah legal system. Today the Church has recovered a more Pauline, patristic and Thomistic view of baptism, by which it most likely would have handled the Mortara case in a way more charitable to the parents and which would have still granted the young boy the freedom to become a priest.

This is deep theological water. God chooses to work through His sacraments, but He is not limited by them. This leads to a paradox: It is theologically correct to say that baptism is necessary for salvation, but not theologically correct to say that without baptism there is no salvation. St. Paul reminds us that God told Moses,

Rom 9:15 “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy.”

Holy Mother Church explains,

CCC 1260 Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery. Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

This is why Catholics must always look to the Magisterium. Fides et Ratio is a wonderful guide for us. Faith is always reasonable; yet faith, since it is not reducible to mere reason, cannot be expressed merely in a series of truth propositions. If it were not so, we would worship logic rather than God!). This is why Cardinal Ratzinger, in his “Introduction to Christianity,” a book he wrote in the late 60s and early 70s, explained that all the Catholic Church's credal statements (e.g. “I believe in God the Father the Almighty …”) are symbols of mysteries: They point to something mysterious and infinite which always surpasses the expressed content of the statements themselves, for the simple reason that God is infinite and his love is always beyond our comprehension.

Our love for God works in this mysterious way. We know something of Him, yet He is infinite, far beyond our small intellects, full of mercies and surprises! Christ's farewell discourse in St. John's Gospel, and the mystical theology of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa Benedicta, witnesses to His infinite love for us.