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.

During most of her history, the Catholic Church held a 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.

However, Mr. and Mrs. Mortara chose to violate the Papal States law during a time when the Church saw baptism through the lens of a 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 her earlier view of baptism. 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.”

We can see evidence of this change through a recent attack on the reputation of Pope Pius XII. On December 28, 2004 the liberal Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera published a bizarre claim by Alberto Melloni that in 1946 Pius XII had sent explicit instructions to Archbishop Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), his nuncio in France, ordering him not to return Jewish children to their parents if the children had been baptized while being sheltered by Catholic families or institutions during the Holocaust. Since there was no evidence that had occurred, the article alleged that Archbishop Roncalli had ignored Pius XII’s “stone-hearted instructions.” Mere months after Dan Rather ended his long CBS News career by airing a forged-document attack on President George W. Bush, the New York Times, without verifying the information, on January 9, 2005, published its own article, “Saving Jewish Children: But at What Cost?” to repeat the false charge.

There were four strong reasons to doubt the authenticity of that supposed papal letter. (1) It was not signed. (2) It was not on Vatican letterhead. (3) The words used were not typical for Vatican directives. (4) And the purported letter from one Italian (Pacelli) to another (Roncalli) was in French.

On January 11, 2005, the Milan newspaper Il Giornale published Andrea Tornielli’s response on its front page. Tornielli found the original document and compared it with the French version published by Il Corriere della Sera and the Times. The original had been three pages in length, and the pages had been attached in the archive, but the French version had translated only the first page as if it were the entire document. The memo makes it clear that if Jewish children—whether baptized or not— were reclaimed by family members, these childrenwere to be reunited with their Jewish families. In the same issue of Il Giornale, Matteo Napolitano castigated Melloni for his erroneous and misleading use of the memo.

Rabbi Herzog had gone to Pius XII in March 1946 to ask about turning these orphans over to Jewish families so that they might be raised Jewish. Pius XII promised to look into it. Evidently the children were returned to their Jewish families; Rabbi Herzog for the rest of his life spoke well of Pius XII.