Edgardo Mortara

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Edgardo Mortara (right) with his mother

Edgardo Mortara (born August 27, 1851 in Bologna , † March 11, 1940 in Liège ) was an Italian Augustinian canon .

Live and act

Born to Jewish parents, Mortara was baptized as a toddler by the Christian maid Anna Morisi during an alleged illness. Since children baptized according to Papal States law were not allowed to be brought up by Jews, he was kidnapped from his parents' home by the papal police at the age of six and raised in a catechumen house against the fierce resistance of his parents . The parents' struggle for their child remained in vain, although the governments of France, Great Britain and Austria intervened on their behalf in the Holy See. Edgardo Mortara decided in 1865 to join the Congregation of the Augustinian Canons of the Lateran . He was ordained a priest at the age of 21.

Similar cases of kidnapping of allegedly baptized children of non-Christian parents had already taken place in the Papal States without causing a comparable sensation. Against the background of the Kulturkampf and the Risorgimento , the Edgardo Mortara case from 1858 to 1860 provided an emotional argument, especially on the liberal side, for their demand for a separation of state and church. The Catholic side defended the separation of parents and children with reports of a miraculous conversion. As a result of the scandal, the French protective power of the Papal States distanced themselves from the Pope.

Life

Family background and living situation of the Jews in the Papal States

Simon Mortara, Edgardo Mortara's grandfather, ran a small business in the northern Italian city of Reggio nell'Emilia , which was part of the Duchy of Modena . Three of his sons initially worked in the business, including Girolamo (Momolo) Mortara, Edgardo Mortara's father. In 1850 Momolo Mortara moved to Bologna with his wife Marianna Padovani and their five children. According to David Kertzer, one of the reasons for the move was that the Reggio store could not support multiple families.

In Bologna , Jews were banned from settling in Bologna from their exile by Clement VIII in 1593 until the end of the 18th century, so that the economic niche in which the Jews of Italy traditionally operated was still in this city in the middle of the 19th century. Century was largely vacant. Bologna was significantly larger than Reggio nell'Emilia and, as a more important trading center, offered a merchant like Momolo Mortara better professional opportunities than was the case in other northern Italian cities. In 1858 there were about two hundred Jews living in the city, most of whom were merchants. They had neither a synagogue nor a rabbi , but were placed under the religious care of the rabbi of Cento . Otherwise, the lives of a Jewish family differed in the Papal States little belonging Bologna at first glance from the Reggio. In Reggio, a Jewish merchant was only able to live outside the ghetto or run a shop for a high annual fee. In Bologna, the largest city in the Papal States after Rome, Jews were not ghettoized, as in most of the Church-State cities. In contrast, the Editto sopra gli Ebrei (The Decree on the Jews) from 1775 clearly stipulated that the Jews of the Papal States were not allowed to employ Christian servants. However, this specific regulation was one of those of the Editto that was not systematically monitored and punished. The Mortara family also employed Christian maids in Bologna.

Secret baptism and kidnapping

Edgardo, born on August 27, 1851, was the first child of the Mortara couple, who were born in Bologna. Towards the end of 1851 they hired a new maid. Anna Morisi, an illiterate woman, was around eighteen when she started working for the family. She came from the nearby country town of San Giovanni in Persiceto . According to her claims, she baptized the then eleven-month-old boy in August 1852 when he was going through a childhood disease. In 1857, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti , Dominican Father and Inquisitor of the Curia, found out about this baptism under circumstances that were not fully clarified (perhaps through a druggist working in the neighborhood, a maid working in the same house or in the confessional directly from Anna Morisi) . What is certain is that on October 26th, 1857, Father Feletti informed the Holy Office in Rome about this “baptism” of the Jewish child Edgardo Mortara.

On the evening of June 23, 1858, Sergeant Lucidi and another official appeared at the Mortara family and asked for a full name of all family members. After this happened, Constable Lucidi informed the parents that the six-year-old Edgardo was baptized and thus a Christian. Therefore, on the instructions of the inquisitor, they had to take the child with them. To family members of the Mortaras, who immediately visited Inquisitor Feleti in the monastery of San Domenico, the latter confirmed the marshal's testimony. Edgardo Mortara was secretly baptized and, as a Catholic, should not be raised in a Jewish household.

Since the parents were by no means ready to hand over the mother, the mother was first moved and given a period of twenty-four hours; the house remained surrounded by police to make it impossible to escape. "On the evening of June 24th, Edgardo was dragged into a car by two gendarmes who violently prevented him from screaming." During a later trial against Father Feletti, Sergeant Lucidi, who had led the kidnapping, said he was so moved by the inhumanity of the process that he would "refuse to obey" in the event of similar orders.

First reactions

At first thought, the Jewish community of Bologna, if it were one of the Papal States not rare extortion, and offered before the end of the twenty-four hour period, a considerable sum for the boy ransom, but without success. After a while, the parents' petitions to Pope Pius IX remained equally unsuccessful . ; after all, they were given permission to visit their son at the Collegio Lateranense ( Alatri ), into which he had meanwhile been accepted.

Edgardo's grandfather, Samuel Levi Mortara, filed a complaint immediately after Bologna was incorporated into the Italian state. On January 2, 1860, Father Feletti was arrested; on April 16, 1860 it was decreed that Edgardo was “kidnapped, but this kidnapping was officially carried out” and that Feletti was to be released. "After long harassment, unspeakable suffering and great financial losses, the Mortara family had no choice but to emigrate to Turin ." The father died in 1871, the mother in 1895.

Further career

After his abduction, Edgardo was taken to the Institute of Catechumens in Rome, where he was baptized a second time, now with the name of Pius; since then his name has been Pio Edgardo Mortara. In 1865 he joined the Augustinian order; in order to withdraw him from military duty, his superiors sent him to Tyrol , France and Spain , where he wandered from monastery to monastery.

In 1873 he was ordained a priest with a dispensation from the Pope - because he was actually still too young. He spoke several languages ​​and was active in the Jewish mission , for example in Munich , Mainz , Breslau and New York . He seemed to accept his parents and siblings as Jews; a letter was published on April 18, 1900, in which he countered rumors that his mother had converted to the Christian faith before she died. During the Second World War he died in the Bouhay monastery in the Belgian town of Bressoux, a district of Liège.

The Mortara case

The problem of baptism

Pope Benedict XIV had already condemned compulsory and seemingly emergency baptisms in 1747. A by Pope Clement VIII. 1764 and by Pope Pius VI. The decree confirmed in 1775 went further and made the baptism of Jewish children by laypeople without the knowledge and approval of their parents a heavy penalty. The Catholic Church saw exceptional situations only when the child was abandoned by the parents or the child was in danger of death. As soon as a baptism was carried out, the church authorities had to intervene according to their own understanding. The official German church encyclopedia by Wetzer and Welte wrote in 1853:

“Baptism, like Confirmation and ordination, is not temporary but permanent, in that it imprints an indelible character on the soul [...] Through baptism the non-Christian becomes Christian and he remains this forever, the Christian can never be essentially to become a non-Christian again. "

Pope Pius IX finally, on the one hand, bore the heavy legacy of a failed church policy towards Jews - on the other hand, “Pius IX was pleased. pious soul ”about nothing more“ than about these conversion ceremonies ”.

Timely reactions

"The Mortara case, about which contemporaries wrote countless articles, was on everyone's lips and served the opponents of the Pope as welcome evidence of his arbitrary rule." Together with the Damascus affair , the Mortara case gave rise to the establishment of the Alliance Israélite Universelle . Major newspapers in Piedmont , France , England and the United States sharply criticized the Curia's actions; also Napoleon III. protested. The French professor emeritus Abbé Delaconture published a protest paper , and the Italian statesman Camillo Benso von Cavour wrote numerous protest notes.

Impact history

The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara , painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim , 1862

The historian Thomas Brechenmacher describes the Edgardo Mortara case as an affair that stood like a beacon over the last decade of the Papal States. The dogmatic attitude of Pius IX. in the case provided not only the opponents of the Papal State an important argument, but also cost the Pope sympathy among Catholics and the Papal States, and it cast doubts there as to the legitimacy of such a theocratic state. In view of the dubious reputation of Anna Morisi, on whose account of a baptism the kidnapping was based alone and who was only 17 or 18 years old at the time of the baptism, it would theoretically have been possible to decide that the baptism was not lawfully performed. Thomas Brechenmacher points out in his analysis of the case that such a decision would have been possible if the case had happened years earlier. There had been comparable precedents in the past. In the years shortly before the end of the papal state, in his view, Pius IX. but no longer about this scope of action. Any giving in would have been interpreted as a concession to modernity, which Pius had opposed since the revolution of 1848 at the latest. That is why Pius IX stayed. in his dogmatic attitude, although even his Cardinal Secretary of State Giacomo Antonelli advised him to adopt a more pragmatic policy in this case.

Resistance to the beatification of Pope Pius IX. in 2000 by representatives of the Protestant Church, the Orthodox Church and Judaism as well as Catholic church historians referred to, among other things, the robbery of Edgardo Mortara; descendants of the Mortara family also expressed their incomprehension.

Edgardo's robbery was staged several times, as early as 1860 in Naples (“Una familia ebrea”) or a little later in Paris (“La Tireuse de Chartres”). In 2002 a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Alfred Uhry entitled "Edgardo Mine" premiered. This play was based on David Kertzer's publication "The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara", a work that appeared in 1997 in English and has been translated into several languages. In 2002 Anthony Hopkins signed for the role of Pope Pius IX. in the film "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara"; however, in September of the same year the project was "put on hold".

literature

Web links

Commons : Mortara case  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kertzer: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. P. 33.
  2. ↑ Kertzer: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. Pp. 33-34, 43.
  3. ↑ Kertzer: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. P. 29.
  4. ↑ Kertzer: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. Pp. 10, 74.
  5. ↑ Breaking Maker: The End of Double Protection. P. 129.
  6. ↑ For a detailed discussion of the employment of Christians in Jewish households, see Brechenmacher: The end of double protection. Pp. 327-335.
  7. ↑ Brechenmacher: The end of double protection , p. 115 gives the age of Anna Morisi at 17 years. According to the court files quoted by Zacher, the girl was almost nineteen at the time of the alleged baptism.
  8. ↑ Kertzer: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. Pp. 13-18.
  9. ↑ a b Zacher: The robbery of the Jewish boy Mortara. P. 7.
  10. ↑ Zacher: The robbery of the Jewish boy Mortara. P. 16.
  11. ↑ Trial files, quoted from Zacher: Der Raub des Judenknaben Mortara. P. 24.
  12. ↑ Zacher: The robbery of the Jewish boy Mortara. P. 8.
  13. ^ Alain Claude Sulzer: In the clutches of the Vatican. In: welt.de . February 6, 1999, accessed July 17, 2020 .
  14. ↑ a b Zacher: The robbery of the Jewish boy Mortara. P. 25.
  15. ↑ Breaking Maker: The End of Double Protection. P. 113.
  16. ↑ a b c Breaker: The end of double protection. P. 432.
  17. ^ From: Raffaele de Cesare: Roma e lo Stato del Papa dal ritorno di Pio IX al XX Settembre. Rome 1907. Quoted from Zacher: The robbery of the Jewish boy Mortara. P. 30.
  18. ^ Alain Claude Sulzer: In the clutches of the Vatican. In: welt.de. February 6, 1999, accessed July 17, 2020 .
  19. ↑ Breaking Maker: The End of Double Protection. P. 431.
  20. ↑ Breaking Maker: The End of Double Protection. Pp. 434-435.
  21. ^ Alain Claude Sulzer: Catholic Church honors arch-conservative Pope Pius IX .: Doubtful beatification. In: RP Online . December 20, 2009, accessed July 17, 2020 .
  22. ↑ Mortara Play. In: davidkertzer.com. 2008, archived from the original on March 5, 2009 ; Retrieved December 20, 2009 .
  23. ↑ headline. June 2002, September 2002. In: HopkinsVille. Retrieved December 20, 2009 .
personal data
SURNAME Mortara, Edgardo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mortara, Pio Edgardo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Roman Catholic theologian
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Bologna
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1940
Place of death Liege