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The Kidnapping of a Little Jewish Boy, Edgardo Mortara
When we hear the word or term Secret Police, we automatically think of Commonist and oppressed countries of the modern era, especially the 20th-century. Well, you would be surprised to know that I am referencing a Christian theocracy—the Papal States (753-1870), the Temporal-power base for the Catholic Church. A state conceived from fraud, and which kept its people in virtual serfdom, poverty, and ignorance of worldly things, even from people from the outside world for more than 1,100 years.
It also maintained a bigotted regime against any Jew that lived as 2nd-class citizens in the Christian theocracy. Jews were not allowed to mingle or if they could afford, to hire a Christian helper, albeit a male or female servant/maid/nanny. However, the Christian citizen did not fare better themselves; they were forever under observation by the Papal Secret Police.
The Irish-American Catholic scholar, Martin, wrote: Between 1823 (death of Pius VII) and 1846 (when Pius IX was elected), almost 200,000 citizens of the Papal States were severely punished (death, life imprisonment, exile, galleys) for political offences; another 1.5 million were subjected to constant police surveillance and harassment. There was a gallows permanently in the square of every town and city and village. Railways, meetings of more than three people, and all newspapers were forbidden. All books were censored. [Malachi Martin (1981), Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, p.254, Secker & Warburg, London]
Going on the scholar Martin, wrote: A special tribunal sat permanently in each place to try, condemn, and execute the accused. All trials were conducted in Latin. Ninety-nine per cent of the accused did not understand the accusations against them. Every Pope tore up the stream of petitions that came asking for Justice, for the franchise, for the reform of the police and prison system. When revolts occurred in Bologna, in the Romagna, and elsewhere, they were put down with wholesale executions, sentences to lifelong hard labour in the state penitentiary, to exile and torture. Austrian troops were always being called in to suppress the revolts…[Ibid]
Edgardo Mortara
In June of 1858, the western world became alight with condemnation of the kidnapping of a 6-year-old Jewish boy by the name of Edgardo Mortara from a Jewish Family in Bologna, the then Papal States (now Italy). It took years for the condemnation to subside if it ever did. Even in 2017, Steven Spielberg announced he would be making a film about the kidnapping that https://letterboxd.com/film/the-kidnapping-of-edgardo-mortara/ captured the attention of Europe and North America back in the late 1850s and 1860s. Back in the day, plays and books were written about the whole kidnapping affair; it was big news. Even now more than 160 years later, there is still ripples of the crime.
The kidnapping of Edgardo aroused a storm of protest. Jews throughout the world, including in Italy, even the bankers Rothschild family of London, and Moses Haim Montefiore and his wife Judith and the Alliance Israelite Universelle all protested vociferously. They placed the story on the international agenda. Even world leaders, including Emperor Napoleon III of France, tried to intervene and obtain the child’s release to his parents, but it was in vain.
Little Edgardo kidnapping was on par with baby Lindbergh kidnapping 74 years later in 1932, and perhaps more so! As the perpetrator was known, and what made it more serious was that his name was, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (1792-1878). He had what we term as Diplomatic immunity for his crime, as he was a senior citizen of the Papal States (756-1870). He was immune from prosecution and arrested even if he ventured out of the safety of the Papal States.
Crime—was rife within the theocracy. In fact, fraud was how the Temporal State came into being, with the Donation of Constantine used to secure the land by deceiving Pepin (III) the Short, king of the Franks (751-68). Whose son Charlemagne became King of the Franks (768-814 ), and Holy Roman Emperor (800-14) became the protector of the Papacy and the Papal States.
On July 18, 1869, the kidnapper Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti gathered 535 Catholic Bishops from all over the world to claim him infallible and that he was the titular head of all and any Christianity that might exist on the face of this earth—what Catholics call the Pope’s supremacy. For he was the last Pope-King, Pius IX (1846-78) head of the Catholic Church and Kidnapper of a 6-year-old Jewish boy, named Edgardo Mortana (1852-1940).
With the Pope as a substitute father, Mortara trained for the priesthood in Rome until the Kingdom of Italy captured the city in 1870, ending the Papal States. Leaving the country, he was ordained in France three years later at the age of 21. Mortara spent most of his life outside Italy and died in Belgium in 1940, aged 88.
The Questions
Why did Pope Pius IX send his secret police through his Inquisitor, Father Feletti to kidnap Edgardo from a respectable Jewish merchant’s family? For the answer, if one can call it one, we have to go back to when Edgardo was a sick baby some five years previous. And a Catholic maidservant of the Mortara family, by the name of Anna Morisi, who had worked in the Mortara house for six years, had secretly baptised Edgardo when she had thought he was about to die as a baby. The Inquisition heard of this, and it was this that set the kidnapping in motion.
The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held that Edgardo’s baptism by the maidservant made the child irrevocably a Catholic and because the Papal States forbade the raising of Christians by members of other faiths, ordered that he be taken from his family and brought up by the Church.
Edgardo was never returned to his rightful home, however, on occasions, his father was allowed to visit Edgardo, but his thorough indoctrination into the Catholic faith was complete, he later became a Catholic Priest.
However, it was not the first or the last kidnapping of a Jewish child by the Catholic Church. In 1945/6, the seizure of a Jewish child was back on the agenda of world news. This time it was not one Jewish child, it was many that were supposedly housed by Catholic families for safety from the Germans, were now prisoners of the Catholic Church for the same reason as that of Edgardo Mortara nearly 90 years earlier. However, that is another story.
Gone are the sovereign Pope-kings, gone too is the theocracy of Papal State, all the Catholic Church has is the wall that surrounds the 44 hectares or 108.76 acres of the Vatican City. The smallest sovereign theocracy state in the world and for that, we had to thank Benito Mussolini or Il Duce back in 1929.
For the doubting Thomas, I have only used Catholic sources for my post. Such as Loyola University Chicago, School of Law, which is a Catholic institution and the works of the late Malachi (Brendan) Martin, ex-Professor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Institute in Vatican city. Those commentators who prefer to source their evidence against my discussion can type on their keyboards “the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.” or for more information on my source for the kidnapping can be had from:
https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1296&context=facpubs
The Last Pope-King
Several historians highlight the affair as one of the most significant events in Pius IX’s Papacy, and they juxtapose his handling of it in 1858 with the loss of most of his territory a year later. The case notably altered the policy of the French Emperor Napoleon III, who shifted from opposing the movement for Italian unification to actively supporting it. The traditional Italian historiography of the country’s unification does not give much prominence to the Mortara case, which by the late 20th century was mostly remembered by Jewish scholars. Still, a 1997 study by the American historian David Kertzer has marked the start of a broader re-examination of it.
What do you say?
Jero Jones
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/