The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

The few resident Jews in the declining temporal papacy under Pius IX in 1858 were outraged but not surprised when a six-year-old boy in Bologna, Edgardo Mortara, was seized by the police and removed from his parents' home. The Vatican's justification for the abduction was that Edgardo had been secretly baptized by a maid who feared he might die, and church dogma taught that a Christian child could not be raised by Jews. Despite protests that erupted as far away as the U.S., Pius IX would not relinquish the child, called him his son and arranged for his education as a priest. As Kertzer (Sacrificed for Honor) observes, committed Catholics saw religious matters with far different lenses than did the helpless Jewish minority, whose presence in Italy nevertheless predated Christianity. The theocratic papal state resisted all entreaties to relinquish the boy, creating pressures not only to liberate Edgardo, but to liberate all Italy from reactionary political regimes. When ""Pio Edgardo"" was 15 and a celebrity, Pius IX wrote to him, ""You are very dear to me, my little son, for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at a high price."" The price would be the acceleration of Italian unification and the collapse of the Vatican's political power in Italy. Kertzer's compelling narrative, purportedly the first full account of the affair to be published in English, is a dramatic sampling of a fanaticism and its pain emerging in religious guises. Edgardo, who eventually became a monk, died at 88 in 1940. (May)