When the Pope Kidnapped a Jewish Boy

Oppenheim- Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

The last official recorded action of the Inquisition in Italy was in 1858, when the Catholic authorities seized a six-year-old boy, Edgardo Mortara, from a Jewish family. Since he had supposedly been secretly baptized by his Catholic nursemaid when he was in danger of death, the little boy was considered a Catholic and a Christian! It being illegal in the Papal States for a Catholic child to be raised by Jews, police and a Catholic inquisitor entered the house one evening in June and seized the boy. He was taken to Rome and adopted by Pope Pius IX. His parents were not allowed to see him for weeks, and afterward they could visit him only under supervision. The boy’s distraught father, Momolo Mortara, spent years seeking help “in all quarters,” but it was in vain. He was informed that they could only have Edgardo back if the family would convert to Catholicism, which they refused to do. They had seven other children. The outcry against the pope’s actions was loud, but he called his detractors “dogs.” In a speech in 1871, he said, “Of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places” (Kenneth Stowe,Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages, pp. 57-58). Edgardo became a Catholic priest, traveling widely in an attempt to convert Jews, though largely unsuccessfully.

(Friday Church News Notes, December 25, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143)

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