The film-maker Steven Spielberg has made some brave choices during his glittering career, but telling the extraordinary tale of Edgardo Mortara is likely to be one of his most challenging projects.
In Bologna in June 1858, the six-year-old Edgardo was removed from the Bologna home of his Jewish parents. A former servant of the family claimed to have baptised Edgardo during a serious illness years earlier and the Church authorities felt obliged to act. Employing a Christian servant in a Jewish household was technically illegal, though the rule was routinely flouted, and the Mortaras’ breach would be used against them in later proceedings.
The key issue, however, was the baptism. It may have been irregular but, assuming it took place (and we will never be sure), it still made Edgardo a Christian. The laws of the 19th-century Papal States were uncompromising: a Christian child could not be raised by Jews. Edgardo was whisked off to Rome to begin his Catholic education and, in short measure, a frenzied debate about the rights and wrongs of the incident erupted across Europe and America.
In April 1859, for example, Brownson’s Quarterly Review insisted that local laws were the business of local officials and, in this case, “the legal process was gone through with all exactness”. Edgardo had been taken “with as little pain as possible to the parents” and the boy’s “state of mind is reported by all to be that of happiness in his new position”. It was all well and good, the article continued, to talk about the rights of parents to raise their children but such rights were not absolute. The staggeringly dismissive conclusion was that the whole matter “amounts to no more than placing [Edgardo] at a boarding school at the expense of the Pope, that he may be taught his catechism”.
Others saw things very differently. The New York Times regarded a parent’s right to care for a child as “a question for mankind, without exception of race or creed”. The Spectator appealed to the “dictate of common sense and humanity” in its condemnation of Edgardo’s removal. For the Jewish Intelligence, another English journal, the action had been a “flagrant act of robbery”. Many questioned whether Edgardo was really as happy as that Brownson’s Quarterly article suggested and almost everyone recognised that his parents were distraught. Protest quickly moved beyond the comment pages. Lionel de Rothschild, the first practising Jew to become a British MP, made pleas on Edgardo’s behalf; Napoleon III wrote privately to the pope; and Jewish leaders from Sardinia to Germany launched their campaigns and raised petitions.
In England, the Mortara cause was backed by Jewish leaders such as Sir Moses Montefiore, who travelled to Rome in April 1859 but failed to secure a papal audience, and no few Protestant luminaries. The Evangelical Alliance and its leading member Culling Eardley were particularly dynamic. In one meeting with the foreign secretary, Lord Russell, direct involvement from the British government was demanded because “the conscience of Europe and of mankind demands that this child be released”.
Russell provided a typically circumspect Whitehall response. He expressed sympathy for the Mortara family and conceded that “we should of course consider it a gross violation of parental rights for any person to take a child from its parents, and for the state to protect that violation”. As regards the “justice of the case there need be no argument”. But, he was sure to add, “when one has to deal with the laws and usages of foreign nations the matter is always surrounded with difficulties”. The “peculiar laws of the different nations before whom the question might come must be considered” even if “the laws of Rome are not such as we can at all approve”.
No amount of pamphleteering and formal protests, nor the poignant efforts of the Mortara family itself, could secure Edgardo’s return. The degree of Pope Pius IX’s involvement with, or knowledge of, the early stages of the affair is unclear, but he became adamant that Edgardo’s removal had been justified. He would not be moved.
Pius took the keenest interest in the boy’s formation and regarded him almost as his personal ward. The Mortara case was not unique during the 19th century but, for Pius’s critics, it was unusually significant. These, after all, were turbulent times in Italy and those who sought unification, and the accompanying destruction of papal temporal power, found a useful symbol in Edgardo: liberating the child was as worthy a cause as liberating the nation.
Pius’s opposition to most of the tides of modernity also seemed, to some, to be encapsulated by the Mortara affair. This, they stressed, was the same man who, after seeming so progressive before the revolutions of 1848, took ultramontanism to extremes and would condemn so many aspects of the modern world in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors. Criticisms would certainly endure, surfacing with gusto at the time of Pius’s beatification. The Tablet was sure to mention the Mortara affair in a leading article in 2000 entitled A Beatification Too Far.
Commenting on that beatification, and the Mortara case in particular, the Jesuit historian John O’Malley asked the obvious question in America magazine: “Do we judge Pius’s conduct against the standards of his day or ours?” The removal of Edgardo, O’Malley concluded, “would be judged by most Catholic theologians today … as wrong, a violation of a fundamental human right”. Then again, “nothing is clearer than that Pius, basing himself, he said, on the principle that the spiritual takes precedence over the temporal, acted in accordance with his conscience”.
None of this is to excuse the Mortara affair. Many people at the time, and not just those with anti-papal axes to grind, found it intolerable. The episode was also clearly layered with the era’s unpalatable attitudes towards the Jewish people. The fact that Edgardo grew up to be a devoted Catholic, was ordained, became a crowd-pulling preacher and died, aged 88, in a Belgian monastery changes none of that.
The telling of his story does require subtlety, however, and that is not always Hollywood’s strongest point. There are factual uncertainties and many strata of interpretation in the Mortara story and, while that will give Spielberg some dramatic licence, I’m sure he’ll try to retain a sense of historical detachment. Any director, while at liberty to express an opinion, would want to avoid oversimplification or demonisation. I wish him luck and I can’t wait to watch the splendid Mark Rylance portraying Pio Nono: not an easy gig.
Jonathan Wright is honorary fellow in the department of theology and religion at Durham University
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