It is June 23, 1858, in Bologna, at 196 via delle Lame, the street of the lame. It was 10 p.m. when the pontifical police, accompanied by representatives of the forces of secular order, showed up at the home of the Mortara family, a family belonging to the Jewish community. Salomone Levi and Mariana are the parents of eight children, aged from eleven years to a few months. Everyone is then awakened. The representatives of the pope, pointing to Edgardo, six and a half years old, announce to the father and mother of the boy that he had been baptized secretly, a few years earlier, by a former servant. From then on, they were ordered to take the child so that he could be raised in the Catholic religion. Indeed, according to the law of the Papal States, Edgardo cannot remain with his Jewish family, because, having been baptized, he would be considered an apostate, that is to say having publicly renounced his religion and therefore excommunicated. “I saw a mother overcome with pain, her face streaming with tears, and a father tearing his hair out, while their children were kneeling and begging the police to have mercy on them. », Reported a neighbor. Pius IX, the sovereign pontiff, will remain inflexible. This affair quickly became an international scandal. It contributes to strengthening anticlerical ideas and to pleading for individual rights at a time when Italian unity is in full construction, where the existence of the Papal State is at stake. The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by the Catholic Church, is neither the first nor the last of its kind. What does he tell us about the relationship between spiritual power and temporal power? The law of God before that of the State: the question has already been asked. Let’s return to the Mortara Affair… Guest: Vincent Genin, ULiège/CEGESOMA (Center for the Study of War and Society) and graduate of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études de Paris
Belgium
