Edgardo Mortara

The Mortara case (Italian: caso Mortara) was an Italian cause célèbre that captured the attention of much of Europe and North America in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure from a Jewish family in Bologna of one of their children, six-year-old Edgardo Mortara, on the basis of a former servant's testimony that she had administered emergency baptism to the boy when he fell sick as an infant. Mortara grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX—who refused his parents' desperate pleas for his return—and eventually became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the pontifical state's actions may have contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.

In late 1857, Bologna's inquisitor Father Pier Feletti heard that 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 Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held that this 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. Police came to the Mortara home late on 23 June 1858 and removed Edgardo the following evening.

After the child's father was allowed to visit him during August and September, two starkly different narratives emerged—one told of a boy who wanted to return to his family and the faith of his ancestors, while the other described a child who had learned the catechism perfectly and wanted his parents to become Christians as well. International protests mounted, but the Pope would not be moved. After pontifical rule in Bologna ended in 1859, Father Feletti was prosecuted for his role in Mortara's seizure, but was acquitted when the court decided he had simply followed orders. 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. Father Mortara spent most of his life outside Italy and died in Belgium in 1940, aged 88.

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