The Church’s Once-Notorious Seizure of a Jewish Child Is Back. Why?

In 1858, a boy named Edgardo Mortara became famous throughout Europe and beyond when, two months shy of his seventh birthday, he was seized from his family’s home in Bologna to be raised as a ward of the Catholic Church. Edgardo was taken from his mother and father not because they were cruel or negligent, but because they were Jewish. As an infant, he had been secretly baptized by his family’s Catholic maid, which meant that he was, by the Church’s definition, a Christian—and according to the laws of the Papal States, to which Bologna then belonged, it was forbidden for a Christian child to be raised by Jews.

The Mortara case, as it is called, was long a point of special bitterness for Jews, particularly in Italy. For at least some Catholics, it has also been a continued source of shame—which no doubt helps account for the furor that has greeted a controversial review of Mortara’s newly-translated memoirs. The review, by the Dominican theologian Romanus Cessario, has two things in common with the memoirs themselves: both are the work of Catholic priests—Father Edgardo Mortara, thirty-seven when he wrote his own account of the case, had already been ordained for seventeen years—and both were written not to condemn but to praise the men who took the child Edgardo from his family.

Cessario’s review, published in the American journal of religion and politics First Things, has not only resurrected old arguments—historical, theological, and political—over Edgardo’s once-notorious seizure. It has also sparked a debate, among Catholics and others, that has expanded rapidly to encompass fundamental questions about the present-day Church, its claims to authority, its relation to the Western liberal political order, and—inextricable from the rest— its relation to Judaism.