A 19th Century Case Involving Papal Law

Allen Bodner is a corporate and real estate attorney who has decades of experience in the New York legal community. Having served as an adjunct professor of law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Allen Bodner has lectured publicly on a variety of topics, from Jewish Supreme Court Justices to the Mortara Affair.

Taking place in 1858, the Mortara Affair centered on a police squad, under orders of an Inquisitor, arriving at the Bologna residence of a Jewish merchant family and taking their six-year-old son. The reason for this was that Edgardo Mortara had undergone a secret baptism under the care of his Catholic nanny as an infant, when he was extremely ill and in danger of dying. Having survived, Edgardo was now considered officially Catholic and must, per Papal law, be educated in Catholic schools. This led to his forcible separation from his birth family, with Pope Pius IX taking personal oversight over his religious tutelage.

Such kidnappings were not unheard of in that era, but the political winds had changed and public opinion turned against the Vatican in this matter, in places as disparate as England, France, and the United States. This singular case, with Mortara as a cause celebre, instigated Mazzini and Garibaldi’s revolutionary efforts to wrest political control of the region from the Catholic state and form a unified Italian state that was secular in nature. As for Edgardo, he was never returned to his family and the church never apologized for his kidnapping. He ultimately chose the course of priesthood and lived in a Belgian monastery for much of his adult life.