Mortara case

The Mortara case (Italian: caso Mortara) was an Italian cause célèbre that captivated much of Europe and the United States from 1858 to 1860. 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 one-time 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 decided 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 brought up and educated by the church. Police came to the Mortara home late on 23 June 1858 and removed Edgardo the following evening.

Edgardo Mortara

Edgardo Levi Mortara (Bologna, Papal States, August 27, 1851 – Liège, Belgium, March 11, 1940) was born as an Italian Jew and became the center of an international controversy when he was abducted from his parents by authorities of the Papal States and raised as a Catholic. He became a priest in the Augustinian order.

Born and raised Jewish during the first six years of his life, Mortara was taken from his family by church authorities after they learned that he had been given emergency baptism by a domestic servant during a serious infantile illness. In the Papal States it was against the law for non-Catholics to raise Catholic children. Mortara was adopted by Pope Pius IX and entered the seminary in his teens.

Mortara case

Removal from parents

On 23 June 1858, in Bologna, which belonged to the Papal States at that time, police arrived at the home of a Jewish couple, Salomone ("Momolo") and Marianna Padovani Mortara, to take one of their eight children, six-year-old Edgardo, and transport him to Rome to be raised as a ward of the state. The police had orders from Holy Office, authorized by Pope Pius IX. Edgardo had been secretly baptised Catholic as an infant.