'Non possumus' (Thoughts about 'Kidnapped')

By Brad Miner But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight, Thursday, July 11th at 8 PM Eastern, to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the excommunication of Archbishop Viganò, further Latin Mass restrictions (projected to come later this month), as well as other developments in Rome and the U.S. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's column... Some years ago, Steven Spielberg speculated about making a film about Edgardo Mortara, a Catholic priest who as a boy in 1858 - a 6-year-old Jewish boy - was forcibly taken from his loving parents in Bologna and raised as a Catholic in Rome. In the 21st century, it is difficult to understand why a pope - in this case, Pius IX - would have tolerated the seizure of a Jewish child for any reason, let alone on the flimsy assertion made by the Mortara's illiterate, teenage Catholic housekeeper that, when she overheard the infant Edgardo's parents praying in Hebrew over his crib, she feared for the infant's imminent death and secretly baptized him. Mr. Spielberg decided not to make the film, so we cannot know what sort of movie he might have produced, but it would almost certainly have been superior to (and likely more even-handed than) Italian director Marco Bellocchio's Kidnapped (Rapito in Italian), which is, generally, anti-Catholic and, specifically, slanderous about Pio Nono, as Pius IX was affectionately known. To quickly summarize the story's outline (historical and cinematic): It was years after the surreptitious baptism that the housekeeper - by now dismissed by the Mortaras - confessed what she'd done, and word of it reached Bologna's ecclesiastical inquisitor. The law then in force in the Papal States stipulated that all Catholic children must have a Catholic education, so the inquisitor sent the civil police (carabinieri) to the Mortara home. They seized the boy, and he was spirited off to Rome and, quite literally, into the loving arms of the pope. Edgardo got that Catholic education - very much under the pope's direction - from the elementary grades through seminary and ordination to the priesthood. But slanderous? Yes, because it's likely Pius knew of Edgardo's seizure only after the fact. The Holy Office (aka the Inquisition) based its decision to take the boy on a 1747 papal bull of Benedict XIV, Postremo mense, that specifically addressed the baptizing of a Jewish child, in periculo mortis, without parental consent and authorizing the forcible removal of the child from the home - even though Judaism was the only religion officially tolerated in the Papal States. Papal power was supreme then, even civilly. Kidnapped does not address the frequency with which the issue came up in Italy, but it was common enough that Jewish families had to be very careful in employing Catholic housekeepers and often, upon a housemaid's termination, demanded notarized statements that no baptism had occurred. Kidnapped flatly blames the pope, and - putting aside the facts above and any truly 19th-century context - pre cents Pio Nono as the kidnapper and, accordingly, a monster. Now, whenever you read a work of history - even if the author is an admired historian - you know you are getting only a part of the story. This is true too of filmmakers who mix fact and fiction, as in Ridley Scott's 2023 biopic, Napoleon, excoriated by historians - especially in France - for the film's inaccuracies, most especially a scene in which Bonaparte unleashes cannons on the pyramids at Giza, a visually stunning scene, but one that never happened. Given the worldwide decline of education in history, there may be many in France who saw Scott's film and believed what they saw. Later, some, we hope, were corrected by those historians. In any case, there are few i...