‘Non possumus’ (Thoughts about ‘Kidnapped’)
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.
