Jews Disturbed by Beatification of Pope Pius IX

ROME —  It was the Elian Gonzalez saga of its era. On the evening of June 28, 1858, papal guards raided the home of Momolo and Marianna Mortara in Bologna and abducted 6-year-old Edgardo, one of the Jewish couple’s eight children.

The parents bitterly objected, but the guards said they had orders from the Vatican of Pope Pius IX. The church contended that the family’s illiterate Roman Catholic maid had secretly baptized Edgardo four years earlier, when he was gravely ill. That made his upbringing as a Jew a violation of canon law requiring the church to take religious charge of any person baptized in the Catholic faith, regardless of the parents’ wishes.

Edgardo was isolated at a Catholic boarding school in Rome and adopted by Pius IX, whose refusal to return him to his family defied a Europe-wide outcry that undermined the church’s authority. The boy grew up to be a priest, preached about the “miracle” of his conversion and was never reconciled with his grieving parents.

The controversy, which typified Pius IX’s open anti-Semitism, all but vanished with his death. But it has sprung back to life with the Vatican’s decision to beatify the long-ruling 19th century pontiff, making him a candidate for sainthood.

Having made reconciliation with Jews a hallmark of his own reign, it is Pope John Paul II, paradoxically, who will preside today over the Vatican celebration of Pius IX’s “heroic values.” With Pius-like stubbornness, John Paul has baffled Jews and other critics by ignoring an international campaign to reverse the decision.

Catholic saint-making is bureaucratic, glacial and often secretive. By agreeing to elevate Pius IX to the status of “blessed,” the 80-year-old pope has sown doubt about the depth of his commitment to interfaith healing and revealed the strength of Vatican ultraconservatives now vying within his divided flock to influence his succession.

The process also raises broader questions of why beatifications are meaningful and whether the conduct of saintly role models should be judged against today’s mores or those of their own time.

At a recent symposium on Pius IX, Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said: “The church may beatify whomever it wishes. But it must understand that the Mortara case is a wound in the body and spirit of Italian Jews that has yet to be healed.”

Defenders Applaud ‘Eternal Love of God’

To his conservative defenders, Pius IX’s role in the case has been unfairly portrayed, through a contemporary lens, as that of an autocratic ruler violating the rights of a family.

“Pius was not insensitive to claims of parental love, but he was persuaded that even the most profound loves of this world must not stand in the way of the transcendent, eternal love of God for the individual human soul,” Catholic commentators Antonio Gaspari and Alberto Carosa wrote last month in the Roman monthly Inside the Vatican.

“He was persuaded that saving this boy’s soul was worth braving the criticism of all Europe,” they wrote, arguing that Pius IX’s energetic propagation of Catholicism in the face of revolutionary anticlericalism made him a towering, martyr-like figure worthy of devotion.

Pius IX does not enjoy a widespread following, even in his native Italy, but remains a complex and controversial giant in church history.

Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti at birth, he became universally known as Pio Nono during the longest papal reign since St. Peter, from 1846 until his death 32 years later.

He gave Catholicism two of its most triumphal doctrines--papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. He lost the Papal States, the Vatican’s worldly kingdom, to Italian nationalists but pioneered the modern cult of papal personality.

His infamous “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864 castigated 80 “delusions” of modern thinking, including rationalism, freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. His critics say his stubborn defense of a vanishing world order stunted Catholicism for decades after his death.

Pius IX’s treatment of Jews as second-class citizens of the Papal States, which sprawled over much of what is now Italy, was just one outgrowth of the Vatican’s doctrine then that Christianity was the one true religion.

He began his reign as a progressive, abolishing the confining walls and gates of the Jewish ghetto in Rome. But his policies hardened after Italian nationalists killed his prime minister in 1848, forcing the pope to flee Rome until French troops could assist in his return two years later.

Citing Jewish support for the nationalists, he reconsigned Jews to the ghetto, stripped them of property rights and barred them from secondary and higher education.

“These measures were acts of self-defense,” Gaspari and Carosa wrote in Pius IX’s favor. “They prove only that he was a prudent temporal ruler.”

The Vatican won’t say so, but Pius IX is being beatified as a late substitute for a controversial conservative successor, Pius XII, who was pope during World War II.

Carefully balancing liberal and conservative sentiment, the Vatican had planned for years to beatify the later Pius in the same ceremony with Pope John XXIII, who called the reformist Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and became a hero for liberal Catholics.

But a growing storm of Jewish complaint that Pius XII failed to speak out forcefully about the Holocaust forced the Vatican last year to shelve his candidacy.

“The Vatican conservatives are saying, ‘OK, you won’t let us have Pius XII; we’ll give you someone you’ll like even less,’ ” said Father Richard McBrien, a religion professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of the book “Lives of the Popes.”

“They are willing to offend the Jews because, for them, internal church politics is more important,” he added.

Pius IX’s candidacy for beatification dates to 1907 and has stalled several times, most recently in the mid-1980s when John Paul balked at approving it for fear of provoking anticlerical sentiment among Italian nationalists. The Mortara kidnapping, though a cause celebre in its time, did not reemerge as an issue until after David Kertzer, a Brown University historian, published a book on it in 1997.

By that time, however, Pius XII’s candidacy was in trouble and the Vatican needed a more suitable pope in a hurry. Pius IX’s cause had long ago cleared all administrative hoops, including the certification of a miracle--the healing of a nun’s fractured kneecap after her prayers to a Pio Nono relic.

Vatican watchers say John Paul may have his own reasons for wanting to honor Pius IX, with whom he shares a devotion to the Virgin Mary and a commitment to a strong, conservative papacy.

Decision Hit Many ‘Like a Thunderbolt’

Even so, the announcement this year that Pius IX would be beatified along with John XXIII shocked many admirers of John Paul’s historic fence-mending with Jews, including his prayer of atonement in March at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

“It hit like a thunderbolt from heaven,” said Elena Mortara, a professor of American literature at the University of Rome and a great-great-granddaughter of one of Edgardo’s sisters. Pius IX’s repression of Jews’ civil rights, she added, “is in itself serious enough to stop this beatification.”

B’nai B’rith International, a Washington-based Jewish advocacy group, joined the protest, and an Israeli spokesman warned that the Jewish state, which gained Vatican recognition thanks to John Paul, “cannot turn a blind eye to the feelings about a pope who was problematic for the Jewish people of his time.”

Pius IX was dismissive of his critics in the kidnapping case, saying he “couldn’t care less what the world thinks.”

Later, stripped of his temporal empire and confined within the Vatican walls, he lashed out at the Jews of Rome, calling them “dogs . . . howling in the streets . . . disturbing us in all places.”

Father John W. O’Malley, professor of historical theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., argues that, beyond the offense to Jews and the boost to militant Catholic traditionalists, beatification won’t save Pius IX from oblivion among rank-and-file believers.

“For whom is this model [of sanctity] meaningful? Popes? Political leaders? Ordinary faithful?” he asked in an article in the Jesuit weekly America. “The model for every saint and blessed must be translated if it is to be meaningful in our lives.”

“For Pius,” he concluded, “the translating will be especially tricky and taxing.”