The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Read Online Free PDF Page B

a nervous Cardinal Legate abandoned Bologna, and people rushed into Piazza Maggiore to celebrate the end of papal rule. They ripped the papal insignia from atop the door of the government palace and hoisted in its place an Italian national tricolor. Amidst the revolutionary fervor, papal troops fled the city, and a provisional government was formed, headed by the prominent local jurist Giovanni Vicini. When Duke Francesco IV of Modena heard about the successful revolt in Bologna, he hurriedly departed his capital. In Reggio the tricolor replaced the Duke’s flag, and while his officers joined him in flight, the bulk of the troops joined the rebels.
    On February 6, 1831, the very day that cardinals gathered in Rome to install Gregory XVI, the new pope received the news of the revolt in Bologna. Two days later, Vicini’s provisional government declared an end to papal rule over Bologna. On February 19, seeing the Legations slipping away from him, Gregory urged Austria to send its troops to crush the rebellion. Two weeks later, thousands of Austrian soldiers poured into the duchy of Modena to retake it for the Duke, who had ties of blood to the Habsburg throne. On March 24, Austrian troops entered Bologna, and Vicini and his colleagues fled. 10
    This was not the first time that Vicini had provoked the wrath of papal authorities. Just five years before the 1831 revolt, he had been punished for his notorious public defense of Jewish rights in the Papal States. His action was prompted by a sermon given during Lent in 1826 by Ferdinando Jabolot, a monk known for his oratorical zeal, in Bologna’s San Petronio Church. To make the sermon’s message available to a wider audience of the faithful, themonk had it published. His topic was the Jews, who were, he pronounced, the plague of humanity, a bunch of filthy usurers and lawless ruffians, richly deserving of the divine punishment that had been meted out to them.
    The roots of Jabolot’s diatribe lay in centuries of Church dogma concerning the Jews. In Catholic theology, embodied in papal declarations of various kinds over the centuries, Jews were a people to be tolerated, but only within strict limits. As the people from which Jesus sprang, and a people whose Bible formed one of the Church’s holy books, they enjoyed a special place that other non-Christian peoples did not. Yet they also bore a special guilt, for they were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. While the Jews were once God’s favored people on earth, they had become God’s enemies. Their temples in Palestine had been destroyed as divine punishment, and they were consigned by God to be perpetual wanderers, leading a wretched life.
    Until the mid-sixteenth century, Church policy toward the Jews showed a certain restraint. They were allowed to practice their rituals, to have their synagogues, for they were a people who had played a special role in God’s work on earth, and their continued existence bore testimony to that historic role. Yet the day would ultimately come when the Jewish people would see the true way, embrace God’s Church, and in this way help to usher in the Second Coming. This attitude, however, changed dramatically with Pope Paul IV’s declaration in 1555 consigning the Jews to ghettoes. Their conversion was no longer something to await passively; it was to be pursued vigorously. 11
    Vicini, reacting to the anti-Semitic campaign in Bologna and to the discriminatory laws directed against the Jews in the Papal States, published his own views in 1827, in the form of a brief on a thorny legal question that had recently come up. Giuseppe Levi, a converted Jew, had died without a will. He left behind three brothers; one of these had also converted, but the other two remained Jews. The prevailing juridical view in the Papal States was that only the brother who had converted should inherit, because, according to canon law, in the act of being baptized converts severed ties with their Jewish kin. As