Opinion: The case behind the case for renaming Pie IX in Montreal

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This 12 months’s Cannes Movie Pageant premièred an essential Italian movie by Marco Bellocchio, Rapito (Kidnapped.) Steven Spielberg as soon as deliberate to make The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, however it by no means appeared. Rapito could fill that lacuna, for critics say it faithfully and movingly recounts the notorious Mortara case of the 1850s and past.

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A Bolognese Jewish little one, Edgardo Mortara grew to become deathly unwell within the 1850s. A home within the Mortara residence secretly introduced the kid for an emergency baptism to save lots of his soul. Bologna was then within the Papal States, whose head was Pope Pius IX. The Church declared the baptism legitimate and forcibly carried the kid away from his mother and father.

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Why did the Church kidnap Edgardo? Papal States’ legal guidelines didn’t allow Jews to lift Catholic youngsters. To underscore the necessity for a contemporary secular stat, the unifiers of Italy referred to as the Mortara case an ideal instance of the Church’s medieval obscurantism.

The kidnapped six-year-old little one was raised solidly Catholic and have become a priest. Pope Pius IX, in an outrageous and notorious case of blaming the sufferer, declared that the kid can be returned to his mother and father if solely they accepted Catholicism. They refused, and the pope then acknowledged that the dearth of return of the kidnapped little one was the mother and father’ fault for closing their hearts to the reality of Christianity, and that confronted with an analogous scenario, he’d do it yet again.

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Whereas the Church has apologized for the persecution of Jews, there was no apology to the Italian Jewish group or to the Mortara household, which nonetheless calls for and waits for redress. The Mortara case constitutes an indelible stain on the Church’s largely first rate report of contemporary relations with the Jews, and it was Pope Pius IX whose obstinacy broke the guts of 1 Jewish household and alienated generations of Italian Jews of their relations with the Church.

When Italy was unified after capturing Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX refused to acknowledge the brand new Italian state and forbade Catholics on ache of excommunication from voting or in any other case collaborating in Italian civic life. He mentioned “the beliefs of Italian patriots are the work of the satan,” excommunicated King Victor Emmanuel II, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Camillo Benso (Depend of Cavour), and whoever supported the Italian nationalist motion.

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In Montreal, we’ve got two civic areas named in honour of Pope Pius IX — Pie IX boulevard and the métro station.

Although he began his papacy as a liberal chief, given this pope’s actions in a while, isn’t one honour sufficient?

Within the face of the unrepented kidnapping of Mortara and of the pope’s opposition to Italian unity — an insult to all Italians, I might assume — I urge town to vary the identify of the métro station from Pie IX to Edgardo Mortara, and within the spirit of our occasions, maybe to look at new doable names for the boulevard itself.

Rabbi Leigh Lerner is rabbi emeritus of Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Westmount. Upon retirement, for seven years he wintered in Italy, serving to Reform Judaism to develop in Milan, Florence and Rome.