MORTARA, PIO EDGARDO

MORTARA, PIO EDGARDO. — Regular canon, born on 26 August 1851 in Bologna, died on 11 March 1940 at Bouhay (Belgium). The son of a Jewish merchant from Bologna, Girolamo Mortara Levi, and Marianna Padovani, M., having fallen gravely ill at eleven months of age, was secretly baptized by the Mortaras’ domestic servant, Anna Morisi. When the fact became known in 1858, the archbishop of Bologna, M. Viale-Prelà, having ascertained the validity of the Baptism, ordered that, in accordance with the canons (Denz-U, nos. 1480–90), the boy be taken from his parents and brought up in the Catholic religion. Thus, on 24 June 1858, little M., despite the opposition

In 1860, Fr. Feletti and the lieutenant colonel of the papal gendarmes, De Dominicis, were brought to trial, regarded respectively as the moral instigator and the executor of the removal of the child from his family. M. meanwhile, having entered the Order of the Lateran Regular Canons (1867), firmly declared that he wished to remain in the Catholic faith, and thus any legal action was dropped. Resistant to military conscription, M. was sent abroad by his superiors after 1870, to various houses of the Order in Austria, France, and Spain; in the colleges attached to them, he earned esteem as a teacher and preacher. In his time he was one of the Order’s most distinguished figures, and, after returning to Rome, he taught theology. He preached in nine languages and devoted himself particularly to the conversion of the Jews: in 1933, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, he addressed an appeal to his former coreligionists to convert to Catholicism. At the end of the First World War, he withdrew to Belgium.