MORTARA, PIO EDGARDO. - Regular canon, b. 26 Aug. 1851 in Bologna, d. 11 March 1940 at Bouhay (Belgium). Son of a Jewish merchant of Bologna, Girolamo Mortara Levi, and of Marianna Padovani, M., having fallen gravely ill at eleven months, was secretly baptized by the M. family's maid, Anna Morisi. When the fact became known in 1858, the archbishop of Bologna, M. Viale-Prelà, having established the validity of the Baptism, ordered that, according to the canons (Denz-U, nos. 1480-90), the boy be taken from his parents and educated in the Catholic religion. Thus on 24 June 1858 the little M. was, despite the opposition

MORTARA, PIO EDGARDO - Portrait.(courtesy of don Mario Del Nastro C.P.L.)

In 1860, Fr. Feletti and the lieutenant colonel of the papal gendarmes De Dominicis were brought to trial, considered respectively the moral author and the executor of the removal of the child from his family. Meanwhile, M., having entered the Order of the Regular Canons Lateranense (1867), firmly declared his wish to remain in the Catholic faith, and so any judicial action was extinguished. Being liable to military conscription, M. was sent by his superiors after 1870 abroad, to various houses of the Order, in Austria, France and Spain, and in the colleges attached to them he won appreciation as a teacher and preacher. He was in his day one of the most distinguished figures of the Order, and having returned 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 to his former co-religionists an appeal to convert to Catholicism. At the end of the First World War he retired to Belgium.

Bibliography4 works

BIBL.: [C. Curci], Il piccolo neofito E. M., in Civ. Cott., 1858, IV, pp. 385 ff., 416; cf. also for new material, Monatschrift für Gesch. u. Wissenschaft. des Judentums, 5 (1933), pp. 321-328; R. De Cesare, Roma e lo Stato del Papa dal ritorno di Pio IX al XX settembre, I, Rome 1907, pp. 278-94; A. Navarotto, L'Affare M. «nell'incubazione della guerra austro-franco-italiana», in Vita e pensiero, 31 (1940), pp. 269-73.

Silvio Furlani

@incollection{ec8_mortara_pio_edgardo, author = {Furlani, Silvio}, title = {Mortara, pio edgardo}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {VIII}, pages = {1426--1427}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1952}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/mortara-pio-edgardo} }

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Mortara, Pio Edgardo

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