MORTARA, Pio EDGARDO. - Canon regular, b. August 21, 1851 in Bologna, d. March 11, 1940 in Bouhay (Belgium). Son of a Jewish merchant from Bologna, Girolamo Mortara Levi, and Marianna Padovani, M. fell gravely ill at eleven months and was secretly baptized by the Mortaras’ maid, Anna Morisi. When the fact became known in 1858, the Archbishop of Bologna, M. Viale-Prelà, having verified the validity of the Baptism, ordered—according to canon law (Denz-U, nos. 1480–90)—that the boy be removed from his parents and educated in the Catholic faith. Thus, on June 24, 1858, despite the family’s opposition, the child M. was taken to Rome, entrusted to the rector of the Catechumens, and later, at the expense of Pius IX (hence his first name, Pio), enrolled in the College of St. Peter in Chains, embarking on an ecclesiastical career.
The press in Turin, France, England, and other countries seized the occasion to launch a violent campaign against the Church’s intolerance and the temporal power of the popes. The legations of the Papal States were occupied, and Felice P. De Dominicis, respectively considered the moral author and the executor of the child’s removal from his family, were targeted. Meanwhile, M., having entered the Order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran (1867), firmly declared his intention to remain in the Catholic faith, and thus any legal action against his removal was extinguished. As a conscientious objector to military service, M. was sent abroad by his superiors after 1870 to various houses of the Order in Austria, France, and Spain, and in the attached colleges he earned esteem as a teacher and preacher. He became one of the most distinguished figures of his time in the Order, and upon returning to Rome he taught theology. He preached in nine languages and devoted himself particularly to the conversion of Jews: in 1933, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, he addressed an appeal to his former coreligionists to convert to Catholicism. After World War I, he retired to Belgium.