(3 of 6)
For a few brief years, it seemed as though Mastai might bridge the gap. In Spoleto he had brokered a peaceful surrender of 4,000 Italian revolutionaries to the archconservative Austrian forces. This led to his 1846 election to the papacy as a moderate. Once installed, he gave amnesty to political prisoners in the Papal States, bestowed on Rome a constitution and a Prime Minister and talked about creating an Italian federation. He unlocked the Jewish ghetto and allowed its wealthier inhabitants to live among the Christian population. Austria's Prince Metternich, the genius of the ancien regime, quipped that he "had allowed for everything in Italy except a liberal Pope."
The detente didn't last long. In 1848, as revolutions blazed throughout Europe, Italian nationalists tried to enlist Pius in their plan to expel the Austrian forces and attain unification. He refused. Achieving an Italian Republic anyway, they slit his Prime Minister's throat. Pius fled Rome disguised as a priest and wearing tinted spectacles. When he returned three years later, supported by French troops, he was a different Pope.
"The knock came at nightfall." So begins The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Kertzer's echo of Holocaust literature is daring but eerily appropriate. The unwanted visitors to the Jewish Mortara family in June 1858 were papal police; they left with Edgardo. A family servant, thinking he was mortally ill, had secretly baptized him, and law required that he be removed from Jewish influence and brought up by the church. Pius may not have initiated the action, but he soon embraced it, and Edgardo, wholeheartedly. In a memoir, Edgardo later recalled that "like a good father, [Pius] had fun with me hiding under his great red cloak and said, jokingly, 'Where is the boy?' and opening up the cloak, he showed all those standing around, 'Here he is!'" Edgardo eventually became a priest, lecturing on the miracle of conversion to Catholicism.
To Pius' astonishment, the child's abduction became an international scandal, a focus for global ambivalence regarding the church. The New York Times ran 20 articles on it in a month; the New York Herald cited "colossal" interest in the matter. Pius' response set the tone for his next 20 years. "The newspapers can write all they want. I couldn't care less about what the world thinks," he told a Jewish delegation. And he added a threat: "Take care. I could have made you go back into your hole." In fact he had already confined the Jews to the ghetto again and rescinded their civil rights. In 1870 he declared them "dogs...there are too many of them in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets."