Pope Pius IX and Judaism
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The relations between Pope Pius IX and Judaism were off to a good start at the beginning of his papacy, but relations later soured after anti-clerical revolutions removed most of the pontiff's temporal power, and he stiffened into intolerance. While Pius rejected charges of antisemitism, the rift created by the Mortara Affair, undermined his moral authority in the eyes of some during the rest of his pontificate.
The Papal States were a theocracy in which the Catholic Church and Catholics had considerably more rights than members of other religions. Protestants and Jews were not admitted to the Papal government or to the social circles of Rome, nor did they have the same standing as members of the Catholic faith. The precise legal difference is difficult to pin down, as there existed no bill of rights or even a clear collection of laws in the Papal States at the time of Pius IX.[1] Even ecclesiastical laws (canon law) were not formalized until 1917, some forty years after the death of Pope Pius IX.
Early in his pontificate, in 1847, Pius IX baptized four Roman Jews and welcomed them personally with warm words into the Catholic Church.[2]
Legislative discrimination and intolerance
At Pius IX's accession in 1846, Catholicism and Judaism were the only religions allowed by law - Protestant worship was allowed to visiting foreigners, but forbidden to Italians; atheism was unthinkable. Jews in Rome were required to live in a ghetto, a separated quarter of the city, and had very limited rights. Pius' relations with them changed over time, from good to worse. He initially repealed laws that forbade Jews to practice certain professions, and rescinded laws which forced them to listen four times per year to sermons aimed at their conversion.
After the pope's 1849 overthrow, the short-lived Roman Republic issued a wide-range of religious freedom measures. After French troops brought him back to power in 1850,[3] the Pope issued a series of anti-liberal measures that eliminated even some of his earlier openings, including re-instituting the Ghetto.[4]
Mortara affair
In 1858 in a highly publicized case, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was seized from his parents by the police of the Papal States. He had reportedly been baptized by a Christian servant girl of the family while he was ill six years earlier, because she feared that otherwise he would go to Hell if he died. At that time, the Papal States law forbade Christians being raised by Jews, even their own parents, and considered the informal baptism performed by the teen-age servant a valid religious conversion. Pius IX thereafter steadfastly refused "to extradite a soul".[5]
When a delegation of prominent Jews saw the Pope, he brought Mortara with him to show that the boy was happy in his care. In 1865 he said: "I had the right and the duty to do what I did for this boy, and if I had to, I would do it again."[6][7]
Calls from The Times and from numerous heads of state including Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary and Emperor Napoleon III of France and Ambassador Gramont[8] to return the child to his parents, were politely rejected. The young boy according to his own testimony wanted to stay, writing to his mother: "I am baptized. My Dad is the Pope, I would like to live with my family, if only they would become Christian, and I pray that they will."[9] In 1870, as Don Pius Mortara, an ordained Catholic priest, Edgardo Mortara entered a monastery in Poitiers, France[10] and later spoke out in favor of the beatification of Pope Pius IX, calling the pope "my father" once again. In his young life, however, Mortara could be visited by his parents, but only in the presence of other Roman Catholics.
1871 speech
In a speech in 1871 – after losing temporal authority over Rome – he said of certain anticlerical activists among the Jews of Rome: "Of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places."[11][12] An 1873 biography mentions his personal charity and indicates an implicit position against anti-semitism.[13]