Angelus News | June 30, 2023 | Vol. 8 No 13

“The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1800-1882, German. This representation departs significantly
from the historical record of how Mortara was taken – no clergy were present, for example. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Waiting for the ‘Netflix Effect’
Advocates of reform related to the 19th-century case of a baptized
Jewish child are hoping for some big-screen help to boost their cause.
BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
ROME — For almost 40 years,
the 1983 disappearance of
15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi,
the daughter of a minor employee of
the Papal Household whose family
lived in a Vatican apartment, festered
into Italy’s version of the Kennedy
assassination without the Vatican ever
feeling the need to launch its own
investigation.
Yet in the wake of a successful Netflix
series called “Vatican Girl,” the
pope’s Promoter of Justice promptly
announced that he was opening an
inquest, vowing that no stone would
be left unturned to establish what the
Vatican knew and when it knew it.
Though it could just be coincidence,
many observers can’t help thinking
public pressure created by the highly
rated four-part Netflix program was
part of what broke the logjam.
At the moment, advocates of another
Vatican gesture they regard as long
overdue are hoping that a new movie
currently playing in Italian and
French theaters will have the same
effect, creating momentum to amend
the Church’s Code of Canon Law
with a peculiar objective: the removal
of a provision allowing for the baptism
of a child even against the will of the
parents if the infant is in danger of
death.
That proposal was first floated almost
a quarter-century ago, in conjunction
with the 2000 beatification of Pope
Pius IX, but went nowhere at the
time.
It arises in connection with the infamous
case of Edgardo Mortara, which
is also the subject of the new movie,
“Rapito” (“Kidnapped”) by famed
Italian director Marco Bellocchio. It’s
the story of a young Jewish boy who
was secretly baptized in 1851 by his
family’s Catholic maid in Bologna,
while the city was still part of the
Papal States. The maid had feared
that young Mortara might die from an
infection.
In late 1857, the local commander
of the papal police learned of the
baptism and, acting on the law of
the Papal States which forbade a
Catholic child from being raised in a
non-Catholic home, forcibly removed
Mortara from his Jewish family in
1858 and sent him to a residence in
Rome for children in such circumstances.
This was the 19th century, not the
Middle Ages, and a newly independent
secular European press turned
the case into a “cause célèbre.”
Despite the backlash, Pius dug in his
heels and refused to return the child,
instead raising him in the Vatican as a
sort of surrogate son. Mortara went on
to become a Catholic priest and died
in Belgium in 1940.
One of Mortara’s descendants, Elèna
26 • ANGELUS • June 30, 2023