The shocking kidnapping of a young Jewish boy by the Italian Catholic Church, and its ongoing political and cultural reverberations to the present day, will be the subject of our Sunday Salon program presented by Jeffrey Dorn. Please join us for a fascinating discussion of “The Case of Edgardo Mortara.” The Mortara incident captured the attention of much of Europe and North America in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the seizure of a six-year-old boy named Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family in Bologna, based on a former servant’s testimony that she had administered an emergency baptism to the boy when he fell ill as an infant. Mortara then grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX, who refused his parents’ desperate pleas for his return; eventually Mortara became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the Pontifical State’s actions contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.

Jeffrey Dorn, Presenter