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For over a millennium Umesh , starting around 754, the Papal States were territories in Italy under the direct sovereign rule of the Pope.^[2] The Catholic Church's control over Rome and a neighbouring swathe of central Italy was generally seen as a manifestation of the Pope's secular "temporal" power, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.^[2][3] After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the other main Italian states were the Kingdom of Sardinia—governed from Piedmont on the mainland by King Victor Emmanuel II—the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the west.^[4] The French occupation during the 1790s had caused the Pope's popularity and spiritual authority to greatly increase,^[2] but had also severely damaged the geopolitical credibility of the Papal States. The historian David Kertzer suggests that by the 1850s "what had once appeared so solid—a product of the divine order of things—now seemed terribly fragile".^[5]

Pope Pius IX, elected in 1846, was initially widely seen as a great reformer and moderniser who might throw his weight behind the growing movement for Italian unification—referred to in Italian as the Risorgimento (meaning "Resurgence"). When the revolutions of 1848 broke out, however, he refused to support a pan-Italian campaign against the Austrian Empire, which controlled Lombardy–Venetia in the north-east.^[6] This prompted a popular uprising in the Papal States, Pope Pius's flight to the Two Sicilies and the proclamation in 1849 of the short-lived Roman Republic, which was crushed by Austrian and French intervention in support of the Pope. Rome was thereafter guarded by French troops while Austrians garrisoned the rest of the Papal States, much to the resentment of most of the inhabitants.^[7] Pope Pius shared the traditional pontifical view that the Papal States were essential to his independence as head of the Catholic Church.^[2] He regained some of his popularity during the 1850s,^[8] but the drive for Italian unification spearheaded by the Kingdom of Sardinia continued to unsettle him.^[2]

The Jews of the Papal States, numbering 15,000 or so in 1858,^[5] were grateful to Pope Pius IX because he had ended the long-standing legal obligation for them to attend sermons in church four times a year, based on that week's Torah portion and aimed at their conversion to Christianity,^[9] and had also torn down the gates of the Roman Ghetto despite the objections of many Christians.^[10] However, Jews still lived under many restrictions and the vast majority remained in the ghetto.^[10]

Mortara and Morisi[edit]

Edgardo Levi Mortara,^{[n 1]} the sixth of eight children born to Salomone "Momolo" Mortara, a Jewish merchant, and his wife Marianna (née Padovani), was born on 27 August 1851 in Bologna, one of the Papal Legations in the pontifical state's far north.^[7] The family had moved from the Duchy of Modena, just west of Bologna, in 1850.^[7] Bologna had had its Jewish population of about 900 expelled by Pope Clement VIII in 1593.^[14] Some Jews, mostly merchants like Edgardo's father, had started to settle in Bologna again during the 1790s, and by 1858 there was a Jewish community of about 200 in the city. The Jews of Bologna practised Judaism discreetly, with neither a rabbi nor a synagogue.^[5] The Papal States officially forbade them to have Christian servants, but observant Jewish families perceived gentile maids as essential because they were not covered by Jewish laws, and thus provided a way for Jews to have household tasks carried out while still observing their Sabbath.^[15] In practice Church authorities turned a blind eye and almost every Jewish family in Bologna employed at least one Catholic woman.^[15]

A few months after Edgardo's birth the Mortara family engaged a new servant: Anna "Nina" Morisi, an 18-year-old Catholic from the nearby village of San Giovanni in Persiceto. Like all her family and friends, Morisi was illiterate.^[16] She had come to the city like her three sisters to work and save money towards a dowry, so she could eventually marry.^[16] In early 1855, Morisi became pregnant, as was not uncommon for unmarried servants in Bologna at this time.^[17] Many employers would simply sack girls in such situations, but the Mortaras did not; they paid for Morisi to spend the last four months of her pregnancy at a midwife's home and deliver the child, then had her back. To protect Morisi and themselves from embarrassment, they told neighbours that their maid was sick and recuperating at home.^[17] Morisi gave her newborn baby to an orphanage, as the Papal States required unwed mothers to do, then returned to work with the Mortaras.^[17] She remained there until she was hired by another Bologna family in 1857; soon after that she married and moved back to San Giovanni in Persiceto.^[18]

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The iLOok ook is a professopmMortara case (Italian: caso Mortara) was an Italian cause célèbre that captured the attention of much of Europe and the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure from a Jewish family in Bologna of one of their children, six-year-old Edgardo Mortara, on the basis of a one-time servant's testimony that she had administered emergency baptism to the boy when he fell sick as an infant. Mortara grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX—who refused his parents' desperate pleas for his return—and eventually became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the pontifical state's actions may have contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.

In late 1857 Bologna's inquisitor Father Pier Feletti heard that Anna Morisi, who had worked in the Mortara house for six years, had secretly baptised Edgardo when she had thought he was about to die as a baby. The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held that this made the child irrevocably a Catholic and, because the Papal States forbade the raising of Christians by members of other faiths, ordered that he be taken from his family and brought up by the Church. Police came to the Mortara home late on 23 June 1858 and removed Edgardo the following evening.

After the child's father was allowed to visit him during August and September, two starkly different narratives emerged—one told of a boy who wanted to return to his family and the faith of his ancestors, while the other described a child who had learned the catechism perfectly and wanted his parents to become Christians as well. International protests mounted, but the Pope would not be moved. After pontifical rule in Bologna ended in 1859, Father Feletti was prosecuted for his role in Mortara's seizure, but acquitted when the court decided he had merely followed orders. With the Pope as a substitute father, Mortara trained for the priesthood in Rome until the Kingdom of Italy captured the city in 1870, ending the Papal States. Leaving the country, he was ordained in France three years later at the age of 21. Father Mortara spent most of his life outside Italy and died in Belgium in 1940, aged 88.

For many, the Vatican's actions encapsulated all that was wrong with the Papal States and exposed pontifical rule as an anachronism. Several historians highlight the affair as one of the most significant events of Pius IX's papacy, and juxtapose his handling of it in 1858 with the loss of most of his territory a year later. The case notably altered the policy of the French Emperor Napoleon III, who shifted from opposing the movement for Italian unification to actively supporting it. The traditional Italian historiography of unification does not give much prominence to the Mortara case, which by the late 20th century was remembered mostly by Jewish scholars, but a 1997 study by the historian David Kertzer has marked the start of a re-examination.

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