Word: mortara
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...actuality the Vatican has exhumed far more than just a venerable body. "I am appalled that the Catholic Church wants to make a saint out of a Pope who perpetuated...an act of unacceptable intolerance," declared a professor named Elena Mortara in Rome. Pio Nono, it turns out, had a Jewish problem of his own. Mortara is the great-grandniece of Edgardo Mortara, who was taken from his Jewish parents at age six in 1858 by the papal police and raised--in part by Pius himself--as a Catholic. The incident typified Pius' ham-fisted treatment of the Jews...
...best seller Papal Sins: "He was a disaster, and his influence has been bad ever since. If you beatify him now, there will be a whitewashing of him, which will involve the church in more dishonesty." Pius is the heavy in the well-reviewed The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by Brown University historian David Kertzer, which is being adapted for Broadway by playwright Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy). Even the author of the definitive, three-volume Pius biography, Jesuit historian Giacomo Martina, does not favor his subject for sainthood...
...church's relationship with the Jews, would propose sainthood for a man who in the mid-19th century forced Rome's Jews back into the ghetto and stripped them of their civil rights after having initially allowed them greater freedom. Further fueling the protests is the case of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy kidnapped by the papal police and raised by Pius IX despite the anguished protests of his parents because a Mortara household servant claimed to have doused the boy with holy water...
...John, it plans to beatify Pope PIUS IX. The earlier Pius had the longest reign in history (1846-78), but he plagued Rome's Jews, repealing civil rights and forcing them back into the ghetto. He also had a role in the kidnapping of a Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara, who had been baptized by a Catholic servant. Despite an international outcry, Pius acted as a surrogate father to the child, who later became a priest. Italian Jews are nonplussed. "The beatification of Pius IX exalts a symbol that still represents a wound," says community leader Amos Luzzatto. David Kertzer...
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