MOVIES AT LA PLAZA: KIDNAPPING—The Power of Rituals

Movie Review by Sergio Martinez

The power of the Catholic Church, the vicissitudes of a minority and the tumultuous times of Italian unification intersect in this film by Marco Bellocchio based on a real historical event: the forced removal of the child Edgardo Mortara (Enea Sala, child) from his Jewish family by agents of the then Papal States, a territory that encompassed Rome and much of central Italy and was governed by the pope. In 1858 in the Jewish quarter of the city of Bologna, then part of the papal dominions, the boy, then seven years old, was taken by the authorities under the pretext that he had been secretly baptized. Now considered a Christian, the boy could no longer live with his Jewish family according to the law of the Papal States but should instead be raised and educated as a good Catholic.

Edgardo, in fact, had been baptized secretly from his family by a Catholic maid who had worked for the Mortara family. When the head of the Inquisition, Pier Gaetano Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni), learns of the boy's secret baptism, he orders him to be taken by force from his family and sent to Rome where he will undergo a process of conversion. Edgardo becomes one of Pope Pius IX's (Paolo Pierobon) favourite forced converts.

The Mortara child became
one of the favourite converts of
Pope Pius IX 

While his parents, the Jewish community and even several foreign governments demand that the Church return the boy to his Jewish family, the pope does not budge. Edgardo will only occasionally see his parents, on one such occasion the boy assures his mother that every night he silently repeats words from a Jewish ritual.

However, Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese, adult) will not have new contacts with the family until several years later and under very different circumstances: the Italian peninsula enters a very tumultuous political period that culminates in the unification of the country and with it also the end of the temporal power of the pope.

The demands of the father for the 
child to be returned to his family
were not heard

The film gives a good historical account of the elements that contributed to the case of Edgardo Mortara: the situation of discrimination to which the Jewish minority was subjected at the time, the power of the ecclesiastical institutions, such as the Holy Office (Inquisition), which for its arbitrariness is abolished when Bologna is liberated by the forces that favour Italian unification. Above all, the power that a ritual like baptism had, even though in this case it was not done by a priest but by a very young and illiterate woman who had believed that the child was in danger of death as a baby and then proceeded to baptize him, so, in her way of thinking, she wanted to avoid that the baby, once dead, would go to limbo.

A recommended film for those interested in historical facts, the power of rituals and how religious prejudices worked.

Running time: 135 min.

Italian with English or French subtitles (check theatres)