Edgardo Mortara

Edgardo Mortara

Edgardo Levi Mortara (Bologna, Papal States, August 27, 1851 – Liège, Belgium, March 11, 1940) was an Italian boy who became the center of an international controversy when he was removed from his Jewish parents by authorities of the Papal States and raised as a Catholic. Mortara was born and raised Jewish during the first six years of his life, until he was taken from his family by Church authorities who took custody of the boy after receiving a report that he had been given emergency baptism by a domestic servant during a serious infantile illness. The rationale for this action was that in the Papal States, it was against the law for non-Catholics to raise Catholic children. Mortara was adopted by Pope Pius IX and entered the seminary in his teens.