A Needless Quarrel

For his part, the First Things reviewer, Fr. Romanus Cessario, shares the memoirist’s view, vigorously defending Pius’s actions in the case—and that is what caused a quarrel to break out this month. Twitter lit up with outrage, denunciation, and counterblast. On Cessario’s side, or at least willing to defend his view as respectable, was a small band of vocal Catholic ultratraditionalists. Opposing his view was a diverse array of Jews, Protestants, secular “nones,” and a great many Catholics who share the view that the pope did a grave injury to the rights of young Edgardo and his family in 1858.

By the end of the week, Public Discourse (the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, where I work) had published a fierce rebuttal of Cessario’s position by Catholic legal scholar Robert T. Miller, which ended by calling on the editor of First Things, R. R. Reno, to “disavow” the review and “to reaffirm the journal’s historical commitment to the freedom of religion as understood in liberal states.” Within a day—though with no indication that he was responding to Miller in particular—Reno had posted an essay on the magazine’s website in which he called Pius’s behavior in the Mortara case “ill-considered” and “wildly imprudent,” a “grievous act” that was “a stain on the Catholic Church.”

Some have said that Reno’s decision to publish the Cessario review was itself ill-considered and imprudent. In his web essay, Reno defends having published Cessario’s piece, but he clearly separates himself and his magazine’s editorial voice from it, even averring that the author “makes suspect moves” in his argument.

So is that that? Time will tell. But in an age when the Catholic church is hardly in a position anywhere to repeat this episode, we should pause to consider why tempers flared anew over the Mortara case, making it again a cause célèbre as it had been in 1858-59.

One reason is that First Things has been the locus of a great deal of fruitful Jewish-Christian dialogue since the magazine was started by the then-Lutheran pastor (and later Catholic priest) Richard John Neuhaus in 1990. The magazine is dominated by a Catholic sensibility reflecting its editorial staff, but it has always been open to other religious voices, including prominent Jewish ones. Did the Cessario piece jeopardize Catholic relations with Jews? It shouldn’t, particularly after Reno’s heartfelt response to critics. But Jewish concerns are perfectly understandable: The Mortara case is better and more painfully remembered in the Jewish community, while a lot of Catholics had never heard of it until now. And, rather shockingly, Cessario’s review made essentially no concessions to the sensibilities of Jews or of anyone else who believes the legal abduction of Edgardo Mortara “offends against the dignity of the family as a natural institution,” in Reno’s words.

The second reason is that inside the Catholic intellectual world another debate is raging today, between the adherents of “integralism” and “liberalism” respecting the relationship of the church to political power. The terms of this debate are still sorting themselves out, but so far have largely been set by the integralists. Though they seem uncertain about what they’re for—vacillating between holding that Christians can never be really at home in any political order and longing for a confessional state to be at home in—the integralists are sure about what they’re against: liberalism, a word they use as an epithet to describe not only today’s progressive left but the whole edifice of the modern free society, with its emphasis on individual rights, limited government, and free markets. Their counterparts in this debate may squirm a bit at being called liberals, but are certainly ready to stand on the ramparts of the modern free society.

Robert Miller’s blast at Cessario and Reno seemed like another installment in this debate when he accused the reviewer and his editor of “statism” (recalling recent criticisms Miller has lodged, in a completely unrelated matter, against Reno’s take on present-day capitalism) and closed his essay with a reference to “freedom of religion as understood in liberal states.” Language like this was like waving a red flag in front of integralist bulls.

But in truth we can discuss the Mortara case, and condemn the pope’s actions in it, without folding the discussion into the integralist-liberal debate at all. Pius IX, who was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 2000 and may soon be canonized, had previously taken steps to relieve the Jews of Rome and the Papal States of much of the oppression under which they had long suffered. But Pius was wrong in the Mortara case—grievously so, as Miller’s main argument demonstrated—for venerable Catholic reasons he should have understood even in his own day, reasons having no connection with the modern liberal project that the integralists (rightly or wrongly) attribute to the anti-Christian secular enlightenment.

Even further back than Thomas Aquinas, the church has taught that it is wrong to baptize Jewish children against their parents’ wishes, much less to take them from their parents. Thomas himself, no modern liberal by any stretch of the imagination, describes it as an injustice to them, but adds that the reason is that “they would lose a father’s right over his now believing [Christian] children.” Does he mean more than a spiritual or moral right—that is, that parents could licitly be deprived of legal custody of their child by the temporal power of the state? That is not entirely clear. In the sequel Thomas writes, “in accord with natural law, a child, before he has the use of reason, is under the care of his father. Hence, it would be contrary to natural justice if, before a child has the use of reason, he were taken away from the care of his parents or something were ordained for him against his parents’ wishes.” Can baptism trump natural justice, or must it yield to it? Thomas does not say; we must puzzle it out for ourselves.

Everything in the Mortara case was set in motion by the servant’s surreptitious baptism of Edgardo, which the church considered not only valid but licit (and still does) even in a case with unwilling parents because administered in extremis. As Cessario notes, “both the law of the Church and the laws of the Papal States stipulated that a person legitimately baptized receive a Catholic upbringing.” But he goes on to argue entirely from canon law and the sacramental character of baptism, without pausing to consider whether the civil law of the Papal States was unjust, particularly in its intransigent and, let us mince no words, brutal application to Mortara’s case.

For Edgardo’s parents were alive, capable, and nonabusive. Nonetheless Cessario endorses the simple progression from a valid baptism, to the church’s duty to a young Christian, to Pius’s forcible seizure of Edgardo. But as Miller rightly notes, this rests on an erroneous view of the legitimate reach of state power. Pius wore two hats, the spiritual and the temporal, and, led astray by his sense of spiritual obligation to a baptized Christian, he wrongly used his temporal authority to snatch Edgardo from his family (and then compounded the injustice by raising the boy himself, without benefit of a married mother and father, as would be normal in a Catholic adoption).

This distinction that should have restrained Pius IX was not some modern liberal notion of the kind he later set his face against in the Syllabus of Errors. It had developed centuries earlier, precisely in Catholic thought, where we can find the true origins of the ideas of natural rights and limited state power, as scholars such as Brian Tierney and Larry Siedentop have shown. As Tierney has written, the medieval canonists of the 12th century

In short, it was Christianity itself that gave the Western world the space we call secular civil society, carving out a realm for human freedom, conscience, and dignity—including the “dignity of the family as a natural institution”—centuries before “modernity” and “liberalism” came along to transform the idea of natural rights into a species of unbounded autonomy that answers to no authority beyond the self. Christians undertook this development of authentic freedom to a large extent in their encounters with the Jews in their midst. In the light of distinctively Christian principles governing political power, we may say that Pius IX acted wrongly—indeed, gravely unjustly. If he is one day to be enrolled among the saints, which is something that Jewish friends and allies of Catholics have made clear would cause grave offense in the Jewish community precisely because of his actions in the Mortara case, it will be despite and not because of those actions.

Matthew J. Franck is director of the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.