Did Pope Pius IX kidnap a Jewish child and had him raised as a Catholic?

Answer 1

NO

Improved answer -

After further investigation, the answer is more yes than no...

Pope Pius IX during his 1846-1878 papacy removed a Jewish child from his family. Edgardo Mortara's Jewish parents lived in Bologna in what was then the Papal States, a Catholic nation whose sovereign territory included much of present-day Italy. The Papal States had two well-known laws. The first prohibited Jewish parents from hiring Catholic servants to raise their children. Pope Benedict XIV had written on February 28, 1747:

Since this may happen, that a child of Hebrew parentage be found by some Christian to be close to death, he will certainly perform a deed which I think is praiseworthy and pleasing to God, if he furnishes the child with eternal salvation by the purifying water.

The Papal States intended this law against hiring Catholic servants to protect Jewish families. With no Catholic nannies around to baptize their children, Jewish parents could keep their families intact.

The second law required that if a gravely ill Jewish child was baptized and then recovered, he could not be raised by his parents unless they became Catholic. The Catholic faith is serious. Once a child is baptized, the Church is responsible to do all it can to protect his immortal soul by assuring that he is raised Catholic.

Edgardo Mortara's parents, ignoring the law, hired a Catholic teen-age girl as a nanny. When Edgardo fell ill at age 17 months, the nanny prayed for the child and baptized him. Five years later, after she told her parish priest that Edgardo was not being raised Catholic, Papal States police on June 24, 1858 enforced the law and brought Edgardo to Rome. Eight days later his parents arrived in Rome where they stayed for a month and pled for his return. Edgardo, then six years old, met with his parents every day but never showed any desire to rejoin them, as he himself later attested.

Edgardo remained in Rome and was educated under the personal protection of Pope Pius IX, always free to return to his parents. At age 17 he went to Bologna to spend a month with his parents, but decided to return to Rome and become a Catholic priest.

In 1870, the Risorgimento, a Masonic-inspired movement to unify Italy and break the temporal power of the Catholic Church, brought Piedmontese troops to Rome. They hurried to the convent where they imagined that Mortara, then age 19, was being held captive, but were surprised to hear him say that he not only intended to become a priest but also to take religious vows with the Lateran Canon Regulars.

Father Mortara, reconciled with his parents, became a devout scholar, and preached throughout Europe in nine languages. He passed into eternity in 1940 at age 88.

Pope Pius IX promoted true freedom for Rome's Jews. At his order, the gates of Rome's Jewish ghetto were taken down. He deployed patrols in the area to protect the Jews from those who were incensed by their emancipation. Father Mortara was one of the first witnesses to give testimony in favor of Pius IX's beatification.