Category:Mortara case

English: The Mortara case was an Italian cause célèbre that captivated much of Europe and the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure from a Jewish family in Bologna of one of their children, six-year-old Edgardo Mortara, on the basis of a one-time servant's testimony that she had administered emergency baptism to the boy when he fell sick as an infant. Mortara grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX, who refused his parents' desperate pleas for his return, and eventually became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the pontifical state's actions may have contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.