Spiritualis Uterus: The Question of Forced Baptism and Thomas Aquinas's Defense of Jewish Parental Rights

Abstract

On June 23, 1858, Pope Pius IX ordered police of the Papal States to remove a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his home, in Bologna. Edgardo had been secretly baptized by his Christian housekeeper after allegedly falling ill as an infant. Since the law of the Papal States required that a person baptized must be raised Catholic, Inquisition authorities forcibly removed Edgardo from his parents’ home and transported him to Rome in order that he receive a Christian upbringing.2 ‘Worldwide protests followed. Thousands of people—from American protesters to the French emperor Napoleon III—demanded the child’s return.’3 Along with assurances that the boy would be well taken care of, Pius IX insisted, Non possumus. Controversy over the Mortara affair in the United States emerged once more, in January 2018, with the publication of Dominican theologian Romanus Cessario’s essay defending Pius IX’s decision.4 In order to forestall anti-Catholic sentiment in reaction to an upcoming film based on David Kertzer’s 1997 book on the Mortara case, Cessario argues that the separation of Edgardo from his Jewish parents is what the current Code of Canon Law, and Thomas Aquinas’s theology of baptism,