Ch5 Vatican Forced Conversions of Jews
| It is better to be divided by truth than to be united by error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals than [to speak] falsehood that comforts and then kills. ~~Adrian Rogers
|
All in all, modern-day Jews get uneasy when Christians begin getting enthusiastic about evangelization. On the one hand, some Jews are flattered to think that Christians are concerned about their spiritual welfare. On the other hand, they soon become annoyed when they discover that Christians fail to recognize what Jews know about themselves, namely, that they are already called (beginning with Abraham), already confirmed in the ways of God (by virtue of doing Torah), and already assured of inclusion in God’s final kingdom (by virtue of the grace of their chosenness). Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox rabbi and Israeli scholar, responds to those Christians trying to convert him to Jesus in the following terms:
Since Sinai we have known the way to the Father. You on the other hand were very much in need of it. Therefore, your becoming Christian is for me a portion of God’s plan of salvation, and I do not find it difficult to accept the church as an instrument of salvation. But please, you do not need to sprinkle sugar on top of honey, as you do when you wish to baptize us. The sugar on top of honey is simply superfluous. We are already “with the Father” and we know the way. . . .[1]
This chapter has three goals: (a) to recall the history of the evangelization of Jews with a special emphasis upon the case of Edgardo Mortara; (b) to examine the church’s mission to evangelize from the vantage point of Jesus; and (c) to explore Paul’s declaration that Israel’s “hardening” (Rom 11:11f) was providential and that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26).[2]
Pius IX and the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
The year was 1858. A young woman in Bologna confessed to her parish priest that six years earlier she had worked illegally as a maid for a Jewish family named Mortara. While serving in the household, the one-year-old son of the Mortaras fell ill. The pious teenage girl, thinking that the Jewish boy might die without baptism[4], took it upon herself to secretly baptize him. Later, the boy recovered. Upon hearing this story from the woman in the confessional, her parish priest insisted that he had to inform the church authorities.
After considering all aspects of the case, the clerical authorities concluded that little Mortara was effectively a Christian by virtue of his baptism. They further concluded that his parents, being Jews, were entirely unfit to foster his Christian identity. Accordingly, the police, acting under clerical orders, seized the seven-year-old Edgardo from his home and sequestered him in the Vatican. He was placed under the care of a group of nuns. In due course, Pius IX took a fond interest in the boy. In fact, he won him over with presents and gradually gained a place in his heart such that Edgardo began addressing him as “uncle.” With time, Edgardo even became a priest, and Pius IX assigned to him the special mission of reaching out to “the fallen race of Jews” so that they too, like him, might come to know the grace and mercy of Christ.
The pleas of the Mortaras for the return of their son fell on deaf ears. Those who supported the return of Edgardo to his parents argued that parents had the natural right to raise their own children in their own religion.[5] Pius IX, given his growing personal interest in this case, argued that spiritual rights took precedence over natural rights and that Edgardo’s baptism effectively released him from the constraints of his Jewish parents.
All over Europe, even some notable Catholics raised objections, but Pius IX was impervious to their arguments. When a Catholic wrote a respectful letter suggesting that Edgardo should be returned, the Pope scribbled on the bottom of the letter, “aberrations of a Catholic . . . doesn’t know his catechism.”
When his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, suggested that Pius might be alienating other countries by such a high-handed use of power, the Pope answered that he did not care who was against him: “I have the blessed Virgin on my side.”[6] He told the Catholic ambassador from France that the Mortaras had brought their trouble on themselves by illegally employing a Christian as their servant.[7]
The actions of the parish priest, the police, and the pope in 1858 were not entirely unexpected. Catholics were always encouraged to perform emergency baptisms in cases where unbaptized children were “in danger of death.” Once performed, however, the child was considered regenerated by Christ’s Spirit and, once this fact was made known to the authorities, the child was taken from his/her Jewish home and placed in a pious Christian home in order to insure a proper Catholic nurturing.
This became a common practice. In Rome itself, during the years 1814-1818, scholars have been able to discovered no less than sixty instances wherein children were forcibly separation from their Jewish parents following such emergency baptisms.[8] Again, in 1864, six years after the uproar that accompanied the abduction of Edgardo, “a nine-year-old Jewish boy, Giuseppe Coen, was baptized without his parents’ permission in Rome and sequestered from them.”[9] The Mortara case, consequently, was just the tip of an iceberg.
The unsavory history of forced conversions
In earlier centuries, the records show that large numbers of Jewish adults were terrorized into accepting baptism. Most Christians are entirely unaware of the ugly underbelly of evangelization during the Middle Ages. Fr. Edward H. Flannery, a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic dialogue, wrote The Anguish of the Jews in order to chronicle the relations between Christians and Jews in Europe during the course of two thousand years. Here is his account of the conditions of the Jews in Spain in the late fourteen century:
Three months later [in 1391] the holocaust began. With renewed fury, the [Catholic] mob broke into the Juderia [the required Jewish ghetto] of Seville and left it in ruins. Four thousand Jews were killed, but the majority . . . escaped death by accepting baptism. From Seville, the carnage spread like a plague throughout all Spain . . . engulfing some seventy Jewish communities. In some Juderias not a single Jews was left [alive], and many synagogues were turned into churches. Authorities were helpless before the onslaught (158).
Even after these pogroms died down, Fr. Flannery notes that the remaining Jews in Spain “appeared to the Church as a scandal and a temptation to their converted brethren.”[10] Thus, Jews were forced to listen to pious sermons and to attend public debates orchestrated to persuade Jews of the manifest superiority of Christianity and the utter bankruptcy of Judaism. Even holy men who were later to be canonized as Saints in the Catholic Church were caught up in the fervor of this unholy enterprise:
Above these towers the figure of St. Vincent Ferrer, Dominican, miracle-worker, an excellent preacher, and totally dedicated to the conversion of the Jews. Throughout Castile and Aragon [in Spain], he passed from synagogue to synagogue, the Torah in one hand, the crucifix in the other and a band of devout [converts] at his heals. . . . He is credited with 35,000 baptisms of Jews between 1411 and 1412. When he failed to persuade he was severe and is believed to have inspired the first compulsory Spanish ghettoes and the oppressive legislation of 1414 that narrowly circumscribed Jewish social activities.[11]
The combined effect of forced sermons, public debates, crowded ghettos, and intrusive legislation was that a steady stream of Jewish converts poured into the Church.[12] Each Sunday, nearly a hundred thousand converts from Judaism crowded into the various Spanish churches for the Eucharist. The Catholic populace was aware that many of these converts from Judaism were not completely persuaded of the infinite merits of Christ and had entered into “baptisms of convenience” calculated to enable them to escape from the diseased and crowded conditions of ghetto existence and from the severe curtailment of their legal rights as Jews. Thus, converted Jews were mercilessly watched by their neighbors for any sign or indication that their conversion was not sincere or that they held on to any of their former Jewish customs.[13] If so, the Dominican watch-dogs were notified.
In time, the number of suspected false conversions was so large that a special Inquisition was formed in 1480 to handle the problem. This Inquisition inspired elaborate regulations for detecting and uprooting “incomplete conversions.”[14] When the Dominican priest, Torquemada, became the Inquisitor General in 1483, “the Inquisition attained an efficiency and ruthlessness that held not only Marranos but all Spanish Jewry in a state of terror.”[15] Accusations multiplied. Confessions were extracted through the use of systematic and progressive tortures. Those who confessed that they secretly continued to practice Judaism were burned at the stake. Public burnings reminded other converts, who were derisively called “pigs” (marranos) by the Catholic populace, that those who failed to keep their baptismal vows had to suffer dire consequences.[16]
Every Jew remembers 1492. Christians remember this date because it marks the sailing of Columbus who, in quest of a new route to China, discovered the “new world” of the Americas. Jews, however, remember this date because this was the year that the pious Christian rulers of Spain and Portugal, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, decreed that every Jew had three choices: (a) convert to Christianity; (b) forever leave their country; or (c) death. At the time, this was regarded by the Vatican as a fair resolution to the vexing Jewish question.
After the Alhambra Decree was passed, Spain’s entire Jewish population was given only four months to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. The edict promised the Jews royal protection and security for the effective three-month window before the deadline. They were permitted to take their belongings with them, excluding “gold or silver or minted money or other things prohibited by the laws of our kingdoms.” In practice, however, the Jews had to sell anything they could not carry: their land, their houses, and their libraries, and converting their wealth to a more portable form proved difficult.[17]
Needless to say, the overwhelming Catholic population was not concerned that Jews had to sell their homes and all their furnishings at a sharply reduced prices. The Catholic buyers had only to wait as the asking price decreased week by week. When Jews tried to purchase diamonds or other precious gems to take abroad with their families, the gem dealers sold their goods at sharply inflated prices because they were aware that the four-month deadline insured that, out of desperation, Jews had either to pay the inflated prices or to leave their wealth behind.
“As a result of the Alhambra Decree and persecution in prior years, over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled.”[18] Those who converted kept their wealth, but they lost their freedom. They would spend their whole lives being watched like hawks by their Catholic neighbors. One misstep, and they would be dragged before the Inquisition. When the natives of the New World were sorely abused by the conquistadores, there were Franciscan friars who alerted the authorities. When the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics sorely abused the Jews, we have no one alerting the authorities. The Jews who killed Jesus were getting exactly what they deserved.[19]
A Nun saves a Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto in 1940
Needless to say, the brutality of these times has largely passed. For Christians, however, this short recital helps to explain why Jews shudder when the Christians manifest any zeal for the conversion of the Jews. Even when conversions were used to rescue a Jew from mob violence, such conversions must be lamented and their results must rend the heart of fathers and mothers who, of necessity, can imagine what they might feel if the tables were turned. Consider the following true story:
The [Jewish] parents were fortunate in being able to place their son with a [Christian] friend who lived outside the [Warsaw] ghetto. . . . The parents were shipped off to Auschwitz, separated, and managed by hook and crook to survive the final solution. Neither was aware of the fate of the other or of the[ir] child. At the age of five, supplied with a new birth certificate by a Roman Catholic parish, the boy walked out of the ghetto holding the hand of the woman who saved his life. He was spirited away to a Roman Catholic orphanage in the countryside, where he went to church every Sunday, said his prayers twice a day, and learned the Our Father and Hail Mary. The nun who looked after the children converted the boy to Christianity. She taught him that he “would have to give up all Jewish things.” He was baptized. He was taught the classic Christian attitude toward Jews. When he and his mother were reunited after the war, “he hated everything Jewish.” “The Jews,” he said, “killed the Lord Jesus.”[20]
Anyone who repudiates the final solution of Hitler must accordingly repudiate everything within Christian theology and practice that systematically destroys the faith of Jews. The nun in this story was surely not an evil person. Far from it. She accepted the boy into the orphanage at some risk to herself and to the others. One might even imagine that she regarded the boy’s conversion as an act of necessity since children are unable to undertake a double-identity that requires systematic dissimulation. The boy’s physical life was thus spared at the cost of obliterating his religious and cultural identity. One can only imagine the anguish of his mother and the disturbance within the boy himself at discovering that he himself and his parents were Jews. The poison of anti-Judaism within Christianity was thus calculated to turn his personal being against his own identity and his own family. The nun in this story was thus the unwitting contributor to Hitler’s final solution.
Observe, Judge, and Act
Q1. Up until this point of time, the message given to you by loving parents and by your religion teachers is that, in the case of an emergency, anyone can administer baptism. So, when Mortara was sick, the Christian maid administered baptism. Then, after considering all aspects of the case, the clerical authorities concluded that little Edgardo Mortara was effectively a Christian by virtue of this baptism. They further concluded that his parents, being Jews, were entirely unfit to foster his Christian identity. Accordingly, the police, acting under clerical orders, seized the seven-year-old Edgardo from his home and sequestered him in the Vatican. He was placed under the care of a group of nuns.
Did the Italian priests act honorably and justly in this case? How so? But did not Edgardo’s Jewish parents have the right to raise him as a Jew? Is this not their natural right? In a case such as this there is a conflict of rights. At the end of the day, whose rights were honored? Whose rights were overlooked? Was justice done? Explain yourself.
Q2. When the esteemed Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, considered cases such as this, how did he decide? As it turns out, he ruled that children should not be baptized without their parents’ consent, since they have immediate authority over them (Summa Theologica III 68,10, ad 2). Pius IX took a fond interest in the boy. In fact, he won him over with presents and gradually gained a place in his heart such that Edgardo began addressing him as “uncle.” Thus, with the passage of time, Edgardo began to take pride in having such a powerful man, Pius IX, as his benefactor. Hence, with time, Edgardo relished his Catholic faith, and he felt no attraction to his former Jewish upbringing. In fact, he preferred the company of Pius IX more than the visits from his parents.
Pius IX ignored the appeals made on behalf of his Jewish parents. When his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, suggested that Pius might be alienating other countries by such a high-handed use of power, the Pope answered that he did not care who was against him: “I have the blessed Virgin on my side.” Explain this. What was Pius IX indicating when he claimed that “the blessed Virgin is on my side”?
Q3. As it turns out, Spain had a long and calculated history of abusive disregard of for the religious rights of Jews—spontaneous pograms, crowded ghettoes, forced attendance at sermons, the Alhambra Decree of 1492, the Spanish Inquisition.
Q4. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
The Church must also struggle with Elie Wiesel’s charge that “any messiah in whose name men are tortured is a false messiah.” Wiesel explains this in his own experiences:
As a child I was afraid of the church . . . not only because of what I inherited‑-our collective memory‑-but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish school children would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors. A symbol of compassion and love to Christians, the cross has become an instrument of torment and terror to be used against the Jews.
Q5. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
In humility and truth, consequently, the false doctrines (named in Q3) and horrendous deeds of Christians (named in Q4) may have temporarily (and maybe even permanently) ruined the chances that Jesus of Nazareth will still be God’s choice for the Moshiach of Israel. No appeal to the infallibility of the popes or to the persistent faith of the Church could possibly overturn this terrible conclusion.
Q6. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
- This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
- He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
- He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. That Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he has stood idly by while his kinfolk bled.
- Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the Moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins. Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts.
- It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians (as gentiles) experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no one can legitimately have an experience of God’s forgiveness of sins without praising the name of Jesus.
Q7. No one can change her mind without first of all having slept on the evidence. The process of deep sleep allows one to forget the non-essentials that are cluttering your mind and feelings. Therefore, I urge you not to commit yourself until you sleep on it for a few nights. Where has your mind and heart settled after three days?
Q8. After a week, open your heart and mind to a trusted and informed guide who is willing to hear the depths of your soul. Share your whole process of finding flaws in your original position. How and why have you undertaken to study this issue more deeply. What new evidence has jumped out at you and how has it changed you? Give yourself forty days to test drive the position of Rabbi Elis Wiesel.
Conclusions
My conclusions are disturbing even to myself. How far I have come from the teenager joining in the roar of the crowd that proclaimed, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world!” The Baltimore Catechism that I then used entirely passed over two thousand years of salvation history. Jews were seen not as “the first to believe” but as “the first to betray” God. Salvation, meanwhile, was narrowly rescripted to mean “the forgiveness of sins” and the “opening of the gates of Heaven”‑-realities that were given central and universal importance while completely ignoring God’s abiding love and enduring promises to Israel. In this climate, it was easy and natural for me, an impressionable Catholic youth, to pity (and even to despise) Jews.
I take courage in the fact that Vatican II began to extract the poison that infected my Church. It is not enough, however, to acknowledge with Paul that “Jews remain very dear to God” (Nostra Aetate 4) and to insist that we share “a common spiritual heritage” (Nostra Aetate 4) when, as this chapter makes clear, Catholics have hardly begun to gauge the carefully disguised ways in which our ancestors have distorted the faith of the early church in favor of a false gospel that poisoned our minds and hearts against the children of Abraham and Sarah.
The five chapters in this little book expose five different ways that the religious teaching I received at Holy Cross Grade School “poisoned” me. These five chapters also bring forward five different remedial steps whereby each “poison” might be purged. As you know, my long journey toward finding an antidote to the “poison” fed to me by my wonderful Ursuline Sisters[21] started with my coming to work for Mr. Martin. I give thanks to that humble Jew every day of my life. And, for you, the patient reader of my story, I would hope that you have already met or you are getting ready to meet your “Mr. Martin.”
It is not enough for Catholics to recover the Jewishness of Jesus; rather, we Catholics must also recover the Jewish mindset of Jesus whereby he prayed (a) that “our Father” would bring the Kingdom of God to earth and (b) that sins would be forgiven “without the death of Jesus.” On this score, so much remains to be done. Most Catholics have little investment in the Kingdom of God coming to us on this earth. They are praying to Mary “for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” The Jesus prayer opens up our hearts to the arrival of our Father on earth (maybe as in Rev 21:1-7, 22:1-7). The Hail Mary prayer, by way of contrast, directs us to prepare for the time of our death because that is the hour when her Son will judge us and send our immortal souls into the afterlife that we justly deserve. Two different prayers, two different futures, two different hopes. Let there be no confusion on this point.
Peace and joy in searching for the truth
Endnotes
[1] Pinchas Lapide and Jürgen Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 69‑70.
[4] In the early centuries of the Christian era, there was no compelling reason to promote infant baptism. Quite to the contrary, the adult catechumenate of two to three years presupposed that converts had not been baptized until their formation period was completed. Furthermore, the early church manuals designated Easter Sunday or Pentecost Sunday as the preferred time for baptisms. It was only when Augustine devised the notion of original sin that parents were forced to protect their infants with early baptisms. Augustine recognized that many, like himself, had adapted the notion that they could sew their wild oats and then to have all their sins forgiven when they completed their catechumenate. Thus, Augustine threatened parents with the prospect that infants with original sin were destined for hell [or limbo] should they die before their baptism. In so doing, infant baptisms gradually became the common practice. This had the effect of destroying the benefits of the adult catechumenate. For full details, see Nathan Mitchell, “Dissolution of the Rite of Christian Initiation,” 50–82 in Made, Not Born, which draws on the classic study of J. G. Davies, “The Disintegration of the Christian Initiation Rite,” Theology 50 (1947): 407–12.
[5].Thomas Aquinas argued that children should not be baptized without their parents’ consent, since they have immediate authority over them (Summa Theologica III 68,10, ad 2).
[6].Pius IX solemnly declared the Immaculate Conception as a belief to be held by all the faithful on December 8th, 1854. Four years later, an unexpected miracle was reported from Lourdes. Bernadette Soubirous, an uneducated French girl of fourteen, reported to her bishop that she had been visited by a “mysterious lady” in an apparition. The bishop wisely asked Bernadette to ask of the lady who she was. When she did so, she received the reply, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This was popularly hailed as a firm confirmation, coming from Our Lady herself, that she agreed with the earlier papal initiative. Pius IX, consequently, felt that he had the blessed Virgin on his side not only in making his earlier dogmatic declaration but also in refusing to return Edgardo.
[7].Wills, Papal Sin, 42.
[8].Kertzer, The Popes, 42-59 where many cases are documented.
[9].Wills, Papal Sin, 45.
[10].Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, 133.
[11].Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, 134.
[12] The text of the Alhambra Decree accused the Jews of trying “to subvert the holy Catholic faith” by attempting to “draw faithful Christians away from their beliefs.” This claim seems suspect. In fact, it was the practices of the Church that brought thousands of Jews to the baptismal font. The Jews had no systematic plan to convert life-long Catholics. At best, one might suspect that Jews would have occasionally tried to encourage Jewish converts to return to their ancestral faith. Nothing more.
[13] As an illustration of this, Elvira del Campo was brought before the Tribunal of Toledo because it was reported that she never ate pork and she changed her underclothes every Saturday. When it was further discovered that her Catholic mother had Jewish ancestry, the Tribunal suspected that she might be a crypto-Jewess. Mercilessly tortured, the young woman asked repeatedly to be told what crime she must confess to in order to stop the administration of more pain. After such intense indignities (including being stripped of her clothes), she lapsed into incoherent speech. For details, see the four-volume work of Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1922) III 6.7.24, URL=<http://libro.uca.edu/lea3/6lea7.htm>
[14] For a careful examination of how alternative motives were also brought forward to completely understand this period of history, go to URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain>.
[15] Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, 137.
[16] The Spanish Inquisition still remains a hot topic. As such, many Catholic historians consider it a matter of loyality to point out the exaggerations found in the reports of Protestants. Some online reports are entirely unreliable. I just read a report that begins, “The goal of the Spanish Inquisition was to expell, convert, or kill all Non-Catholics in Spain” (URL=https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/spanish-inquisition-258743421/258743421). Given the climate of honesty in reporting, I generally find Wikipedia and major journal articles to be reliable. Blogs are most prone to confessional or person biases. Occasionally one finds Catholics lamenting the deeds of their ancestors associated with the Spanish Inquisition. One such statement includes this: “As a Catholic priest, I am here to express this sorrow and ask for forgiveness from my Jewish brothers” URL=<https://jewinthepew.org/2015/11/01/1-november-1478-pope-sixtus-iv-establishes-spanish-inquisition-otdimjh/>
[17] URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra_Decree>
[18] URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversions_of_Jews_to_Christianity>
[19] The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespear dramatizes how the Christians outwitted the Jewish money lender and stole from him his daughter and his wealth. Shakespear wrote to get the applause of the crowds, and, needless to say, it’s the Christians who are applauded and the Jews who are despised. Nonetheless, one cannot expect a small note of sympathy for the Jew in his famous lament.
[20] From Alexander Donat’s personal memoir, Holocaust Kingdom, cited in Sidney G. Hall III, Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 12.
[21] If you want to see what the Ursuline Sisters look like and what they are doing in Cleveland today, then go to URL=https://www.ursulinesisters.org/
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