Half-Modern

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

For those who think that we can have republicanism, constitutionalism, and Calvin’s Geneva (certain critics of 2k who live and work in the former Northwest Territory), Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminds about the contrast between pre-modern and modern times:

The challenge of Western modernity produced a remarkable ferment of speculation in the Islamic East, but not in a form that the West has found easy to understand. So “What went wrong” needs to be set in context. For many centuries political and philosophical thought had languished in the East, not least because the Ottoman rulers did not encourage it. As a consequence, the fruits of the European Enlightenment reached the East rather late. Thereafter, Easterners sought (and seek), in the eyes of many modern commentators, to acquire the superficial trappings of Western economic and material progress, without recognizing that these develop from a commitment to education, freedom of thought and enterprise, and an open, essentially secular society. . . .

I suspect that most critics of 2k would like Muslims to be 2k whenever the vigor of political Islam manifests itself. But if Christians want Muslims to keep Shar’ia law out of civil policies and legislation, why don’t they see a similar imperative for themselves. Wheatcroft duly observes that adapting to modernity in the West has not always been smooth:

Nor has progress always had an easy passage even in Europe or the United States. Resistance to a godless and secular society existed in rural areas (like Indiana and Ohio – editing mine) everywhere. Throughout the nineteenth century many conservative Europeans, completely unreconciled to the alien ideals of progress, abhorred every aspect of modernity. For the vast rural majority, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe, in France, Spain, and the mezzogiorno of Italy, these new political and social ideas had no meaning: the faithful usually believed what their priests told them. The resistance to change was not very different in the regions under Islamic rule. Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (297, 298)

But what happens for both Muslims and Christians is that the modern ones (the premoderns are not alive) embrace modernity partially:

The eminent political scientist Bassam Tibi has described this melange of tradition and modernity as “half-modernity,” which he calls a “selective choice of orthodox Islam and an instrumental semi-modernity.” Charles Kurzman puts it into a more precise context. “Few revivalists actually desire a full fledged return to the world of 7th century Arabia. Khomeini himself was an inveterate radio listener, and used modern technologies such as telephones, audiocassettes, photocopying, and British short-wave radio broadcasts to promulgate his revivalist message. Khomeini allowed the appearance of women on radio and television, chess playing, and certain forms of music. When other religious leaders objected he responded, ‘the way you interpret traditions, the new civilization should be destroyed and the people should live in shackles or live for ever in the desert.’” (314)

The take away is that both 2k advocates and critics are guilty of being half-modern; none of us follows the laws and policies of Calvin’s Geneva or Knox’s Scotland (though the Netherlands’ toleration of folks like Descartes and Spinoza may be much more of a model for contemporary Bloomington, Indiana and Moscow, Idaho – a historical point unknown to most Dutch-American critics of 2k – than any champion of Reformed Protestantism realizes). 2kers believe they have figured out a way to retain the truths and practices of the Reformation while also living in good conscience in the modern world. The way to do this is to recognize that the church, her truths, and ways are spiritual and do not bend to the logic of modern societies. This results in two standards, one for the church and one for the world. 2kers don’t expect the world to conform to the church.

Anti-2kers also believe they have figured out a way to retain the truths of the Reformation. They do this by insisting that the church’s morality be the norm for society. They do not insist that the church’s truth (doctrine) or practices (worship) be the norm for society, the way those truths and practices were the norm for Geneva and Edinburgh. By clinging to one ethical standard for church and society, without either its theological foundation or its liturgical consequences, anti-2kers think they are following Calvin and Knox. They are actually doing a good impersonation of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Neither side is directly following Calvin. One side is deviating in good conscience.

Critics of 2K May Not Sing "A Mighty Fortress"

Published on by D. G. Hart100 Comments

Most Protestants older than 35 are familiar with the text of Luther’s hymn. Since Luther himself was a two-kingdom advocate, the notion that “A Mighty Fortress” has 2k connotations is hardly surprising. What comes as a surprise is that anti-2kers have not removed the hymn from our hymnals. The fourth stanza sings:

That word above all earthly powers,
no thanks to them, abideth;
the Spirit and the gifts are ours,
thru him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also;
the body they may kill;
God’s truth abideth still;
his kingdom is forever.

Obviously, reading cultural transformation into those words is a feat possibly only John Henry Newman could perform. But finding an eternal dimension in the work of civil magistrates is well-nigh impossible. How exactly can the temporal affairs of the civil government be eternal?

This observation disproves once again the common notion that Christians learn far more theology from hymns than from doctrinal teaching.

Not Everyone Uses the Plural

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Hold on to your seat. David VanDrunen responds to Ryan McIlhenny’s response to VanDrunen’s response to McIlhenny’s response to two kingdoms:

What is most important to me is that the Reformed community reaffirm the basic distinction between God’s two kingdoms—his common providential rule and his special redemptive rule—whether or not one agrees with all the ways I personally apply this distinction in exploring the Christianity-and-culture issues. This distinction is biblical and has very deep roots in the Reformed tradition. I would deem it a great blessing from God were the Reformed community as a whole to re-embrace it, and I see my efforts to defend the distinction as something I can do to serve the Reformed churches I love. The thing is, I struggle to think of any contemporary figure I have read or spoken to who either calls himself a neo-Calvinist or is commonly identified by others as a neo-Calvinist who does not speak of God’s kingdom in the singular. Possibly my own experience is just quirky, but ever since I began thinking seriously about this I have understood a one-kingdom view to be of the essence of what “neo-Calvinism” is. Thus I do not consider myself a neo-Calvinist. To me, the thought of a “two kingdoms neo-Calvinist” is like the thought of a “libertarian socialist.” It’s paradoxical, even contradictory.

And, of course, what makes the difference between the singular and plural of Kingdom important is how we live in this age (saeculum), a time between the advents of Christ, when believers live side-by-side with unbelievers. If kingdom is singular, what place do non-believers have in civil society? Do they have equal rights under the law, or do we put them in ghettos or treat them as dhimmi? And if Kingdom is singular, do believers learn from non-Christian philosophers, historians, and bio-chemists? Or do we bar non-Christians from universities?

Believe it or not, putting non-Christians in ghettos, treating them as dhimma, and denying them admittance to universities were all responses to making God’s kingdom singular.

Jonathan Edwards and Neo-Calvinism

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Ryan McIlhenny responds to David VanDrunen’s review of Kingdoms Apart:

Neo-Calvinists would agree that Christians and non-Christians share truths equally, but on a surface or common (creational, natural law) level only. Anyone digging deeper into a particular area of study will be confronted with anomalies, irony, or just plain mystery that can never be critically and creatively worked out apart from a theoretical interpretive grid rooted in one’s religious ground motive. It is the religious heart that reveals the competing understandings of the common. As I mentioned in the book, the neo-Calvinist distinction between structure and direction is helpful on this point. Thus, in both morality and reason, an explicitly biblical approach is better or more advanced, again in theory, than one that rejects or simply ignores the importance of Christ.

The “religious heart” reveals competing understandings? Does that apply to interpreting the Civil War (U.S.)? Or do graduate students in history need to learn from a host of non-saved historians, whose hearts are not religious, to sort out the competing understandings of what led to the war and what its consequences were for the nation (and local communities)?

And does this apply to medicine? When I need to have my hip replaced and get a second opinion, do I need to ask whether the surgeons’ hearts have been strangely warmed?

No one lives this way. Neo-Calvinism leads to intellectual theonomy. It allows pietists to wear their faith on their intellect. But if doesn’t explain how Christians operate (unless neo-Calvinists are willing to claim that the way Christians ordinarily operate is sinful), how smart can it be?

Paper, Print, Ink — The Winner Is?

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If paper beats rock in “Paper, Scissors, Rock,” does paper beat the printing press in the development of modernity and what it means to be enlightened?

. . . in the Enlightenment the magical agency of the press to transform society became a near-universal belief. Censorship was the negative recognition of this absolute credence, and the eighteenth-century relaxation of control over the printed word (in the Habsburg domains and in Russia) was a short-lived experiment. But what was the state of those who did not enjoy the benefit of the printed word? They lived in an unimaginable darkness, waiting and longing for the coming of the light. And what of a government that deliberately turned its back upon the printing press? It could only be considered as the epitome of barbarism.

That was precisely the position of the Ottoman Empire and the infidel East. The West believed that the Ottomans “prohibited” the printing press because of their obscurantist faith – Islam. The Turks’ refusal to accept this unique benison from the West was an indication of their deep and fundamental wickedness. . . . I believe that the debate over the printing press was the final formulation of the Western malediction of the Eastern infidel; but it was a condemnation carefully adjusted and attuned to the mores of an Enlightened age. What had begun with the Muslim as the “Abomination of Desolation,” then continued with the “Antichrist”, “the malignant foe,” and all the other epithets, ended with a portrayal of debased ignorance. This is the stereotype that has come through to the present day, and still flourishes in the West, but I believe that the Ottoman “failure” to adopt the printing press was the first point at which this prejudice was systematically articulated. (274-75)

. . . .The failure to adopt Gutenberg’s new art became a touchstone of the essential backwardness of Muslims. . . . To change or even question that norm is to enter a maelstrom. It is easier to pose the question as a counterfactual, a “what if.” What if Mehmed II “the Conqueror,” to cap his victory at Constantinople in 1453, had paid the debts of the floundering Mainz entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg, and shipped his printing press to the Old Palace above the Bosphorus? It is perhaps not such a foolish premise, knowing what we do of both Mehmed’s passions and Gutenberg’s financial circumstances. Nor is it entirely fanciful, because the Islamic world had already pioneered a development much more far reaching than Gutenberg’s trio of innovations – reusable metal type, the casting mold, and the printing press.

It was paper more than print that revolutionized the world. Take another counterfactual: what if Johann Gutenberg had had to print his great Bible on the only material available in 1455: sheep, cow, and goat skins? What would have happened to his great invention if there had been no paper in western Europe? The role of paper in the printing revolution has been strangely passed over. Yet without paper, transmitted from China to the Muslim world, and thence to Europe, the development of publishing in Europe is virtually unimaginable. (Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 276-77)

History is hardly inevitable, nor does it break down in easy to chew, bite-sized pieces that never produce indigestion. The only way to see good guys and bad guys in the past MAY be through the eyes of faith. Everything else is quicksand, or in the words of Qoheleth, “vanity.”

Confusing Johns

Published on by D. G. Hart355 Comments

This is Calvinism (mainly):

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; yet he has authority, and it is his duty, to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordainances of God duly settled, administrated, and observed. For the better effecting whereof, he has power to call synods, to be present at them and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God. (WCF 23.3)

This is Calvinism revised:

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance. (OPCCF, 23.3)

This is Calvinism on Locke:

Hall demonstrates that while the Declaration’s reference to “nature’s God,” its claim that government’s function is to protect citizens’ rights, and its assertion of a right to overthrow usurpatious rulers are consistent with Lockean thinking, they are also perfectly in keeping with John Calvin’s teaching on those subjects, which antedated Locke’s Second Treatise . . . (Kevin R. C. Gutzman’s review of Mark David Hall, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, American Conservative, May/June, 2013)

And it gets worse for rights-affirming “Calvinists”:

. . . because the powers which God hath ordained, and the liberty which Christ hath purchased, are not intended by God to destroy, but mutually to uphold and preserve one another, they who, upon pretense of Christian liberty, shall oppose any lawful power, or the lawful exercise of it, whether it be civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God. (OPCCF, 20.4)

Calvinism's Debt to the Turks

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

The arrangement and deployment of these symbols [of the Turks] – weapons and costume – began to alter subtly in the first decades of the eighteenth century, in part, remarkably, as a result of a shared interest in flowers. Flowers had been highly visible in the Ottoman capital from the mid-sixteenth century. By the 1630s the famous Turkish traveler Evliya Chelebi was estimating that there were some 300 florists in Constantinople. The open meadows along the Golden Horn were filled with tulips and lilacs in the spring and the lilacs’ scent was intoxicating. The introduction of the tulip to Europe from Turkey in the mid-sixteenth century, first to Augsburg in 1559, then to Antwerp and the Habsburg domains in the Netherlands between 1562 and 1583, revived a passion for flowers and gardens in the West. Mass production of blooms exported opened into an industry in the Netherlands, and tulip bulbs were exported across Europe. The Margrave of the small estate of Baden Durlach had more than 4,000 tulips in his garden by 1636, all carefully listed in his garden registers. . . .

It is impossible to be precise about the date but certainly beginning in the Tulip Era the symbolic connotations of “the Turk” began to gather new and extended meanings. The similarity of the tulip’s appearance to a turban was first noted by the Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople Ghislain de Busbecq in the 1550s. He was passionate about flowers and, based upon this visual connection, mistakenly gave the tulips their name, a corruption of the Turkish for turban, tulban. But turbans, once the symbol of Eastern violence, now acquired an additional, softer connection. . . . For the West, flowers, silks, and flowing robes suggested an indolent life rather than the rigors of the field of battle . . . (Wheatcroft, Infidels, 265, 266)

Crusading Protestant Style

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One of the joys of ecclesiastical deism is that Protestants don’t have to answer readily for the political and cultural consequences of the Crusades, a phenomenon that as Andrew Wheatcroft shows, etched into the memories of the West and East perceptions that still inhabit planet earth. After all, if the church did not exist between 500 and 1500, the Crusades were not the church’s business.

Still, as off-putting as the Crusades were, Protestants were not as squeamish in employing the word as they should have been. For most of his career, for example, Billy Graham’s urban revivals were known as “Crusades.” And until a decade or so ago, Wheaton College’s mascot was the – that’s right – Crusader. (They changed to the lame and uninspired Wheaton College Thunder.) And then we had Campus Crusade for Christ, recently renamed Cru. This cultural insensitivity is likely another consequence of ecclesiastical deism – not knowing church history leads to incalculably bad appropriations of it.

Twentieth-century evangelicals were not the only Protestants who could not resist invoking the imagery and language of the Crusades:

Gradually, the common meaning of “crusade” in the English language became a metaphor for a sustained and powerful action in a good cause. But the older sense of the cross and holy war was still a potent symbol. Nor was the specific enmity to Muslims completely lost. I remember singing at school a hymn by J. E. Neale, which had been popular since first published a century before. Neal had reworked a text by Andrew of Crete.

Christian, dost thou see them
On the holy ground?
How the troops of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?
Christian, up and smit them,,
Counting gain but los:
Smite them by the merit
Of the holy cross.

. . . . Neale’s usage was atypical, and he later produced a more anodyne version. The “troops of Midian” were transmuted into “the powers of darkness.” Perhaps he considered this more appropriate to the mission fields? Likewise, “infidel,” which had still been in use in the early nineteenth century, fell out of favor with hymn writers. “Heathen lands” and “pagan darkness preplaced the wastelands of the infidel. Perhaps “infidel” was too precisely associated with Mediterranean Islam? However, in 1911, Robert Mitchell returned directly to the language of “crusade” in its original bellicose sense:

Hark to the call of the New Crusade,
Christ over all will King be made;
Out to the world let the challenge ring:
Make Christ King!

His refrain elaborated the theme:

Hail to the King of kings! Triumphant Redeemer!
On march the solders of the New Crusade.
This is the battle cry: Christ made the King?
And to our Sov’reign we allegiance bring:
Prince, Guide and Counsellor He shall be.
Carry the standard to victory!
Hail to the call of the New Crusade:
Make Christ King!
Strong is the foe of the New Crusade,
Sin in its armour is well arrayed;
Into the fight we our best must fling:
Make Christ King!

There were hundreds of missionaries to the Holy Land at the time that Mitchell wrote, but the big battalions of evangelism directed their attention elsewhere. Nevertheless, the essential terminology of “crusade” and conquest remained a constant presence in Christian discourse and activity.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals crusaded, as they believed, for a spiritual victory, not for territorial conquest. But the word does not allow so facile a separation. This ambiguity between a holy war in a spiritual sense and a victory over the temporal forces of darkness had a long degree. Two seventeenth-century near contemporaries, John Bunyan and Thomas Fuller, both wrote books entitled The Holy War. Bunyan’s allegorical intentions were clear from this title: The Holy War Made by Shaddai upon the Diabolus foe the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World or The Losing and Taking Again for the Town of Mansoul. It was publsihed in 1682. Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre was equally popular. (197-98)

Billy Graham, Wheaton College, and Bill Bright got it honestly.

Life among the Christians and Turks

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Pope Francis’ recent words about atheists stand in stark contrast to the encyclical (1009) that Pope Serguis IV issued to remedy the Muslim destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (966):

Let all Christians know that news has come from the east to the seat of the apostles that the church of the Holy Sepulchre has been destroyed from roof to foundations by the impious hands of the pagans. This destruction has plunged the entire church and the city of Rome into deep grief and distress. The whole world is in morning and the people tremble, breading deep sighs. . . .

With the Lord’s help we intend to kill all these enemies and restore the Redeemer’s Holy Sepulchre. Nor, my sons, are you to fear the sea’s turbulence, nor dred the fury of war, for God has promised that whoever loses the present life for the sake of Christ will gain another life which he will never lose. For this is not a battle for an earthly kingdom, but for the eternal Lord. (Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam, 159)

Wheatcroft does not use this encyclical to show up the fanaticism or intolerance of medieval Christianity or the Vatican. His aim is much more complicated and the history he tells is a complex affair of how both sides demonized the other, and how both Christians and Muslims were responsible for perpetuating myths about the other that would have resonances in the memories of the West and the East all the way down to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and responses to 9/11. In other words, the language of crusade and jihad played off each other for the better part of a millennium (and it looks like the Christian West and Islamic East have still not recovered):

The theory of jihad was drawn from a few occurrences of the word in the Qur’an and more fully in the juristic commentary and oral traditions (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed. These statements often required considerable interpretation to mold them to events. In theory, for Islam as for Christendom, war was an evil. For battle and killing to be sanctified it had to be a struggle in a good and godly cause. Over time, therefore, both communities evolved superficially quite similar ideas for a just war in a good cause. But there were differences between the parallel but separate processes of evolution. In Christendom, the doctrine of holy war was hotly debated and transmuted over time into many different ideological strands, mostly in response to social and political change. The terminology of “Crusade” was highly mutable: “pilgrimage,” “journey,” “signed by the cross,” and so on, were the ways of describing it. In Islam, there were two commonly used – jihad, and ghaza in Ottoman Turkish – and there could be little debate about the meaning of these terms, and little theoretical investigation of their limits and boundaries.

When the organized forces of “Crusade” and jihad confronted each other directly on the battlefield, the contrast between them was immediately apparent. Visually speaking, the dominant motif of the Western Christian side overwhelmed all others. The Muslim banners carried many different emblems and texts, mostly the names and qualities of God and other suitable verses. . . But on the Christian side the single image of the cross was dominant. From the first contact the defining characteristic of the Crusade was the symbol of the crucified Christ. (177)

Wheatcroft goes on to describe the how the Crusaders violated Islamic and even Byzantine sensibilities that distinguished the private and holy realm from the public and common.

For [Muslims], the concept of Christ on the cross transgressed a wide range of taboos. God made flesh was unthinkable, and even more so a God who experienced a physical birth. In Islam God was transcendent, while the Western Christians proclaimed his materiality. The Crusaders’ capacity to pollute seemed limitless. They had, unwittingly or deliberately, defiled the holy site in Jerusalem . . . from the first moments of their occupation. They had killed thousands within the holy precinct. . . . Another Muslim traveler was shocked when he climbed up to the holy sites. “I entered Jerusalem and I saw monks and priests in charge of the Sacred Rock . . I saw upon it bottles of win for the ceremony of the mass. I entered the Aqsa mosque and in it a bell was suspended. The most manifest evidence of this desecration of Muslim eyes was the large gold cross that had been placed on the highest point of the Dome of the Rock. (180)

Though perceptions of Christians and Muslims had already been shaped by life together in Spain some three centuries earlier, the Crusades established the pattern, according to Wheatcroft:

. . . during their confrontation in the East, Muslims and Western Christians developed much more complex and roughly symmetrical views of each other.. The degree to which each group produced reverse or mirror images is remarkable. Christians regarded Muslims as inherently cruel and violent; Muslims felt the same about Westerners. Christians developed wild imaginings about the sexual proclivities of Muslims. Muslims regarded the Franks, as Usamah made clear, as little better than animals in terms of sexual propriety. (189)

And now, one thousand years later, in some parts of that troubled world, Western tourists can enjoy an Efes and Turkey’s natural charms, and wonder why some Turks think they are living in a country the political equivalent of Syria.

Roman Inquisition's Success

Published on by D. G. Hart274 Comments

David Kertzer concludes by observing that Edgardo Mortara’s story has fallen through the cracks of history thanks to its embarrassing features for both Roman Catholics and Jews. The difficulty Mortara presents to Rome is relatively easy to see, but one website captures the change in Vatican policy well:

One of the reasons the Church ordinarily restricts the administration of baptism to priests and deacons (while allowing for laity and others to do so when someone is at the point of death and a priest or deacon is unavailable) is to prevent precisely the kind of confusion your mother-in-law has created by taking it upon herself to baptize her granddaughter without the parents’ permission.

1. There is such a thing as conditional baptism, but it is a baptism given when the validity of the original baptism is in question or when there is doubt as to whether a baptism occurred. In this case, the baptism your mother-in-law performed — assuming she did it correctly — would be the original baptism. Should her granddaughter’s parents choose to return to their Catholic faith and raise their daughter as a Catholic, a priest or deacon would perform a conditional baptism both to make sure it is done correctly and to start a sacramental record.

2. Since her granddaughter presumably was not at the point of death when your mother-in-law baptized her, the baptism she performed is presumably valid but illicit. That means that your mother-in-law should go to confession to confess having performed an illicit baptism.

3. I can only recommend that your mother-in-law admit to the child’s parents what she has done. They need to know so that they will know that the child needs conditional baptism, not unconditional baptism, should they decide to raise her Catholic or should the child eventually decide to become Catholic herself. Even were the child baptized when she was in extremis, the parents would still need to know about the baptism once it was clear she would survive. The only difference is that your mother-in-law should apologize for an illicit baptism. If the child was baptized while in extremis, an apology is not necessary. If such an admission is not made, and the parents or the child decide eventually for baptism, then the child may receive an unconditional baptism — which would be objective sacrilege since baptism cannot be unconditionally repeated.

4. No, the child does not now need to be raised Catholic either by her parents or her grandmother, particularly if her parents continue to remain opposed to it. The Church now recognizes that it is not necessary to impose a Catholic education on a baptized child who was baptized without the permission of the parents and whose parents are opposed to their child being a Catholic. The Church learned the hard way from the case of Edgardo Mortara that such attempts to do so only cause bitter resentment by the families and by future generations and thereby deepen estrangement from the Church.

The embarrassment to Jews is less obvious until we remember how Edgardo turned out. He became a faithful Roman Catholic, entered the priesthood, and ministered out of a monastery in Belgium for much of his life. As a boy, Edgardo adopted Pius IX as his second father as much as the Pope adopted him as spiritual (and temporal?) son:

At Christmastime each year, Edgardo was called to the Vatican for a visit with the Pope. On these occasions, as Edgardo himself later fondly recalled them, Pius IX “always lavished the most paternal demonstrations of affection on me, gave me wise and useful training and, tenderly blessing me, often repeated that I had cost him much pain and many tears.” When he was still little, he recalled the Pontiff, “like a good father, had fun with me, hiding me under hi grand red cloak, asking jokingly, “Where’s the boy?’ and then, opening the cloak, showing me to the onlookers. . . . The Pope beamed with pride, as, at his prompting, the little convert translated Latin passages for him, to the delight of his visitors. (David I. Kertzer, Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 255)

Edgardo did have meetings with family members later in life. One came when his brother, Riccardo, was part of Italian freedom-fighter forces to liberate Rome from the Vatican’s rule:

When, however, Riccardo appeared in the doorway of Edgardo’s convent room, wearing the uniform of the Italian light infantry, he was in for a rude welcome. His 19-year-old brother, dressed in an initiate’s robes, placed one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sacrilegious sight and raised the other in front of him, signaling Riccardo to stop where he was. “Get back, Satan!” Edgardo shouted. But, the crestfallen Riccardo replied, “I am your brother.” To this Edgardo responded, “Before you get any closer to me, take off that assassin’s uniform.” (263)

Edgardo also met his mother once he had been ordained:

In 1878, Mariana Mortara, now widowed and with all of her nine children grown, heard that Edgardo was preachign in Perpignan, in southwestern France. Accompanied by a family friend, she went to see him. It had been twenty years since she had last laid eyes on her son. It was a poignant reunion, for Edgardo felt great affection for his mother. But try as he might to turn her onto the path of eternal blessing and happiness, he could not gt her to agree to enter the Catechumens and convert.

From that moment Edgardo, remained in touch with his family and, as he aged, sought out family members when he found himself in Italy. But while his mother made peace with him, not all of his siblings were so kindly disposed. (298)

That is why Edgardo Mortara never became a cause celebre for Jews:

For Italy’s Jews, it is not the pain of the Mortara memories that has made its discussion uncomfortable, but the embarrassment. The battle between the Jews and the Church was played out in a struggle over a 6-year-old boy. For the Jews, the Church’s claim that Edgardo could not remain with his Jewish parents because he had been supernaturally transformed by baptism was doubly insulting. Not only did it demonstrate their vulnerability to the Church’s political power, but it also asserted a Catholic claim to possession of the true religion, to a privilege relationship with the Almighty, and to the dismissal of Judaism as error, if not worse. When the Church began to publicize reports that Edgardo was showing signs of his supernatural transformation, the discovery of what, in fact, the little boy actually believed, and whether he truly preferred to stay in the Church rather than to return home to the Judaism of his ancestors, became a kind of public test of the relative merits of the two religions. It was a test the Jews lost.

Of course, Italian Jews were well aware of the psychological pressures exerted on the small boy and had no trouble coming up with a secular explanation of his ultimate decision to abandon his family and Judaism and embrace the Church, but this did not make his transformation any more palatable. That he followed the long – and, for the Jews, vile – tradition of such converts and dedicated himself to trying to convert his own family, and indeed Jews everywhere, meant that Edgardo came to be viewed with horror: he was a changeling. The child who had once been portrayed in the most glowing terms, the object of Jewish compassion, became a man who was disdained, whose character had to be discredited. He could not be happy he could not even be fully saine, for were he happy and sane, it wold reflect poorly on the religion of the Jews. It was best not to talk of him at all. (302)

All the more reason we need Javier Bardem to play Edgardo’s father, maybe Franka Potenta as his mother.