Jewish boy forced to convert in horrific true story: NPR

Enea Sala (center) plays young Edgardo in Kidnapped: the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

Anna Camellingo/Cohen Media Group

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Anna Camellingo/Cohen Media Group

We live in days of powerful, often violent religious feeling – stories that might have seemed like dead old stories now take on a scathing new relevance.

This is the case of Kidnapped: The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortarathe ferocious true story of a young Jewish boy forcibly taken from his parents by papal emissaries in 1858. It was directed by Marco Bellocchio, the great Italian filmmaker who burst onto the scene 59 years ago with his scorched earth debut. Fists in the pocket.

Now 84 years old but still far from meek, Bellocchio takes us back to the 19th century to tell a historical horror story steeped in Roman Catholic anti-Semitism.

The action begins in the 1850s in Bologna, then under the reign of the unpopular and very conservative Pope Pius IX. Edgardo, who has just been born, is the sixth son of a Bolognese Jewish family whose servant, without their knowledge, baptizes the baby to save his soul.

When the inquisitor of the Church of Bolgona learned of this baptism six years later, he declared Edgardo a Christian. And since it is illegal for non-Christians to raise a Christian child, he snatches the 6-year-old boy from his anguished parents and sends him to Rome. There, while he longs for his mother, Edgardo is placed in a boarding school for the children of Jewish converts, where he is surrounded by images of the crucifixion.

Naturally, Edgardo’s parents are broken and do everything they can to get him back, even waging a massive international PR campaign. On their way to Rome, they made heartbreaking appeals to stone-faced priests who said they understood their sadness but could do nothing to alleviate it. After all, they help the boy become a true Christian.

To avoid appearing politically weak, Pius IX refuses the world’s calls for Edgardo’s freedom. In fact, he doubles down on the kidnapping, personally guiding the boy’s Catholic education and having him baptized a second time.

Although Kidnapped is a straightforward historical drama about religious oppression, Edgardo’s tale is filled with surprising twists and turns, especially when, in 1860, nationalist rioters overthrow the rule of Pius IX in Bologna. With new officials, the Inquisitor of Bologna is arrested for the kidnapping and we see how Edgardo fell into one of the trapdoors of history. If he had simply been born a few years later, he would not have been taken from his Jewish home and forcibly converted to a Christian.

Even if the rebels attack the Pope, we continue to worry about Edgardo’s fate in Rome. What happens to a young Jewish boy cut off from his family and trained not only to be a good Catholic, but also to become a priest? What core of the original Edgardo remains? Who does he become as he enters adulthood? The answers are disturbing.

Now at times Kidnapped feels dated. Yet Bellocchio never falls into the boring realism of costume drama. Working in a painterly style, he pushes things towards the operatic – relying on surging music and endowing Edgardo with an innocent beauty that borders on angelic. Actor Paolo Pierobon plays Pope Pius as a sort of opera buffa character, hammered out in the style of Marlon Brando – at once silly, frightening and sinister. In one of the film’s best scenes, Edgardo has a hallucinatory encounter with a crucifix that directly addresses the lie that the Jews killed Christ.

Like me, Bellocchio was raised Catholic and is clearly appalled by the Church’s cruelty towards the Mortara family and towards all Jews, whom they treated as inferiors who must literally kiss the Pope’s feet for a decent treatment. He wants We to be dismayed and angry too.

Yet what gives the film its relevance is not only its depiction of anti-Semitism, but also what it shows about the dangerous politics of religious belief. Although religion officially deals with timeless universal truths, Kidnapped reminds us that these timeless universals are always linked to historical questions of power. And where there is power, there will be abuse.