The Mortara case was a controversy precipitated by the Papal States' seizure of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish child, from his family in Bologna, Italy, in 1858. The city's inquisitor, Father Pier Feletti, heard from a servant that she had administered emergency baptism to the boy when he fell sick as an infant, and the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition held that this made the child irrevocably a Catholic. Because the Papal States had forbidden the raising of Christians by members of other faiths, it was ordered that he be taken from his family and brought up by the Church. After visits from the child's father, international protests mounted, but Pope Pius IX would not be moved. The boy grew up as a Catholic with the Pope as a substitute father, trained for the priesthood in Rome until 1870, and was ordained in France three years later. In 1870 the Kingdom of Italy captured Rome during the unification of Italy, ending the pontifical state; opposition across Italy, Europe and the United States over Mortara's treatment may have contributed to its downfall.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortara_case
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1529:
War of the League of Cognac: The French army under Francis de Bourbon was destroyed in Lombardy, present-day Italy, by the Spanish army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Landriano
1848:
In the Wallachian Revolution, Ion Heliade Rădulescu and Christian Tell proclaimed a new republican government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallachian_Revolution_of_1848
1919:
During the Winnipeg general strike in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police charged into the crowd of strikers on horseback, beating them with clubs and firing weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg_general_strike
1963:
Italian cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was elected as Pope Paul VI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Paul_VI
2004:
SpaceShipOne completed the first privately funded human spaceflight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
contumacy: (chiefly Christianity and law) Disobedience, resistance to authority. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contumacy
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms of nature and creates new configurations of vitality. Its transcendence over natural process offers it the opportunity of interfering with the established forms and unities of vitality as nature knows them. --Reinhold Niebuhr https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr