@Vouthon, wish you were around during the Mortara case...
Mortara case - Wikipedia
Indeed, that was the lowest of low points for the church under Pius IX. What's bizarre is that he started out as a relatively philo-semitic pope, as even the article cited concedes:
The Jews of the Papal States, numbering 15,000 or so in 1858,[5] were grateful to Pope Pius IX because he had ended the long-standing legal obligation for them to attend sermons in church four times a year, based on that week's Torah portion and aimed at their conversion to Christianity.[9] He had also torn down the gates of the Roman Ghetto despite the objections of many Christians.[10]
But then
this horror of horrors happened and everything went downhill, in tandem with his increasing conservative turn (and, arguably, loss of a sense of reality when the secularists annexed the papal states bit-by-bit, eventually reducing him to a "
prisoner in the Vatican" by 1870 with the conquest of Rome by Victor Emmanuel).
My understanding of the facts of the case are hazy but the local inquisitorial 'Catholic narrative' (spurious though it was) spun it in a way such that it could be viewed not to as contravening the medieval canon law I've just cited. Your article notes:
For the Holy Office, situations such as that reported by Feletti presented a profound quandary—on the one hand the church officially disapproved of forced conversions,[25] but on the other it held that the baptismal sacrament was sacrosanct and that if it had been properly administered, the recipient was thereafter a member of the Christian communion.[25] In accordance with the 1747 papal bull Postremo mense, the laws of the Papal States held that it was illegal to remove a child from non-Christian parents for baptism (unless it was dying), but if such a child was indeed baptised the church was held to bear responsibility to provide a Christian education and remove it from its parents.[26] The cardinals considered Morisi's account and ultimately accepted it as bearing "all the earmarks of the truth without leaving the least doubt about the reality and the validity of the baptism she performed".[27]
I don't have a clue how they managed to justify this - I mean, the canon law (from the 1200s and before) clearly stated "
that person who is known to have come to Christian baptism not freely, but unwillingly, is not believed to posses the Christian faith", which is to say: the baptism is invalid (not sacramentally effective).
Were they seriously trying to say that the child positively
wanted the emergency baptism, such that it was not a violation of his conscience? Apparently so, for they strove to deduce this from his attitude post-baptism:
There were many different versions of the Catholic story, but all followed the same basic structure. All had Edgardo quickly and fervently embracing Christianity and trying to learn as much as possible about it.[41]
The most influential pro-church article on Mortara was an account published in the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica in November 1858, and subsequently reprinted or quoted in Catholic papers across Europe.[43] This story had the child begging the rector of the Catechumens not to send him back but to let him grow up in a Christian home, and initiated what became a central plank of the pro-church narrative
According to Kertzer, the proponents of this pro-church narrative did not seem to realise that to many these accounts sounded "too good to be true" and "absurd".[43]...
Father Pio Edgardo Mortara resided at Bouhay for the rest of his life and died there on 11 March 1940, at the age of 88
So, you see how they 'obfuscated' their way around the canon law on this one: evidently because they were mortified by the international outcry over the situation and were intent on trying to justify it (even under their own canon law which forbade it!).
Canon 57 of the Council of Toledo IV (633 A.D.), citing Romans 9:18, famously condemned the practice of forced baptism:
[O]n the Jews, however, thus did the Holy Synod order, that no one should henceforth be forced to believe, God hath mercy on whom he will andwhom he will hardeneth; such men should not be saved unwillingly butwillingly, in order that the procedure of justice should be complete...They should be persuaded to convert, therefore,of their own free choice, rather than forced by violence
That an unlawful / insincere baptism is also an invalid one sacramentally, is evidenced by the fact that Pope Alexander II (1061-1073) permitted all Jews baptized by force during the First Crusade of 1065 to return to practicing Judaism (see Flannery,
Anguish of the Jews 76). In that same letter to Landulf of Brescia he also wrote the following:
"Although We have no doubt it stems from the zeal of devotion that your Nobility arranges to lead Jews to the worship of Christendom . . . you seem to do it with a zeal that is inordinate. For we do not read that our Lord Jesus Christ violently forced anyone into his service, but that by humble exhortation, leaving to each person his own freedom of choice, he recalled from error whomsoever he had predestined to eternal life, doing so not by judging them, but by shedding his own blood."
[Alexander II, Letter Licet ex to Prince Landolfo of Benevento, 1065 AD (DS 698)]
This was on the basis that the medieval canonists, such as Hugguccio, taught that absolutely coerced baptisms were not just 'unlawful' and 'requiring compensation' for the evil act but also without effect because there was no assent to faith.
An example from the Middle Ages:
"It is contrary to the Christian religion to force others into accepting and practicing Christianity . . . the one who never consents and is absolutely unwilling receives neither the reality nor the character of the sacrament."
[Pope Innocent III, Letter Maiores Ecclesiae causas to Archbishop Humbert of Arles (1201 A.D.) (DS 781)]