Pope Faces Politics of Sainthood

V A T I C A N  C I T Y , Sept. 2 -- During history’s longest papacy, Pope PiusIX pitted the Roman Catholic Church against a changing world:condemning emerging freedoms of speech and religion, confining Jewsto Europe’s last ghetto and condoning the seizure of a Jewish boy to beraised as a Catholic.

When he died in 1878, revenge-seeking Italian liberals tried todump his body into the Tiber River.

On Sunday, Pope John Paul II will beatify Pius in a twinceremony with the 20th century’s Pope John XXIII, advancing the twopontiffs to the church’s last step before possible sainthood.

‘A Beatification Too Far’

Jewish groups are bitterly protesting Pius’ beatification. Evensome Catholics are challenging the church’s pairing of the rigidlytraditional Pius with the widely popular John XXIII, who has hisown critics among conservatives for convening thetradition-overhauling Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

“A beatification too far,” a respected English Catholicweekly, The Tablet, said of Pius IX’s beatification, calling it“the work of a small group of ultraconservatives.”

“It can only be seen as a political move, designed to provide aconservative and reactionary counterweight to the beatification ofJohn XXIII,” the weekly stated.

‘Caused So Much Suffering,’

“Really, I cannot understand it,” says Elena Mortara,great-great niece of the Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, who was takenfrom his weeping father’s arms in 1858 by papal police.

Pius “has caused so much suffering,” she told the Italianreligious monthly Confronti. “The wound of the ‘Mortara case’still aches in my family, and in all our community.”

Church authorities took the 6-year-old Edgardo from his familyin Bologna after a Catholic housemaid claimed to have baptized theboy when he appeared deathly ill. Under Pius’ patronage, Edgardogrew up a church ward and later a priest.