Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube. submit to the cube.
this broke containment on instagram but i’m glad people are so stoked about leather history & grateful for @tslurcollective for all the work that went into this
anyway remember when the US government commissioned a study on dangers of pornography and when the commission returned with a report saying it doesn’t pose a danger and recommending removing restrictions the US government denounced its own study
truly believe that self-censorship is the death of good horror. i mean i know i’m biased because i am trying to get a fucked up book published, but i feel like so many good ideas are stopped in their tracks because the writers are so afraid of being judged. i mean, hell, i went through the exact same thing writing my book. my dad had to continuously tell me to stop self-censoring and to write from the gut, because i was terrified that other people would hate me or be disgusted by me because of what i wanted to write. i didn’t want to pour myself into the book and then have people read it and realize that i was secretly a bad person. and like, look. i’m not going to pretend that everyone in my life is thrilled about this book, now that I’m talking about it openly. there are people that mean a lot to me who think that writing about incest and sexual assault and gratuitous violence is fucked up. and guess what? we’re still friends. i respect that they’re uncomfortable around those subjects and will probably never read it, they respect that i wrote it and still hope that i find success, and we talk about other shit! at the end of the day, it’s horror fiction. they know my character and trust that I won’t push it on them. and there have been far more people that have been very excited about the book, people that i wouldn’t have expected! self-censoring is almost shooting yourself in the foot— you’re not telling the story you want to tell, you’re telling a watered-down version of it. readers can always tell when someone is really excited to be writing what they’re writing, and when they’re walking on eggshells. get more fucked up! push it to extremes! that’s going to be so much more interesting for both you and your audience. don’t censor yourself before anyone else gets to see it, you’re just doing the critics’ job for them. they think it’s disgusting? oh, you’ll fucking show them disgusting.
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