The dramatic and extraordinary story of a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna, secretly baptised as a baby by his Italian nursemaid, then taken to live in Rome in 1858 and raised as a Catholic despite an international outcry, is recounted by the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in Kidnapped by the Vatican? The Unpublished Memoirs of Edgardo Mortara (Ignatius Press, 190pp, £12.99).
Messori makes a strong defence of the pope involved, Pius IX, and explains the event from a highly traditional Catholic perspective. Understandably, the matter is still deeply controversial today and the Church has been much criticised for its action at the time, not least by modern Catholic writers.
What is usually overlooked in the controversy is the behaviour and later life of Edgardo Mortara himself. Messori includes Mortara’s own memoirs of his childhood and subsequent life so that readers can make up their own minds based on the evidence.
Mortara was insistent that, although he loved his Jewish family and was sad to leave them, he never had any wish to return to Bologna after he had been taken away. Although not knowing of his baptism as a child, he relates how he had always been drawn to Catholic churches and public processions, how quickly he learnt to love the traditional Catholic prayers and how, educated by the Canons Regular of the Lateran, he chose to join the order as a priest when he became an adult.
He also says that he always venerated Pius IX as a second father, that he regarded the nursemaid who had baptised him on the point of death as his spiritual mother, and that he always had a special love for Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, as it was in 1858, the year he became a Catholic, that the apparitions at Lourdes took place.
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Charles A Coulombe’s A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail (TAN Books, 264pp, £20) is highly imaginative, thought-provoking book that provides both a scholarly and a passionately argued link between the medieval quest for the Holy Grail (the chalice used at the Last Supper) and the Church’s feasts and devotions – principally the feasts of the Sacred Heart and the Precious Blood.
Anyone who has read about the Arthurian legends in literature (or, indeed, listened to Wagner’s opera Parsifal) will know intuitively that the stories lie deep within Christian tradition and liturgy. Coulombe explains why this is so.
His book starts with recounting the Grail story, the wanderings of the knight Perceval, his discovery of the wounded king at the castle of Montsalvatch, Camelot and the roles played by the knights Lancelot, Galahad, Bedevere and others. As an interesting literary device, he recounts the same story at the end of the book – after the reader has been led through the origins and interpretation of the legend and can see it through more enlightened, “Catholic” eyes.
As the author explains, the quest for the Grail is not just for an ancient object with supremely sacred associations, but for what it symbolises: Eucharistic grace and communion with God.
He reminds the reader that the medieval world in which the Grail stories were written, by Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, and later taken up by Sir Thomas Malory, was one of “believing Catholics with a deep sense of wonder regarding the world in which they lived” and that “the miraculous and the marvellous were simply factual to them”. This is a world quite foreign to our science-dominated century, in which even Catholics are tempted to play down the supernatural elements of their faith.
Coulombe is keen to emphasise that “all that is miraculous, sacramental, devotional, royal and chivalric” in Catholicism is contained in the Grail story. Rather than the fashionable modern mode of literary deconstruction, he shows how every element of the Arthurian tales can be understood in the light of Christianity. Montsalvatch is an image of the Church. The Chapel Perilous is “a powerful symbol of the confessional” and “every site of perpetual adoration is itself a Grail chapel”. It is a book worth reading and re-reading.
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Inside Communism by Douglas Hyde (CTS, 46pp, £1.50) is a booklet in the CTS popular heritage series, written in two sections in 1948 and 1950. It tells the story of the famous convert Douglas Hyde who had been a well known and active communist for more than 20 years.
Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed (though the cultural Marxism it left behind has seeped into the Western world through “progressive” politics), it is easy to forget its destructive power. As Pius XI wrote in Divini Redemptoris: “The complete emancipation of woman from any ties with home or family is a special characteristic of the communist theory.”
Hyde himself refers, somewhat prophetically for the time, to “our largely pagan England of today [where] an absence of an effective moral code [is] to be found among wide masses of the people”. His book is a useful reminder of why the communists so hated Christianity, which defends the rights of individuals against an all-powerful state.
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