Following Marianna's death in 1890, it was reported in French newspapers that she had finally, on her deathbed and with Edgardo beside her, become a Christian. Edgardo refuted this: "I have always ardently desired that my mother embrace the Catholic faith," he wrote in a letter to "Le Temps", "and I tried many times to get her to do so. However, that never happened". A year later, Father Pio Edgardo Mortara returned to Italy for the first time in two decades to preach in Modena. A sister and some of his brothers came out to hear his sermon, and for the rest of his life Edgardo called on his relatives whenever he was in Italy. During a 1919 sojourn in Rome he visited the House of Catechumens he had entered 61 years before. By this time he had settled at the abbey of the Canons Regular at Bouhay in Liège, Belgium. Bouhay had a sanctuary to the Virgin of Lourdes, to which Father Mortara felt a special connection, the Lourdes apparitions of 1858 having occurred in the same year as his own conversion to Christianity. 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.