The Press.
London, England, 1858-10-23 00:00:00

THE MORTARA CASE.

Tins case, which has created so profound a sen-
sation abroad, and given rise to such violent con-
troversy in the journals of the Continent, has
been hitherto so little noticed here, save in the
foreign correspondence of our newspapers, that it
may be desirable, before giving our own view of
this last aggression of the Papal Church, to state
shortly, for the information of our readers, the
circumstances as they occurred. The son of
some Jewish people at Bologna, aged six years,
has been forcibly taken from his parents on
the pretence that two years previously—that
is, at the age of four—he had been subjected to
the rite of lay baptism by his nurse. The
child has been placed in an Institution called the
Refuge of Catechumens, and is still forcibly with-
held from his Parents under the express sanction
of the Pope, who has been appealed to, on the
ground that by the Canon Law he has become a
subject of the Church into which he has been
fraudulently baptized.
This monstrous outrage on all usage, on all
fundamental principles of law, and upon those
universal rights of man which it ought to be the
first object of all law to establish and to uphold,
has excited, we are glad to observe, the strongest
and most unfeigned indignation among the
greater portion even of the Members of the
Roman Church. The Constitutionnel, the Journal
des Debate, and the Nord have animadverted in
the most earnest manner upon the scandalous
conduct of the Papal Priesthood, and urgent
appeals have been made to the French Go-
vernment to interfere in the matter. Of
their right, of our right, of the right
of every member of the family of European
nations to use their influence byraresentation
to have this grievous wrong redress there can-
not, we apprehend, be the slightest doubt, if not
in the mere interest of MORTARA, a Jewish
citizen in the Papal States, at all events in the

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interests of humanity at large. It is a
right of the same character as that by
which we use our influence to protect the
children of Africa from slavery and the subjects
of the King of NAPLES from subjection to the
treatment of wild beasts. Much as we pity and
feel for the parents of this unfortunate little
victim of Papal greed and despotism, the interests
of the family are absorbed in the greater question
of the interests of humanity, and of the necessity
that all Europe should make a stand against this
new attempt of the revived Inquisition to assert
the immunity of their Order and of their sys-
tem from the control of natural and civil law.

It is to be regretted that some of our foreign
contemporaries have suffered themselves to be in
a considerable degree led away from the true
issue by the false issues which have been raised
by the Univers and other advocates of the
Ultramontane doctrine, with regard to the enact-
ments of the Canon Law, and the powers con-
ferred by it. The defence that has been put
forward is of a twofold character. It is asserted,

firstly : that this little boy of six years of age is
in a perfect state of beatitude; that in reply to
an appeal from his father praying him to return
to his home on the ground that the Command-
ments enjoin him to honour his father and
mother, he said, " The Pope knows the
" Commandments better than you, and I
" will do what the Pope tells me ; " that
he desires earnestly to convert his father
and mother, a task to which the Weeping Virgin,
whose statue is over the door of this prison-house
for infants, has miraculously made him quite
equal ; and finally, that he is a remarkable in-
stance of special grace, and that his abduction
has been forcibly effected in order to secure to
him that perfect liberty of conscience to be found
only in perfection within the pale of the Papal
Church. Those are the arguments in support of
the violence derived from the alleged condition
and wishes of the Boy himself. We shall not
trouble ourselves to inquire into the truth of
these allegations or the soundness of these argu-
ments, as they are put forward merely to lead
opponents into by-paths of controversy that can
lead to no end. _ _ .

The real issue that is raised by this act
of the Inquisition, and upon which the Univers
on its behalf before it was aware of the strength
and universality of the feeling against it in the
first instance, took its stand, is the pre-eminence
and supremacy of Ecclesiastical Law and Hccle-
siastical Authority whenever the Church and
State are in presence together, and whenever CiVil
and Canon Law are in antagonism. That is the
issue which Rome is bent on trying now, and
which she will continue to try with that continuity
of policy and perseverance of action in which no
other Power, save Russia, has ever equalled her.
She tried it here in England in 1851, when She
parcelled out the dominion of Queen Vicroina
into territorial principalities. She tried it in
Sardinia upon the question of marriage. She
tried it in Austria upon the question raised by
the Concordat. She tried it in Ireland upon the
occasion of the progress through the Kingdom
of one of her Temporal Princes, by proclaiming,
through the marked and designed omission of
the Queen's health on a great public occasion,
the supremacy of the Pope and his authority, and
She is trying it now in the face of Europe by
the violent abduction of this Boy, and by the
re-establishment in Germany of those Ecclesias-
tical Councils which the Emperor JOSEPH 11. so
wisely abolished and interdicted. In the first
attempts She has failed ignominiously. Her
territorial Bishops are myths, her Cardinal-
Prince is a laughing-stock. In Austria alone
she has met with success. It remains to be seen
whether the Emperor of the FRENCH, by
the aid alone of whose soldiery the Pope
sits in the Chair of St. Peter, will permit
all law, natural, human, and Divine, to be set
aside and overridden by an organization of des-
potic l'riests seeking irresponsible temporal
power. We have italicised the last words because
we desire especially to impress upon the minds of
our readers the great and important fact that these
aggressions have every one of them been as a tem-
poral, not of a spiritual character, and that in
every one of them the object has been the acqui-
sition of purely temporal despotism, of undisputed
and irresponsible control over the political ordi-
nances, the social life, and the private property
of all men in all countries.

1020

Pulp anb Calanial 3nttiligenct.

FRANCE.
THE PRINCE AND THE EMPEROR.

The Augsburg Gazette learns from Warsaw that
Prince Napoleon was not more than three minutes
alone with the Emperor Alexander, but the Czus
tells a very different story. The Cracow paper affirms
that the Czar and his guest were closeted together
for an hour and a half, and that the countenance of
the French Prince was quite radiant when he quitted
the Russian Monarch. His Imperial Highness did
not invite the Czar to go to Paris, but he told him
that he had been sent by the Emperor Napoleon to
return the visit of the Grand Duke Constantine. The
Prince only called on one Polish nobleman, and to
him he observed that he was greatly struck by the
magnificence of the palaces of the nobles and by the
miserable huts inhabited by the serfs. The preva-
lent opinion in Warsaw is, that no political impor•
tame is to be attached to the visit of Prince Napoleon.