The Sun.
London, England, 1859-10-26 00:00:00

THE MORTARA CASE.

(From the Times.)
It really seems as if there were among our Roman
Catholic fellow-subjects men who were desirous to

force upon the Government and people of these

slands a reconsideration of a great public measure,

solemnly resolved upon after a long controversy, and
founded on views the most liberal, and as we are still

willing to believe, the most enlightened. We know
that the Roman Catholic faith is not the faith of

.hese kingdoms. Why. will the Roman Catholics

Labour so sedulously to convince us that our country

is not their country, our interests are not their
interests, and our standard of morality is not their
standard of morality ? Cannot they receive at our
hands a toleration, an indulgence, a consideration
utterly unknown to every nation in which their
faith is in the ascendant, without seeking to abuse
the liberty they enjoy by putting forth doctrines
shocking to every feeling and every conviction of
the nation in the midst of which they live ? One
week we see the Bishops of the Roman Catholic
Churth in Ireland effecting a diversion in favour of

the Pope by an attack on the national system o
education, which was designed for and accepted by
their predecessors as a great boon, which has
worked successfully for 30 years, and which, though
accused of proselytising tendencies, has never been
shown to have made a single proselyte. Upon this
scarcely dissembled onslaught on the well-meant
attempts of good men of all parties to promote
popular education in Ireland follows a denunciation
of any sympathy with the inhabitants of the Papal
States in their present sore need, because the con-
tinuance of Papal despotism in temporal matters is
pant of the religion of the writer, who, though sym-
pathising most keenly with the alleged oppression
of Ireland, holds in the utmost horror the longings
of Italy for emancipation from ecclesiastical tyranny.
And now, not content with 'exhibiting themselves
as the champions of ignorance and the supporters
of tyranny, to-day our columns are sullied by the
appearance of a letter the object of which is indi-
rectly to defend the proceedings of the Papal
Government with regard to the boy Mortara—pro-
ceedings which even Roman Catholic nations have
regarded with dismay and aversion. This day it is
no conclave of bishops nominally met to deliberate ;
it is no veteran agitator who values his sacred office
mainly for the power which it gives him over the
minds of an ignorant and exciteable population ; it
is an English country gentleman of ancient lineage
and unquestioned private character, who comes for-
ward as the apologist of one of the worst iniquities
for which Rome of late years has had to answer.
Our readers have read, and we confess we
should have thought but for Mr. Langdale's
letter that no layman could have read with-
out assent, the emphatic protest signed by a
number of bishops, noblemen, and gentlemen
against the conduct of the Papal Government in
the case of the boy Mortara. The facts have long
been notorious, but will bear a brief recapitulation,
especially as Mr. Langdale thinks that he has de-
tected a case completely analogous in the ordinary
conduct of Englishmen. The boy Mortara, the
child of Jewish parents, was, it appears, clandes-
tinely baptised by a maidservant into the Church
of Rome. On the strength of this baptism the child
was on the 24th of June, 1858, when six or seven
years old, forcibly taken from his parents by the
Papal Government, and conveyed under an escort
of soldiers too a convent in Rome. Sir Moses Monti.
fiore, on behalf of the British Jews, went to Rome
to obtain, if possible, the liberation of the child,
The Pope absolutely refused to see him, and he was
informed that the child should not be released. The
protest, as Mr. Langdale truly says, censures this
proceeding on two grounds—first, that the child is
taken away from the authority of his parents ; and
secondly, that he is educated in a religion of which
they. disapprove. Mr. Langdale is evidently of
opinion that in so doing the head of the Roman
Catholic Church acted well and wisely ; that, the
child having become a member of that Church by
the treacherous and dishonourable act which the
servant perpetrated under his father's roof, the
Pope had a right to call in his civil to the assist-
ance of his spiritual authority, and to kidnap the
child of bis subject in order to bring it up in the
bitterest hatred and contempt of its parents and
their religion. The tie he thinks which bound the
parent to the child, and which Burke not inaptly
called the sacrament of nature, was rudely broken
by the furtive administration of the sacrament of
baptism to an unconscious infant, and the civil power
of the State was well exerted to enforce a right so
obtained for an end so desirable. But, instead of
coming forward as the direct apologist of proceed-
ings which evidently excite his warmest sympathies,
Mr. Langdale thinks it easier and safer to be himself
the assailant, and to protect the Papal Government by
attacking those who protest against its bigotry and
tyranny. The case of Mortara is, according to Mr.
Langdale, constantly the case of children in every
Poor Law Union in England. Children, he says,
are taken from a starving parent to be educated in
a faith contrary to their parents' will, or else the
last moments of a widowed mother are invaded by
the assurance that her child will be educated in a
religion which she believes will lead to an eternal
separation between then. To be sure, Mr. Lang-
dale admits that the law does not direct this, that
the matter is one of local management; but still he
maintains the cases to le strictly parallel, and calls
with much triumph upon the protesters to apply to
this crueltythe same indignation as they apply to
the Mortara outrage.
Mr. Langdale shrouds himself in vague, and we
dare say he thinks safe, generalities ; but the dif-
ference between the case put and the case protested
against is, even as he states it, so plain, that we
are almost ashamed to point it out. The Roman
Government took the child from parents well able
to maintain it, by violence and contrary to their
protestations and reclamations. In the English
case put by
.Mr. Langdale there is no taking at all.
If a parent is unable to support a child from sick-
ness or poverty, the child is admitted into the
Union Workhouse, not in contravention of the
wishes of the parent, or with the view of prosely-
tism, but merely for the purpose of preserving its
life—a stretch of humanity which is not, we be-
lieve, to be found in any Roman Catholic country.
When placed in the workhouse the child is in-
structed together with the other children, and it
learns such religion as is taught there as a part of its
education. There is no wish to make converts or
proselytes, but the Board of Guardians believe, and
rightly, as we think, that they are not bound out of
the funds placed at their disposal for the relief of the
poor to provide separate spiritual instructors,accord
ing to the religion of the parent. This is Mr. Lang-
dale's parallel case. In the one case there is a taking
away by violence of a child whom the parents
were willing to maintain and educate, in the other
there is a receiving with the consent of the parents
of the child, under a benevolent law, into a place
where the State may perform towards it that duty
of nurture which the parents, through poverty,
sickness, or death, are unable to discharge. In the
one case the child is seized that it may be prosely-
tized, in the other it is received that it may be
kept alive. The whole gravamen of Mr. Langdale's
charge is, that in the case of those who are sup-
ported on public charity the State has not thought
fit to require that special religious instructors
should be maintained. It will be a happy day for
the Roman people when such is the heaviest accu-
sation that a bitter and uncandid enemy can bring
against the priestly tyranny under 'which they
groan.
But Mr. Langdale does not appear to have care-
fully considered his own position. It is quite pos-
sible to disapprove the treatment of the parents of
the boy :Mortara without seeinc, anything repre-
hensible in the management of our Poor Law
Unions. Bnt the converse would seem to us im-
possible. It seems to us impossible to disapprove,
as Mr. Langdale appears to do, the conduct of our
Poor Law Guardians, and yet to approve, as Mr.
Langdale appears to do, the treatment of the boy
Mortara. Not to provide Roman Catholic instruc-
tion for a young Roman Catholic is surely less scan-
dalous than by force and fraud to push Roman
Catholic instruction on a Jew. To omit a duty
which the State never undertook is surely -less cul-
pable than to violate a right which lies at the
foundation of civil society—the right of every
parent, so long as he is able, to maintain and edu.
sate his child, to bring him up in his own faith-
iahec:ll-lef ise its i
indeed, one way of reconciling these con-
tradictions;
sthe Catholic olhd
icearemligaiy true,proonispagateit
andby
force and fraud. The Protestant religion is false,
and therefore its professors are bound to pay out
of the poor-rates for instructors to expose its
absurdities. It would be more seemly in the
defenders of the Pope to labour to raise his
to his,
trans-
parent sophisms Government to our level than to
sophisms to drag down our practicetryby