Vatican City • It’s an episode that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized.
Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church.
The Associated Press has confirmed findings by Brown University historian David Kertzer that Edgardo Mortara’s memoirs were changed in ways big and small when they were translated from the original Spanish into Italian and published to great fanfare by Italy’s Mondadori house in 2005.