biography
pronunciation:
[maw(r)tahra]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1852–1940)
|
| biography:
| Italian religious, born into a Jewish family, and the unwitting principal in the celebrated ‘Mortara’ case. In 1858 he was carried off from his parents by the Archbishop of Bologna, on the grounds that he had been secretly baptized when seriously ill as an infant, by a Catholic maidservant. The refusal of the authorities to give him up to his parents excited great indignation in Britain. Eventually he was discovered in Rome in 1870. He retained his Christian faith, and became an Augustinian monk. |
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