Yesterday I watched the new film by Marco Belocchio “Rapito”, 2023. He is very good that at his very respectable age (84 years) still makes a good movie.
The film is devoted to a little-known topic, at least for me, – how children were taken from non-Christians in Italy, in this case from Jews. Based on a true story. The action takes
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Yesterday I watched the new film by Marco Belocchio “Rapito”, 2023. He is very good that at his very respectable age (84 years) still makes a good movie.
The film is devoted to a little-known topic, at least for me, – how children were taken from non-Christians in Italy, in this case from Jews. Based on a true story. The action takes place in Bologna, which at that time (until 1870) was part of the Papal States.
In a large Jewish family Mortara worked as a maid girl, who on her own initiative decided to christen their half-year-old child Edgardo, when he fell ill after seeing his parents pray at his bedside, although the disease was a common cold, as later found out. After some time, she was fired, because she was stealing, and she, in order to receive money, informed the churchmen, namely the head of the Papal Inquisition Feletti, that the child was baptized, and was brought up in a Jewish family, which was forbidden, after which the boy, who by that time was only 6 years old, was taken from the family and sent to a special Catholic school for the children of converted Jews, although formally they even then had no right to do so, since they were allowed to take away only from seven years old. The parents make a big fuss to get the child back, the story even goes global, which extremely angered Pope Pius IX, because of which he took the case under his control, forced the boy to be publicly baptized for a second time. Despite all efforts, the child could not be returned, even after the Papal States ceased to exist and Feletti was put on trial, which found him innocent. The boy, meanwhile, grew up more and more imbued with Catholicism, however, from time to time he had some breakdowns, but then everything returned to the usual course, he did not even come to the funeral of his father and tried to baptize his mother on her deathbed, which she categorically refused, and his brothers and sisters expelled him for it. He became a priest, worked as a missionary throughout Europe, and then went to a monastery in Belgium, where he died at the age of 88.
I watched the film with interest, although it was shot in a rather calm manner, the actors are selected and play well, however, the already grown-up Edgardo is somewhat inferior to the boy Edgardo. The whole story once again makes you think about what people are doing, hiding behind religion in this case. Of course, I don’t know the history of Italy very well, and I didn’t even know about it, and when my father started to fight, he was threatened that they would send him back to the ghetto if he continued to be excessively active.