the mortara case in the news

For the new:
60 Minutes did a piece this past weekend on the recent canonizations and beatifications by John Paul II. Pope Pius IX was one of the beatifications. He was also the pope who endorsed the removal of six year-old Edgardo Mortara from his family on the (unproven) grounds that Edgardo had been baptized. 60 Minutes has a few quotations from Elena Mortara, Edgardo's great grandniece, who campaigned, unsuccessfully, against the beatification. My own read on Pius IX is that he was a stubborn, reactionary SOB* whose prime concern was preserving his own power.

And the old:
From the long-defunct Philadelphia Presbyterian, some good ol' 19th-century style anti-Catholicism. They certainly weren't lacking in vitriole, were they?

Popery in its march may trample on the most sacred rights of society; by the foulest means it must fill up its unholy communion... [a] more God-defying and man-oppressing system was never devised by Satan than this monstrous religion of Popery.

*This is a bit unfair. His papacy started off pretty well, what with him allowing the walls of the Jewish ghetto to be torn down and other liberal stuff like that. But after the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849-50, the above description pretty much fits.