At six months old, unbeknownst to his parents, Edgardo Mortara, born into a Jewish family in Bologna, was baptized by the maid Anna Morisi, who believed he was at risk of imminent death.

After about seven years, the inquisitor of Bologna, Father Pier Feletti, upon learning the story, had the pontifical gendarmerie burst into the Mortara family's house to take away Edgardo and raise him in a Catholic boarding school.

The law of the Papal States prohibited people of other faiths from raising Christians, thereby stripping the child's parents of their parental rights.

In the name of NON POSSUMUS, that is, the refusal based on the observance of divine and canonical laws, Pius IX justified the separation of the child from his original family. Children were symbols of the Pope's power during a crisis of the pontifical state.

Under his pontificate, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed (1854), and the dogma of papal infallibility was defined in the First Vatican Council (1870).

Bologna belonged to the Papal States, Pius IX was the Pope-King, and it was believed that Jews were steeped in superstitions. Therefore, Edgardo Mortara could only return home if his family decided to convert to Christianity.

While all the children in the boarding school, including Elias, a child with very clear ideas who was taken from the ghetto in Rome, are indoctrinated into the religion, Edgardo, disoriented by the violent iconography of the Catholic churches, responds perfectly to the question about the dogma: "a principle accepted without asking questions or discussing because it comes from God." However, if God is a single God, the prayers dedicated to a child with a heart condition should have been enough to save him, but they were ultimately futile...

The fear and trembling of a God who reads your thoughts, along with the distance from family and the environment, which is in many ways comforting and reassuring, will determine the decisions of a now adult boy. Nevertheless, Bellocchio does not hesitate to continuously insinuate interpretive doubts about the history, the meaning, and the values to be considered.

Representing a crime in the name of an absolute principle, together with the desperate and therefore extremely violent will of an authority that is now dying, resisting its collapse by counterattacking, reflects the interest expressed by the director of Bobbio, who believes that cinema is "to say without keeping anything silent about what one is convinced of"...

The inhumanity of the principles to obey also seems greatly represented, along with the bipartisan obtuseness of the coherence in applying a principle of faith.

Family, religion, power: while the dogma reigns, the unconscious resists.

And even more so, the concept of the "adiastole" of truth, which gives birth to obtuse monstrosities wherever they are found: between dreams of circumcision and liberation from the nails of crucifixion.

Many micro-surreal-dreamlike digressions to leave nothing unattended, to indicate a path, to insinuate doubt, to express a concept.

Non Possumus is the dogmatization of the principle of non-contradiction, but while truth is a certainty that has its foundation in the ability to remove all its negations, faith cannot be identified with truth because faith "believes" precisely because it "does not know."

Bellocchio shakes THE truths, leaving them disoriented, in search of a refuge, that refuge that only churches and synagogues can be... but if God is dead, as Nietzsche suggested, what are churches and synagogues but the tombs of God?

25-May-2023 by Beatrice