Submitted by Alan Schmidt

In Bologna during the mid 1800s, a nanny working for a Jewish family baptized a child named Edgardo Mortara during a life and death emergency. Five years later, the Baptism came to light and a furor of controversy flared within and outside the church of how to deal with this situation. The child was now Christian, and now had the right to a Christian upbringing, which would not be given by his parents, who refused in his many requests for his family to convert. Pope Pius IX finally removed the child from his parents, citing it was the only moral thing to do, regardless of how monstrous the secular world sees it. Monstrous they did see it, with America being the most vocal of them all. Later, the child became a Catholic Priest, and praised the pope saying “he loved me like a mother who prefers the son who has made her suffer the most.” 

This interesting historical incident would have been unknown to the vast majority of the online space if it hadn’t been for a First Things article written a few years back that not only detailed the incident, but endorsed it. This position led to the expected outcry among the likes of Rod Dreher and other conservative commentators on top of outbursts from the left-wing elements of the Church. It’s obvious that even most hard-line traditionalists living today would be hard pressed to cheer the decision, at best stating that it was a very hard decision involving a corner case. The vast majority of Catholics support parents raising their children as they deem fit, and only see the need of removing them in cases of clear neglect and abuse. Even many trads would argue the nanny, though working with good intentions, acted immorally in baptizing the child in secret.

The reason the Church has such prescriptions supporting a parent’s control over their children is a moral issue and a political one. They clearly understand that prying into the private life of a pagan family would create all sorts of societal harm, even if the intent would be for every child to eventually enter the fold of the Church. It also violated the correct moral order of things, where parents are the near ultimate arbiters of the safety and well-being of their offspring, as they would know and love their own children the most. Also, there is the limited political control in the Church, and not delving into private family life was an implicit truce that no political actor would infringe upon.

The conservative commentariat’s reaction on this thorny decision in history issues is enlightening, as, even among firm believers, there seems to be a hard stop in how far they will go regarding imposing their religious faith. While there can be differences in opinion in how to handle this matter, if one really believes that Baptism makes someone a new creation in Christ, it’s a logical next step to state such a new Creation needs to full support of Christ’s Church on earth, and under such an obligation the Church usurps even the rights of the parent. To simply dismiss the decision as monstrous brings one’s own convictions into question, and one would be in the right to question whether one really believed what he said he believed.

In the political arena, power nearly always goes to the group who will not only take their beliefs to their logical conclusion, but enforce it on everyone else while believing to be on the side of angels. The gay movement, the spearhead of the new cultural revolution, knows this all too well. Recently, California introduced bill AB 957, which will allow social workers to take away children whose parents refuse to affirm their preferred gender identity. The interesting part of his bill is the reaction of the left, who don’t even see removal of parental rights as a sad outcome of non-affirmation, but a vicious bloodlust against parents who refuse to conform to the whims of the new morality. A Jewish family in a Papal State somehow elicited more sympathy than parents who refuse to conform to an ideology barely more than a generation old.

Like the foolishness of the Jewish family trusting a Catholic nanny (they actually broke the law by doing so), parents are willingly sending their children to education centers that preach the gospel of the current year, and will actively try to convert the children away from the faith of their guardians. Notice the parents aren’t the ones the children are getting their baptism into a new gender identity from, but teachers, peers, and social media networks that most of their lives are enmeshed in.

One can call the new gender revolution a perversion of nature, monstrous, or just plain illogical, but one can’t argue the proponents aren’t willing to take their ideology to its logical end. If a child has a right to his gender identity, then it logically follows they must be removed from parents who refuse to affirm it. They make the excuse that this will prevent suicide or other mental health issues, but this is just a disingenuous sidestep to make the hard pill go down smoother for those on the fence by pretending to base it on already well-established interventions based on abusive behavior. If the axiom is true, that children have an immutable right to gender self-expression, then one can’t escape the logical conclusion. We can leave to the reader to fill in the blanks what other behaviors will fit under that umbrella, and once the current battle is won, we’ll see that extension soon enough.

Weakness in the face of hard choices and severe reluctance to impose one’s values when necessary has led to the vacuum where a far more militant value system has filled in the void. As our enemies continue their stranglehold in the moral landscape, our options will not get any easier. Soon parents get visited by child protection services escorted by police to take away their child after a teacher reported the child’s new gender the school actively pushed and encouraged. There will be no relief with a hostile court system when it dismisses the parent’s case. No one will rescue the child from herself when she consents to permanently altering her body at ten years old. When those agents of the State walk up to the parent’s porch, there will only be a single hard choice left.

Alan Schmidt writes at substack.com/@AlanSchmidt