§ 175.8. The Mortara affair of A.D. 1858 attracted special attention. The eight-year old son of the Jew Mortara of Bologna was violently taken from his parents to Rome because his Christian nurse said that two years before, during a dangerous illness, she had baptized him. The church answered the entreaties of the parents and the universal outcry by saying that the sacrament had an indelible character, and that the pope could not change the law. Again in A.D. 1864, the ten-year old Jewish boy, Joseph Coën, apprentice weaver in Rome, was decoyed by a priest to his cloister and there persuaded to receive baptism. In vain his mother, the Jewish community, and even the French ambassador, urged his restoration; and when, in A.D. 1870, the temporal power of the pope was overthrown, the lad, now sixteen years old, had himself become such a fanatical Catholic that he refused to have anything to do with his mother as an unbeliever.
§ 175.9. In the Tyrol in A.D. 1830 there were numerous conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism (§ 198, 1). A Catholic priest in Baden, Henhöfer of Mühlhausen, influenced by the writings of Sailer and Boos, went over to the Lutheran church in A.D. 1823, and continued down to his death in A.D. 1862 a vigorous opponent of the prevailing rationalism. Count Leopold von Seldnitzsky, formerly Prince-Bishop of Breslau, felt obliged in 1840, in consequence of the conscientious objections he had to perform his official duties toward church and state during the ecclesiastico-political controversies of 1830 (§ 193, 1), to resign his appointments. He was subsequently led in A.D. 1863, through reading the Scriptures and Luther’s works, after a sore struggle, to join the evangelical Church. He devoted all his means to the founding of Protestant educational institutions at Berlin and Breslau. He died in A.D. 1871, in his eighty-fourth year. The proclamation by the Vatican of the dogma of infallibility drove many pious and earnest Catholics out of the Romish communion. Of these Carl von Richthofen, Canon of Breslau, engages our special interest. Son of a pious Lutheran mother, and trained up under Gossner’s mild spiritual direction (§ 187, 2), his gentle and deeply religious nature had attached itself to the Roman Catholic church of his father only under the illusion that the Romish doctrine of justification was not wholly irreconcilable with the evangelical doctrine. He at first submitted to but soon renounced the Vatican decree; was excommunicated by Archbishop Förster, voluntarily resigned his emoluments; joined the Old Catholics in A.D. 1873, and the separated Old Lutherans in A.D. 1875. In the following year he died a painful death from the explosion of a petroleum lamp.--Upon the whole Rome has made most converts in America and England; and she has suffered losses more or less severe in France, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Bohemia.