Many European heads of state protested the 1858 kidnapping, as did Jewish leadership. Pius was responsible for the case of Edgardo Mortara, who at the age of six was abducted from his family in Bologna and taken to the Vatican by Papal police after it was reported that the Jewish child has been secretly baptized. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement: 'The beatification of Pius IX is troubling for the Jewish community. вЂњThe Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today expressed concern at the VaticanвЂ™s beatification of Pope Pius IX, who was responsible for the 1858 abduction of a six-year old Jewish child. When Pious IX was beatified in 2000, the ADL issued the following statement which summarizes the event. The pope was celebrating a man who had sanctioned compulsory baptism of Jews, then inflicted judicial torture to make sure these conversions were sincere.вЂќ The most stinging example of the PopeвЂ™s anti-Jewish views and behavior is abduction of a Jewish child named Edgardo Mortara. He was considered a martyr (witness to the Catholic faith) after some of the family of his Jewish victims managed to assassinate him - and then suffered grievously themselves.- It was the conviction of the great liberal theologian of that time, Father Dollinger, that canonizing the inquisitor 'served the pope's campaign of riding roughshod over liberal Catholics as well as Jews. вЂњPius IX was the Pope who decided in 1867 to raise to sainthood one of sixteenth-century Spain's notorious grand inquisitors, Don Pedro Arbues de Epilae. The Pope returned those Jews under his control to the Ghetto. The papal reign of Pius IX was marked by a variety of reactionary policies as he sought to deal with the loss of the papal temporal power to the emerging united nation of Italy. Pope Pius IX was chosen to lead the Catholic Church, beginning the longest reign in the history of the post-apostolic papacy.

1846: The Papal conclave of 1846 concluded.

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