As with “The Traitor”, another broad-brush panorama of a changing world, noted Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s exposes a very sensitive topic and a part of the history of a people and the...
As with “The Traitor”, another broad-brush panorama of a changing world, noted Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s exposes a very sensitive topic and a part of the history of a people and the influence of religious divisions. It is known that the Vatican is responsible for many evils, which are not talked about, and this story is just one of the details in all of that. It’s something that happened in the second half of the nineteenth century to many families because of the the influence of the Inquisition was still prevalent. In “Kidnapped” he recounts a shameful episode in the waning days of Papal secular power prior to the unification of the Italian state, in which a 6-year-old Jewish boy is ordered by the “Holy Office” to be yanked from the arms of his parents because of an alleged furtive and illicit baptism performed when his was an infant, making him a Christian who, for the protection of his immortal soul, could no longer be raised in a Jewish family. He is taken to Rome, to be raised in an institution for converted boys destined for the priesthood, while his case becomes an international scandal, seized upon by anti-clerical circles throughout Europe and beyond, to the immense irritation of the Pope and the Curia. It is good to watch about the history of the Catholic Church.
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