Edgardo Mortara’s own account of these events recently appeared in English for the first time. But if anyone was expecting it to help clarify the controversial event at the heart of the story, they were deeply mistaken. Indeed, a reviewer for the conservative Catholic journal First Things used the text to defend Pius IX’s actions, sparking numerous heated responses, including from an archbishop. What none of them has addressed, however, is that the published memoir itself has been heavily doctored.

The actual document Edgardo wrote differs in many passages from what Vittorio Messori, Italy’s foremost conservative Catholic journalist-turned-polemicist, has published. Messori’s work represents the first translation of Edgardo’s memoir—originally written in Spanish—first into Italian, then into English. And it’s a work that casts the episode in a light sympathetic to Pius IX. The Atlantic emailed Messori, one of the most influential critics of Pope Francis in Italy, asking him to explain the discrepancies. Messori at first attributed any errors to the English translation of his book, which he said he did not get to review. But the same discrepancies appear in the Italian version he prepared himself; asked to comment on specific passages, he did not respond.

In 1888, three decades after he was taken from his family, Edgardo wrote an account of his story in Spanish, referring to himself in the third person. By then, having been raised in a seminary, he had become a Catholic priest; years later, members of his order prepared a typescript of his account. It was the copy of this spiral-bound memoir in Rome’s Canons Regular archive that Messori says he found and translated into Italian for publication; the English version that appeared last fall relies on Messori’s translation, rather than the original Spanish. I personally compared the Italian and English versions of the Edgardo Mortara memoir published by Messori with the original, which I too located at the Canons Regular archive and digitized.

In Messori’s version of the memoir, the reader is treated to a heartwarming story of a six-year-old child who is overjoyed to be taken from his parents so that he can become a Catholic—a child who would later have an uncannily accurate memory of what had happened to him. But this is not the narrative Edgardo actually wrote. The happy version instead emerges from numerous changes to the original, including the addition and deletion of entire paragraphs—changes that are common to both published versions of the Edgardo Mortara memoir in Italian and English.

A case in point is the addition of a 300-word paragraph, presented seamlessly with the rest of the text. It offers a justification for Pius IX’s action in ordering Edgardo’s removal from his family, and also describes the touching scene of the Inquisitor, Father Feletti, the man responsible for ordering the boy taken, going to see little Edgardo. “In Rome, with great pleasure and tears in his eyes,” Messori’s version of the memoir reads, “Father Feletti hugged the Mortara child, for whose eternal salvation he had suffered so much, and he always had a special affection for him. Father Mortara will always hold very dear the memory of this respectable friar, who was one of those who more closely intervened in the spiritual regeneration and rehabilitation of his soul.” Neither this scene, nor the rest of the paragraph in which it appears, are to be found in Edgardo’s original memoir.