Now, however, conservative voices are defending Pius IX’s decision to abduct a Jewish boy. In the latest issue of First Things, a right-leaning Catholic magazine, the Dominican priest and theologian Romanus Cessario wrote a review of Kidnapped by the Vatican? The Unpublished Memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, which recently appeared in English translation. In the book, author Vittorio Messori, an Italian Church historian, goes through Mortara’s personal archive and defends the abduction. Likewise, Cessario calls the law upon which Pius IX acted “not unreasonable” and casts Edgardo’s kidnapping in a positive light: “Divine Providence kindly arranged for his being introduced into a regular Christian life.”

Cessario’s essay spurred strong reactions within the Catholic world. Michael Sean Winters, writing for the National Catholic Reporter, called it “morally repugnant” and “intellectually deplorable.” Catholic intellectual Robert George called it “an embarrassment.” Meanwhile, the Mortara family is upset that some people have the chutzpah to defend the abduction today: “It really hurt, when we heard some are still defending Pius IX,” Eléna Mortara, the great-granddaughter of Edgardo’s older sister, told me. She said that Edgardo’s kidnapping has always been an open wound for the family, “something we still discuss at every Passover,” even if it sometimes provokes dark humor: “We had this inside joke about being the only Jewish family with a priest uncle.”

The Mortara case has, in recent memory, been a source of tension between Catholics and Jews. When the process of beatifying Pius IX began 18 years ago, the Italian Jewish community protested. The descendants of the Mortara family wrote an open letter to John Paul II, asking him not to make the man who’d kidnapped their relative into a candidate for sainthood who would be publicly venerated. Pius was beatified anyway. Today, however, Steven Spielberg is making a film about the Mortara case, and Eléna Mortara says that defending the kidnapping has become “a very marginal position.”

So what’s driving some conservative intellectuals, like Cessario and Messori, to defend it? Anti-Semitism does not appear to be their motivation. “I hold Jewish people and the Jewish faith in high regard,” Messori told me. “It’s where Christianity came from.”

Rather than being about Catholics’ attitudes toward Jews, the debate about the Mortara case today is more about a war raging inside the Catholic Church. Since the Second Vatican Council, which addressed the Church’s relationship to the modern world, the Church has progressively changed its posture toward secular morality, a process that has accelerated under Pope Francis. This change has led to discontent in the most traditionalist sectors of the Church.

“There is a backlash. It has been going on for 30 years, but now that we have a progressive pope, it’s getting stronger,” Faggioli, the historian, told me. The defenses of the Mortara kidnapping are part of what he described as “a full-fledged culture war” inside the Church: “They’re saying that what the Vatican has done in the past 30 years is wrong, and we should go back to Pius IX’s days, when the only thing that counted was the law of the Church.” Defending the Mortara abduction now, he added, is a “way to attack, indirectly, the direction that the Church has taken.” Other progressive Catholics have expressed a similar interpretation in recent days.