It had come to the attention of the Church that a teenage non-Jewish servant girl had performed an “emergency baptism” on Edgardo several years earlier, fearing that he would die of a childhood illness and not be allowed entry into Heaven.
Despite strenuous efforts by Jewish communities around the world, Pope Pius IX refused to release Edgardo, who ultimately became a priest in the Augustinian order and devoted his life to converting Jews to Catholicism.