He also said the beatified pope regarded his critics as "unbelievers … [operating] a war machine against the church." Some senior Catholics continue to defend Pius's actions in the Mortara case. In 1912, in his written statement in favor of the beatification of Pius IX, Edgardo Mortara recalled his own feelings about the abduction: "Eight days later, my parents presented themselves to the Institute of Neophytes to initiate the complex procedures to get me back in the family. As they had complete freedom to see me and talk with me, they remained in Rome for a month, coming every day to visit me. Needless to say, they tried every means to get me back – caresses, tears, pleas and promises. Despite all this, I never showed the slightest desire to return to my family, a fact which I do not understand myself, except by looking at the power of supernatural grace." Monsignor Carlo Liberati, the church official who advanced Pius IX's beatification, said Pius should not be judged by the Mortara case: "In the process of beatification, this wasn't considered a problem because it was a habit of the times" to take baptized Jews and raise them as Catholics. "We can't look at the Church with the eyes of the year 2000, with all of the religious liberty that we have now," Liberati said. Liberati also said: "The servant girl wanted to give the grace of God to the child. She wanted him to go to heaven … [and] at the time, the spiritual paternity was more important than civil paternity." It was common belief in the Catholic church, until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, that all those not baptized went to Hell for all eternity. In Italy, Jewish leaders and some Catholic scholars warned that the canonization of Pius IX will undermine the goodwill engendered by recent Vatican attempts to atone for Christian Europe's history of anti-Semitism. B'nai B'rith, a prominent Jewish group based in the United States, also protested against the campaign to canonise Pius. The Mortara case is thus once again a live issue in Jewish-Catholic relations. In 1912, Mortara had testified in writing that he thought Pius IX should be canonized: "I am firmly convinced, not only by the deposition I have given, but by the entire life of my august protector and father, that the Servant of God Pius IX is a saint. I have the almost instinctive conviction that one day he will be raised to the glory of the altars.