In her new book, Journalist Maria Laurino brings to light the story of forced adoptions of Italian children carried out by the Catholic Church, which took thousands of children away from their unwed mothers between 1950 and 1970, and sent them to the United States without the mothers’ consent.
CBS’s 60 Minutes caught up with Laurino in an exposé aired on Sunday, and also spoke to victims of this program profiled in her book, The Price of Children, which is out today in paperback. She pieced together these children’s stories from the Catholic church’s own archives in New York.
One of them is John Campitelli, born Piero Davi to his mother Francesca, but raised in the United States after they were separated against her will. Francesca was forced by her family to give her child up to a Catholic-run institution for children of unwed mothers, who immediately removed her name from Piero’s birth certificate and changed his records to state that he was “abandoned since birth.”
The Catholic church was apparently taking advantage of a change in U.S. law from 1950, which counted children with a parent who couldn’t provide care as an orphan. According to CBS’s report, the Vatican “repackaged” children as orphans along these lines, making Piero immediately eligible for a U.S. visa. A form mothers were meant to sign relinquishing all rights to the child was crucial to the process. Many women were lied to about what the form meant, and in many cases doctors or lawyers fraudulently signed in their place. Raised in the United States, John Campitelli eventually managed to convince an Italian newspaper to run a story about his situation, and was able to reunite with his mother when he was 28 years old, in 1991.
The Vatican charged $475 per child (around $4,500 in today’s dollars), and engineered the adoption of some 3,500 children over 20 years through this program. Its pioneer, an American priest living in Rome named Andrew Landi, directed priests to travel around the country, looking for children out of wedlock to funnel into the program. According to Laurino’s investigation, some women were even told that their children had died to deter them from looking into what had happened. Landi had direct connections to Pope Pius XII, who reportedly saw the first children off personally. Monsignor Andrew Landi died in 1999, never having expressed regret for his actions, and according to 60 Minutes, the Vatican still insists to this day that “the orphan program was the only chance for a new life for these children.”
While the details of this specific program, which ended in 1970, are reaching the light of day for the first time through Laurino’s work, it is the latest in a series of scandals exposing the Vatican’s role in ethically unsound adoption practices. A similar program was uncovered in Ireland from roughly the same period of time, where on top of having their children wrenched away from them, mothers who gave birth out of wedlock were forced into living and working at workhouses for “fallen women.” Pope Francis denounced how Irish children were “robbed of their innocence and taken from their mothers” in that instance. The Vatican has yet to issue any kind of response to Laurino’s findings.
