Just another huge criminal excess of the Catholic Church that involves human trafficking
Quote:Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth
According to the birth mothers, nuns who worked in maternity wards took the infants shortly after they were delivered and told the women, who were often unwed or poor, that their children were stillborn. But the babies were not dead: They had been sold, discreetly, to well-off Catholic parents, many of whom could not have families of their own. Under a pile of forged papers, the adoptive families buried the secret of the crime they committed. The children who were taken were known in Spain simply as the “stolen babies.” No one knows exactly how many were kidnapped, but estimates suggest tens of thousands.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading psychiatrist in the regime who was trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. The gene, he said, might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun.
Franco’s rule also marked a dramatic turn for the Catholic Church, which allowed its nuns and priests to become partners of the right-wing regime. They commanded the education system, where children were to be instructed in Catholic values, learning to read using the Bible. Franco also ceded oversight of parts of the state-run hospital system to the clergy. Nuns often sat alongside top management at hospitals, helping to select staff and overseeing the budget. But their influence was perhaps strongest in the hospitals’ charity floors that took in the poor. There, the nuns were often deployed to encourage single mothers to give their babies up for adoption to married couples.
“The mothers were no longer prisoners, leftists or the wives of leftists,” wrote the journalists Jesús Duva and Natalia Junquera in “Stolen Lives,” a 2011 book about the kidnappings. “It was no longer about political repression, even though, in many ways, the victims continued to be from the same defeated social classes: poor couples.” For a time, the arrangement ran smoothly. But by the 1960s, Franco had opened Spain to tourism and multinational industries, which brought foreigners with more liberal ideologies. The economy also boomed, giving women more independence. Being an unwed mother was no longer as impossible as it once seemed. “The supply of babies began to fall,” Soledad Arroyo, a journalist who investigated early accusations, told me. “But it had already generated a huge black market in the illegal trafficking of babies. What do you do?”
Some nuns — aided by doctors, nurses and midwives — began to abduct babies to meet demand. In certain cases, the nuns still managed to persuade mothers to give up their children willingly, though many say they were coerced into surrendering their newborns. Others say they were sedated in the delivery room and then told, when they woke up, that their babies had died. In reality, the children had been sold to other families.
I.M. started working at the clinic when she was a teenager and remembered Sister María being severe and unrelenting. But it was the nun’s behavior toward the unwed women on the charity floor that surprised her the most. Sister María would refer to them as “heathens” and “subversives,” sometimes to their faces. Many of the babies had been reported dead, I.M. said, including some she had seen alive in their incubators hours before. There were rumors that the body of at least one newborn was preserved in a refrigerator, though I.M never knew why. (Some I interviewed said that mothers who demanded to see the remains of their children were shown corpses of other babies.)
She also remembered a blue notebook that sat on Sister María’s desk in the clinic. Inside were lists of names, many of which I.M. recognized as prospective parents she had seen visiting the nun. They came to the clinic in the morning, always with a check. Sister María would interview them for several hours, and if things went well, the families left with a baby that afternoon. In another column of the notebook, I.M. had also seen numbers marked in pesetas. The amounts didn’t seem like donations to her; some of the figures amounted to weeks of wages.
David Rodríguez, then a student in Madrid who took his story to local journalists, said that his mother had told him she paid 60,000 pesetas to Sister María when she adopted him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/magaz...abies.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"