Can You Leave Them Alone Together?
Photo: Rob Melnychuk /
Digital Vision / Getty
Which is the graver crime committed in recent decades by the Catholic Church: the widespread sexual abuse of children and subsequent cover-ups by the hierarchy or the theft and subsequent sale of hundreds of thousands of infants born to the "wrong" sort of women? And what does it say about the Catholic Church that we'd even be asking such a question?
Well, it's a question that's going to be getting a lot more attention in Spain where current estimates place the number of stolen infants at over 300,000 over the past four or five decades. The program started out as political when dictator Franco took babies from people considered politically unreliable, but after his death the Catholic Church took over and used it for their own ends.
A secret network of Catholic hospitals, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns and more all worked together to steal infants, convince mothers their kids were dead, and sell the children to "reliable" Catholic families.
At least now know where the Catholic Church can find funds to pay for all the lawsuits over the abuse and rape of other children. Sell one infant to pay the fines for raping another -- makes perfect sense, right?
Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth. But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.
In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents. Official documents were forged so the adoptive parents' names were on the infants' birth certificates. ...
Journalist Katya Adler, who has investigated the scandal, says: 'The situation is incredibly sad for thousands of people.
'There are men and women across Spain whose lives have been turned upside-down by discovering the people they thought were their parents actually bought them for cash. There are also many mothers who have maintained for years that their babies did not die - and were labelled "hysterical" - but are now discovering that their child has probably been alive and brought up by somebody else all this time.'
Source: Daily Mail
Apparently stolen babies purchased from the Catholic Church may have amounted to 15% of all adoptions (the term has to be used very loosely here) in all of Spain between 1960 and 1989. It wasn't until 1987 that anything started to change, and that was only because the Spanish government began to regulate adoptions instead of the Catholic hospitals. In other words, the Catholic leaders and institutions never chose to change on their own and never acknowledged ever doing wrong.
It will be difficult for justice to ever be done, though, because laws were passed to grant amnesty for crimes that occurred by Franco's regime. As a result, there are few coordinated investigations of what happened back then. Only local or regional prosecutors have looked into this at all but it was a national crime that occurred on a national level -- without national coordination and resources, people may never find out the truth of what happened to their own families.
It's important to remember here that the problem isn't with Catholicism or religion per se, but rather with institutions that are placed above and beyond challenge or question. When any person, group, office, or organization exercises absolute moral authority without any meaningful oversight or external checks, then you will inevitably see crimes like this occur. It almost always starts out for ostensibly "good" reasons (at least in the eyes of those committing the crimes) and no one has enough authority to even question what's going on, much less challenge or object.
After all, by whose standards can you use to object? If they are the ones who get to determine what's right and what's wrong, and if they have already concluded that what they are doing is "right," then they aren't going to listen to outsiders who are judging them based upon external standards which they don't accept. They will only accept judgement from higher authorities within their own system, and how often does that happen -- especially when it comes to churches and religion?
This sort of thing doesn't only happen in the context of churches and religion, but it's a lot more likely to happen in the those contexts because it's a lot more likely for churches and religion to claim absolute moral authority. Secular groups or institutions may at times try this, but not as often and not as successfully. So unless someone can come up with a way to ensure that the only churches or religions claiming absolute moral authority are also infallible, the only solution is to oppose religions and churches who try to make such claims in the first place.
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