NEW YORK — It was a quiet Saturday morning in May 2017 when Maria Laurino received a phone call from her cousin, John Mantica. He was searching his way through New York City, where Laurino lived, but ended up planting a seed of curiosity in his mind.

Mantica was born in Italy and adopted by a Steubenville couple in 1959, when he was 9 months old. He told Laurino about a social media group he had recently joined, whose members were also born in Italy and adopted by American couples through a program run by the Catholic Church.

Through the group, he had heard stories of birth mothers in Italy who were allegedly pressured by society and the Church to abandon their children, many of whom were sent to the United States for adoption without any connection to their birth family.

Laurino – an Italian-American journalist, speechwriter and teacher – became interested in and connected with the group’s founder, John Campitelli, who himself had been adopted through the Vatican-run program and was dedicated to connect adoptees with the past they had lost.

With this vital connection, Laurino began researching the Vatican’s so-called orphan program that affected thousands of Italian biological mothers and their children. A proportionately large number of these children, like Laurino’s cousin, were adopted by Steubenville families and grew up knowing they were adopted but never experienced the circumstances of their family separation and expatriation.

As Laurino would discover, some adoptees have no interest in digging up their past, while others mourn the separation of their families in Italy and now struggle to put the pieces back together.

Laurino’s quest for information is detailed in his book “The price of children” published October 15. It draws on the personal testimonies of adoptees and birth mothers, as well as thousands of archival documents from Church officials involved in the program, namely Bishop Andrew P. Landi, the program operator in Rome, and Mgr Emil. N. Komora of the Catholic Refugee Committee, which oversaw the placement of children in the United States from its New York office.

“(My book) is an investigation based on archival documents and interviews that I carried out in America and Italy”, Laurino said: “and it’s also an essay because I have a particular point of view, and I was trying to place these (birth mothers) and the terrible treatment of women.”

***Program Origins***

After World War II, the Vatican established the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza to help the poor of Italy, which at the time was described as a devastated country facing many out-of-wedlock births, Laurino said. The adoption program grew out of that commission, initially to rehouse war orphans, defined by the U.S. Displaced Persons Act of 1948 as a child under the age of 16 who had lost both parents to war.

Congress amended that law in 1950 because of the large number of American couples wanting to adopt children, Laurino said. Thus, the definition of war orphan was expanded to include children whose parents were “unable to provide care” due to “death or disappearance” of the other parent.

The children actually adopted hardly correspond to the image of a war orphan. Laurino pointed out that a few years after the program began, the children directly affected by the war were teenagers. But American couples wanted babies, she said, and so the program retired the nom de guerre around 1955.

“All these children fell into this category (orphans) because it was a very patriarchal society,” said Laurino. “The men were absolutely not held responsible. Either they walked or they ran. … The entire burden fell on women, and many of them were forced (to abandon their child) because of societal pressure. Mothers turned against their daughters. It was a terrible shame to have a child out of wedlock.

***Course for children***

The children of single parents were placed in specific institutions called bandetrofios, known for their high infant mortality rates due to malnutrition and disease. Laurino said biological mothers were deliberately separated from their children and their contact was severely limited. This would have been done to prevent mothers from “polluted” children with their so-called vices.

With the briefotrofios filling, the orphan program was seen as a pragmatic solution by those involved, who wanted the children to be raised in good Catholic homes in the United States, Laurino said. The number of Italian children benefiting from the Vatican program between 1950 and 1970 was estimated to be 3,700, Laurino said.

To meet the demand for adoptions, priests were sent across Italy to find more orphans, according to records found by Laurino. Adoptive parents would pay $475 per child – about $4,500 today – and even if there was a profit to be made, Laurino doesn’t believe that was the main motivation.

“Actually, I think it was more of a moral statement.” said Laurino. “I think the Church was very concerned, in Italy and in America, about the values ​​of the time. …”

As soon as a child entered an institution, the identity of the biological mother was erased from the records. Many children were given false names, which reportedly caused big problems for adoptees who then decided to trace their roots.

A key part of the orphan program was a consent form that birth mothers would sign that would sign away all rights to their children, Laurino said. Mothers were often pressured to abandon their children, did not understand the forms, or had others sign their forms for them without their permission.

Many women were lied to, told they could reconnect with their children later, only to have their children put up for adoption, Laurino said. Others were wrongly told their child had died – apparently to give the mother a sense of closure.

The prospective adoptees were taken from their institutions by train to Rome, where they were flown to New York before being placed with an adoptive family, Laurino said.

***THE “Steubenville Pole”***

Among the records, two U.S. communities stood out as having a disproportionate number of adoptees relative to their population: Pueblo, Colorado, and Steubenville, which welcomed approximately 80 and 30 adoptees, respectively, over the life of the program.

Laurino hypothesizes that the high number of adoptees in Steubenville is due to some “a strong bond” between Catholic Charities of Steubenville, which managed the children’s local placements, and the American Catholic Church in Rome.

Those in the “Steubenville Cluster” as Laurino calls it, were not very aware of their shared backgrounds growing up, but are now aware of them, decades later.

“It’s this really interesting anomaly,” said Laurino. “How did so many of these children of the briefitrofios in Italy end up in one city? And how fascinating that they don’t know it. …(The adoptees I interviewed) said it blew our minds to know that the boy you were in high school choir with and sitting next to actually came from an institution and you didn’t have one. no idea. … This path that they all shared and they didn’t know or only knew a small part of it – they had heard of a few adoptions here, but not many.

Every Steubenville adoptee has their own story to tell, Laurino said, with adoption being a unique situation. “singular experience”.

As for Laurino, she wants her book to enlighten readers about what happened in Italy and the questions it raises about the importance of women’s rights.

“I hope readers can come away understanding a story that I found shocking and has clearly still affected the lives of many adoptees and birth mothers.”

(Monday: A look at the upbringing and journey of some of Steubenville’s adoptees.)