Really, Catholic Church?  The Crusades and the Nazi sympathizing and the RICO-worthy facilitation of pedophilia weren’t enough?  Now there is emerging evidence that priests and nuns in Spain stole babies from “unsuitable” mothers and sold them to other people.  The definition of “unsuitable” apparently started with enemies of Franco, but motivation morphed over the decades to include keeping babies out of the hands of their unwed mothers, or perhaps just pure profit.

The primary source for this information is a BBC documentary, This World: Spain’s Stolen Babies.  I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet, but if this summary is at all accurate, I’ll have to restrain myself from throwing things at the TV.  The stunning facts just keep coming: the number of babies stolen may be as high as 300,000.  And at first I thought, “Oh well, it happened during the Spanish Civil War – terrible, but not surprising.”  But no, this started in 1939 and continued through the 1980s.

If that didn’t push enough of my buttons, many of the mothers doubted that their babies had really died, and some protested and demanded answers.  They of course were labelled “hysterical,” the catchall defense of so many authority figures who abuse laboring women.

You may have noticed a lot of “may”s and “apparently”s here, and the reason is that there has not been an official investigation.  The documentary sparked a lot of interest and emotion, but it seems amnesty laws may prevent criminal investigation.  So mothers who were dismissed as hysterical and robbed of their children, or adults who discover that their parents traded cash to a priest for them, are investigating on their own, and getting DNA tests when they can piece enough together to identify a possible lost baby.

Meanwhile, this has inspired me to finally defect from the Catholic Church.  I’ve got to polish up my letter, and have my husband witness my Declaration of Defection, but hopefully I can get it out by next week.  Maybe it’s silly and ultimately unimportant, but I don’t want my name associated with this corrupt organization.  I have no doubt that many Catholics are good and honest people, but the Church, as an entity, is utterly without morals.  Any moral organization would have leapt to root out pedophiles and baby-traffickers at the first whiff of these scandals, but of course we know how the Church has chosen to deal with pedophile priests, and I don’t see any evidence of them even issuing a statement about this debacle.  They’re evil.  And I’m going to make it official that they don’t speak for me and can’t count me as a member.