Baby trafficking by the Catholic Church

First, we learn that child rape by priests has been covered up by the Catholic Church for decades. Now comes this news of 50 years of baby trafficking!

How can anyone still belong to the Catholic Church these days?

From the Daily Mail:

Up to 300,000 Spanish babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a period of five decades, a new investigation reveals.

The children were trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a widespread practice that began during General Franco’s dictatorship and continued until the early Nineties.

Hundreds of families who had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling for an official government investigation into the scandal.

Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth. ...

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents. ...

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.’ ...

It began as a system for taking children away from families deemed politically dangerous to the regime of General Franco, which began in 1939. The system continued after the dictator’s death in 1975 as the Catholic church continued to retain a powerful influence on public life, particularly in social services. ...

The BBC documentary features an interview with an 89-year-old woman named Ines Perez, who admitted that a priest encouraged her to fake a pregnancy so she could be given a baby girl due to be born at Madrid’s San Ramon clinic in 1969. ‘The priest gave me padding to wear on my stomach,’ she says.

It is claimed that the San Ramon clinic was one of the major centres for the practice.

Many mothers who gave birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.

The BBC programme shows photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly to show grieving mothers.

I wonder how much money the Catholic Church made from this. According to this article, one baby was sold for 200,000 pesetas, "a huge sum at the time" ... "the price of an apartment back then." Apparently, it was so much money that the buyers paid in installments over ten years.

So, is that more or less than 30 pieces of silver, then? I'm sure glad we've got religion to give us morality, aren't you?