Italy's stolen children reunite with mothers after forced adoptions

Thousands of Italian children were moved to the United States on so-called orphan visas between 1950 and 1970, in a system that tied together the Vatican, Catholic-run institutions, Italian authorities and U.S. immigration rules. Many were not orphans at all. They had living mothers who say they never agreed to permanent adoption, and decades later some of those mothers and children are still trying to reconstruct what happened to them.

The pipeline depended on a 1950 change in U.S. immigration rules that expanded the definition of an orphan to include some children with one living parent if that parent could not provide care. In Italy, anonymous surrender practices made it easier for babies to be treated as abandoned on paper. The National Catholic Welfare Conference, the American Catholic Church’s main organizational arm, handled key parts of the adoption process, and its correspondence files in New York run from 1920 to 1970.

Maria Laurino’s The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice centers the system in a broader network involving the Italian government, the Vatican and the U.S.-based Catholic hierarchy. Mothers were pressured to give up their children, birth records were altered, and some women were told their babies had died. Records in some cases described children as “abandoned since birth,” even when mothers later said they never consented to adoption.

John Campitelli, born Piero Davi in 1963, reunited with his mother, Francesca, after years of searching. His original records falsely described him as “abandoned since birth.”

Pope Francis has publicly addressed forced-adoption scandals in Belgium and said the Church must seek forgiveness and acknowledge the suffering caused by such abuses. It remains unclear how many of the 3,500 children sent to the United States were taken from mothers who never intended to lose them permanently.