Let me begin by admitting that it’s taken me two months to write this.

In early September, I read The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice by Maria Laurino, an Italian American journalist whose cousin adopted a child from Italy in 1959. This child, now an adult, calls Laurino for travel tips as he’s on his way back to Italy where he hopes to find information about his birth mother; he’s learned via a Facebook group for Italian adoptees that the official story of his birth and adoption may be a lie, that the Roman Catholic Church may have falsified documents in order to expediate the removal of Italian children for adoption in the United States. Laurino’s interest is piqued, and so her investigation begins.

The book does an excellent job of showing how Italian children were stolen from their parents—most often from single mothers—and made to appear as orphans so that they could be marketed to American Catholic couples hoping to adopt. Laurino shows the effect this scheme had on the lives of the Italian mothers themselves and also on the children who became Italian American adoptees. She includes research on the history of the adoptee rights movement and details the experience of several adoptees she spoke with multiple times at length.

Laurino’s research also includes an exploration of the origins of Catholic attitudes towards women, purity, and sin, which she traces to early Christian writers from the fourth century. She explains how virginity became a Christian virtue and how sexual behavior became the measure of Christian life, leading to the widespread abandonment of children born outside of marriage. By denying her child, the unmarried mother could reenter good Italian society; the relinquished child became a ward of the state and faced an often hostile future, if the child survived at all.

After World War II, Pope Pius XII used the existence of unwed mothers as an example of evil taking hold of Italy in the form of atheist communism. To counter this threat during the 1950s, he launched a campaign to position the Virgin Mary at the center of Catholic devotion. No woman could live up to such a standard, but women who became pregnant out of wedlock suffered the worst persecution, the culmination of which was losing their children. Shipping many of those children off to America eased the governments’ financial burden for their care.

When I was a young adult slowly emerging from the Catholicism I’d been raised in, I wasn’t yet aware that my adoption was part of an historical event similar to the Italian situation Laurino describes called the Baby Scoop Era, a period of nearly three decades during which approximately four million unmarried girls and women surrendered babies for adoption. I knew that I had been born in a maternity hospital and I knew that I had spent some months in a Catholic home for babies before my adoption, but I didn’t know any details. I didn’t yet know the story of my own birth and relinquishment, or the stories of other adoptees or of the mothers who’d lost their children. But even without this knowledge, by my late twenties I realized that my growing uneasiness with Catholicism stemmed from my being adopted.

Reading The Price of Children reinforced the conclusion I reached after learning about the Baby Scoop Era during my forties as I was reuniting with my birth families: my mother and I were victimized by the Catholic church. We were pawns in a coordinated effort to control the Catholic population via weaponized shame.

***

I understand how Catholicism works because I was raised by Catholic parents and attended Catholic schools. I attended Mass several times a week during the school year and at least once a week when school was out. “Religion” was a subject for me in school, just as math and English were subjects. Some of my teachers were nuns, and priests often came into class during grade school and junior high to teach us what we needed to know about being Catholic.

In second grade when I made my first confession, I felt holy. I took to heart the suggestion to think about dedicating one’s life to God. I took seriously our prayer requirements and the command to follow those ten rules for life handed down to Moses. Thou shall not lie. Thou shall obey.

I knew I was adopted and that my adoption was Catholic—it had been facilitated by Catholic Charities—which meant my mother had been Catholic. I knew my mother hadn’t been able to keep me because she was only a teenager when I was born. I accepted this as a reasonable explanation for why I had to be adopted, because I was being indoctrinated in the Catholic lifestyle. Sex before marriage was a sin. Sex during marriage was for procreation, therefore birth control was never allowed. Abortion was murder, a mortal sin. One had to confess sins to a priest, be sincerely sorry for them, commit in one’s heart to not sin again, and do penance in order to be forgiven by God, in order to begin again with a clean slate.

Once I became a teenager myself, though, my understanding of what it meant to be Catholic began to change. I understood why sex was a temptation; I had a boyfriend. I was required to make a yearly confession in order to receive communion at Mass, but now I walked out of the confessional fully intending to sin again. I sympathized with my nameless, faceless teenage mother. A high school classmate was expelled from our Catholic school when she became pregnant, and I knew without being told that the boy with whom she had sex would continue at his school regardless.

***

The Catholic church has long used shame as a means of control. For a child, this aspect of shame is enforced mainly by parents, but also by teachers and nuns and priests, and by neighbors and extended family if they are also Catholic. Catholicism breeds a cycle of shame in which its adherents help keep each other in line via various forms of punishment.

Particularly in my teenage years, there was an emphasis on proper sexual behavior for Catholics that was communicated to me via my schooling, via homilies at Mass, and via my parents. A good Catholic teenager does not engage in sexual behavior. I had a single day of sex education in sixth grade to cover the basic biology, but not much good information from my educators after that. Sex was such a taboo topic that when I got my first period, my mom handed me a book to read rather than talking to me about menstruation. I learned most of what I knew about sex as a teenager via word of mouth from friends.

The only formal education I received about birth control was that it was not permitted even once I was married. Via friends and TV shows, I knew about condoms and I knew about The Pill. But, of course, my mom was never going to take me to a doctor to get a prescription for a birth control pill when I was not supposed to be having sex. And buying condoms was out of the question for many Catholic kids, because the store clerk checking you out might be a fellow parishioner who knew your parents.

So, the likelihood of a Catholic teenaged girl getting pregnant, even during the 1980s when I was coming of age, was relatively high. We were undereducated about anything having to do with sex, unlikely to use birth control, yet experiencing the same natural, biological urges as every other teenager without having any supportive adult to talk with about our feelings.

It was even worse for Catholic girls back in the 1950s and ‘60s. Just as unwed pregnant Italian girls were forced to leave their homes until they rid themselves of the evidence of their sin, so too were many pregnant American teenagers forced by their own parents into maternity homes where they could be hidden away, shielding the family from shame in their community. Catholic parents, trained to enforce the rules of moral society in which they themselves had been indoctrinated, harshly punished their own daughters, instilling a deep sense of shame from which many of those girls never recovered. Those parents themselves were so deeply indoctrinated that they exiled their own grandchildren, who typically grew up in closed adoptions under new names with their previous identities hidden from them to prevent reconnection with their original families, exactly as was done with the children adopted from Italy. Because if original mothers and their lost children ever found each other, the truth of how those children came to be adopted might come out, and the culpability of the Catholic church would be known.

We are meant to obey, though the church lies.

***

I no longer attend Mass or receive the sacraments. I did not have my own children baptized, and I intentionally raised them outside of any organized religion. But religion is all around us. Christianity is front and center at this moment in American history. It’s easier to recognize indoctrination in other sects than in the one you’re raised in, and that, of course, is by design. The continued existence and relevance of the church relies upon children being taught from birth how to live within the church’s rules so that, as they grow into adulthood, anything that contradicts the church feels unnatural. It took me more than two decades to fully extract myself from Catholicism, and yet sometimes I still find myself reluctant to openly confront what I was taught by the church.

What I understand now is that I was raised in a Catholic bubble. And that my mother was likely raised in that bubble as well, a bubble created and reinforced for her by her parents and her parish.

Let me tell you, it’s a complete mind fuck to become aware of the fact that the tradition you were raised in rejects your very existence due to the fact of how you were conceived, that your church deliberately separated you from your family to enforce the misogynistic ideal of a virginal woman, which exists for the purpose of controlling a population of people.

In the eyes of the church, I had to be removed from my family and raised by strangers to uphold the Catholic contract. My mother had to lose her first child and to pretend forever that she had never been pregnant so that her parents could continue to be perceived as good Catholics.

It took a while for me to write this post because reading The Price of Children reignited the anger I have toward the Catholic church. So many words formed so fast in my brain, I could not easily wrangle them in a concise, coherent way. What was done to the people Laurino interviewed was wrong. What was done to me and to my mother was wrong. There is no explanation the Catholic church can give, no good work the church can do, that will ever make it right.

And the worst part about all this is that it continues today. The Catholic church’s teaching has not changed. Girls and women are still losing their children because of weaponized shame. Children’s lives are being forever altered unnecessarily because of weaponized shame. The church continues to be a cause of needless suffering. And yet, we are supposed to accept Catholicism, and more broadly Christianity, as good and necessary, and to view those who declare themselves to be Christians as righteous. I never again wish to live under the control of the church. I fervently hope that others will likewise awaken and shake off the chains of indoctrination.