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BABY TRAFFICKING CONDUCTED BY NUNS INThe TeleGracia News Team travelled to Dublin, Ireland to investigate the crimes committed by the Vatican unto innocent people. They were astonished to find irrefutable evidence of the corrupt baby exporting business administered by the Catholic Nuns in this nation and facilitated by the Irish government. The team came across the book Banished Babies written by Mike Milotte, a former RTE news correspondent who came across all the documents forged by the nuns to carry out the criminal act of stealing innocent Irish babies and selling them to American families and abroad. Below is the transcript of the interview conducted by TeleGracia News Correspondent Axel Cooley with Mike Milotte. Part of this astonishing interview is available for viewing at: http://www.youtube.com/vaticancrimes#p/u/6/0sje6seBDQo Axel Cooley (AC): Were speaking to Mike Milotte, former RTE Current Affairs reporter and also the author of the book Banished Babies. Its the story of baby trafficking organized by nuns, sanctioned by the archbishop, administered by civil servants, approved by politicians, whose main concern was secrecy. Mike, thank you for joining us tonight and answering our questions. We definitely have a lot of inquiries as a result of coming across your book Banished Babies. Can you tell us a bit about the history of Irelands export baby business? Mike Milotte (MM): Well, this story began to emerge in the 1990s around the same time a lot of other stories began to arise about the care - or lack of care - of children by the state and by other institutions run by the catholic church, stories began to come out about children being sent to America for adoption - something that people had not heard about before. The stories were very scant, few and far between, at the beginning. And one of the things that I remember clearly, one of the first stories I heard, was a woman who worked for Aer Lingus (which is Irelands National Air Carrier) telling a story about escorting children to America. In Des Plaines there were flight attendants working

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on the airplanes, and part of their jobs, it seems, was to deliver children to America and she often wondered what this was all about because it happened regularly, but she never really found out. And I talked to this woman and she told me a story where she was in the Aer Lingus office in Dublin one day, when an American couple came in and very loudly said, - Hello! We are here from America. Wed like to thank you for the babies that we bought!! And we are here to buy another one! And she was absolutely astonished! They came from nowhere and they came in and thanked the staff and thanked Ireland for letting them buy the babies. So, thats when I became interested in this story, and I suppose being a Current Affairs Journalist, I was always interested in something a bit more - and adoption, if there was a financial edge to it, an unknown scandal that sort of whetted my appetite and so I began to look into it. I did a program on it, we went to America to find a lot of these children that have been sent to America and talked to them. Its very personal stories, and then it appeared as though there have been several 1,000 files in the department of foreign affairs in Ireland that had never been released. Initially, there was a denial on behalf of the government ministers that there were any files, but the very following day, the minister for Foreign Affairs put his hand up and said Actually, there are files in my department. Thousands of them and Im going to release them. And he put them into the Public Archive, the National Archive, and I got hold of them immediately - the following day - and the book is based on that. Basically, what these are, are the policy files. They are the states own files that came out and a Department of Foreign Affairs relating to the entire period when children were sent to America for adoption and I think they really reveal a disturbing story that had never really been told before, and never really been appreciated now even though I wrote this book. I suppose it came at a time when the focus was on other obvious stories of child abuse - and this isnt a story of child abuse and I think theres a lot of abuse involved. So it never really achieved the attention that it probably deserved. It is a story that has never fully been told in this country.

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AC: What sorts of stories did you come across that were quite shocking? MM: I think the whole thing turned out to be very shocking because it was highly organized by the Catholic Church. Basically, what you are talking about here is thousands upon thousands of women and young women who had children and the church did not want to admit that this phenomenon had existed there was any such thing as children born out of wedlock in Ireland. And first of all, you can see that the homes they were born in were called orphanages - you see, an orphan is someone whose both parents are dead, whose mother and father are dead but in this instance, the parents neither were dead, neither the mother nor the father were dead. They just werent married! But they called them orphanages, so it would appear to anyone looking at them that all these children that were in there Oh! His parents had died, but if you did the sums, that was blatantly ridiculous! You would have mass deaths of young people! Quite clearly, they want orphans all day with the children of unwed mothers - and the church was always keen to keep the lead on this thing. It was a subject that was never talked about it. And if the family had a daughter who got pregnant, very often she would be put on the family home. She would have to go and find her own way and in some way, yes, the nuns were the ones that gave them somewhere to go, but of course the Catholic Church created the hostility to them in the first place! So, it wasnt as though they were doing them a favor! They created the problem and then they were left picking up some of the pieces. But, in fact, I think what is most scandalous here is that they turned it to a business that at the time when this began to really develop, it was immediately after the Second World War, and a lot of American soldiers were based in Europe at the time and they had been taking children from Europe to America in large numbers. They would ship loads of children, taken to America for adoption. And then, a lot of the European countries began to realize they were losing a whole generation, the next generation, to replace people that died in the war, so the export of children from all of Europe was stopped, except Ireland. So, a lot of American soldiers turned to Ireland to get children. I think thats how it really began. There were no rules, no regulations nor adoption legislation. It seems as though they could come here and take these children back to America at will. In fact, the book starts with a story of one guy who came and he was interviewed on his way back to America and he had two children and he said they were surprised for his wife and that he had picked them up in an Irish orphanage. Now that to me is quite scandalous! The catholic church I think then realized that something was going on here and they didnt like it because they would have assumed and probably rightly so that most of the mother of these children were Catholics. Ireland at that time was a 99% catholic country, but they had no way of knowing what religion the people who were taking them to America where.

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The Catholic Church wanted to ensure that the children of catholic Irish mothers went to American Catholics, so at that point the Catholic Church stepped in to try and put some sort of organization on this, and they drew up rules and regulations, which State agreed to and the State was quite happy to leave the Catholic Church to organize this. And initially the Archbishop, the senior catholic cleric in Ireland, John Charles McQuaid, was personally involved in this, in drawing up the rules and regulations. And they turned to an American catholic organization called Catholic Charities, who were given the job of vetting the children in America. The Catholic Charities was given the job of vetting the would-be adoptive parents in America and their primary concern was to ensure that they were Catholics first and foremost, and secondly it seems they wanted to ensure they had some means of support, that they had money, but the fact they were practicing Catholics seems to have been the primary concern, rather than any concern with their ability to actually be parents of children. And I think what emerged subsequently in most of these cases was that some of the adopting parents had been rejected by the American Adoption System as being unsuitable for one reason or another as adoptive parents, but yet they had been able to turn to Ireland and simply because they wee practicing Catholics they were able to get children from here. So, the way it was organized the children were born in catholic-run orphanages which were actually mother child homes - run by nuns, the State had to get involved because the children needed passports to leave the country. But the State seemed to be happy enough to go on the verifications and documentation provided by the nuns. The State didnt appear to have an independent policy of its own and at that time in Ireland the state did not want to do anything to upset the church, in particularly John Charles McQuaid, who was a very dominant personality and from looking at State records, you can see that the State was quite happy to let the church call the running in the adoption process. AC: So ,they did nothing about it, they did nothing to stop it? MM: No, not only did they do nothing to stop it, they facilitated it at every turn! The state issued passports to children and the state required mothers to sign - the mother had to sign two documents which came in to states possession. The first was an application for a passport for their child and the second, was an agreement to adoption by the child in America. Now, I have looked at a lot of these documents because they remain in state files and the signatures are different. The signatures were actually forged I can say that quite authoritatively - the signature were forged by nuns and they were so disregarding of the state authorities - or of anyone questioning this - that they didnt care that they had forged and put a different signature on each of these two critical legal documents. So, you see a signature of a mother applying for a passport for a child is completely different from the signature

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of the same mother agreeing to the adoption of that child, and Ive seen a number of documents like that. AC: Can you explain to us the sorts of documents you would fin? Were they cooperative in providing these to you? MM: Once the archive came into public domainyou see, its policy here that state archives come into public domain after 30 years. This was more like 40 years, 50 years in some cases, before these documents were released, but they decided to release the whole lot together, so some of them were even predated, they hadnt quite gone the 30 years when I got my hands on them. So, yes, once the Department of Foreign Affairs decided to release these documents, they released them very fully indeed, but what they did do was they took names out, so none of the documents identified individuals. These were documents about state policy and about the concerns that the state might have had at various times about their dealings with the Catholic Church, about their dealings with American diplomats. They were mostly documents generated around the process of issuing passports because that was the main involvement of the state, was the issuing of passports. AC: Do we know which catholic run orphanages were taking place in this scenario? MM: Well, most of them were. Im sorry, Im not going to be able to name them, but they are all named in the book. Do you want me to look at the book and sort of say? AC: Yes! Its just that, some people dont believe that people who supposedly represent God would do something like this. Do we know which catholic orphanage it is? MM: Yes, we do. I have detailed them all in the book and I can tell you some of them. The biggest was St. Patricks School, which was in Dublin - records show that they sent 515 children to America. The next was Sean Ross Abby which sent 438 children. The Mother and Child Home in Castle Pollard which sent 278 children. St. Patricks Home - again in Dublin - sent 254. St. Clares in Stamullen (which is just outside Dublin) sent 130, The Secret Heart Convent in Cork sent 98, and the Catholic Aids Women Adoption Society in Cork sent 37. St. Josephs Convent in Crume sent 29, and then there was a Protestant one, the Protestant Adoption Society - well, all of them combined sent a total of 24. So, you see it is predominately a Catholic operation. St. Bridgets Orphanage sent 14, and then some miscellaneous, because there were a lot of small childrens homes operating here as well, sent 101. So, this is the total number of passports that we know to have been issued and that comes to: 1,918. But, there were a lot

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of children, particularly in the early years, who went without passports and there is no number on that. There was also a very prominent scam involved, where American women would come to Ireland and would go into a nursing home - a maternity home where children were born - and pretend they were pregnant and they would come out with a baby! The baby had been obviously born by now and they would go to the American Embassy and have that child put onto their own passport. So, we dont know how many children fall into that category, but I believe that was a wide spread practice. So again, the total number of children sent to America during this period is unknown, which I think is one of the scandals. AC: Were speaking to a lot of people that perhaps might not believe that representatives of God might possibly do something like this, what source of other documents did you come across, registries? You actually said over 1,918 passports were actually issued. Astonishing amount of archives! When did you stop? It seems as though you opened up a can of worms! At what time did you feel you had enough information in order to produce the book? MM: What I had was the documentation was very thorough, these were state documents. I did actually get access to Archbishops McQuaid own papers in relations to adoptions, which is the first time his papers had been opened to anyone. Now, they didnt reveal an awful lot because I suppose he was intelligent enough a man not to commit most of his thoughts to paper on this subject. But, the state documents were very thorough and they involved communications because the children were coming from Catholic nursing homes run by Nuns - so an awful lot of the communications (even around passports) was between the state and the orphanage, between the state and the nuns. So, there are a lot of letters the mother superior who was running these homes - to civil servants, talking about their requirements and their needs and their plans and prospects and so on. So, it is a very well documented operation and the involvement of the church in it, is not in dispute. It is not something that the church has tried to deny. The church would say that they were doing good for these children, because at the time, from the Second World War this went on up until the 1970s, Ireland was a very under developed country, quite a poor country, and America was seen as somewhere where the streets were lined with gold. And, if you could have a life in America with an American family, the feeling was it could only be for the good. Now, there might be an element of truth in that somewhere, but it reduces happiness to wealth, and wealth is a very relative thing anyway, because I think Irish nuns, looking at American families who had maybe a little bit of money, they

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would view them as wealthy, when in fact, in American terms they were actually were not. So, a lot of these kids were going to very ordinary run-of-the-mill American families, where their prospects in life would be very mundane, they werent going to Beverly Hills or whatever. But part of the problem that emerged subsequently, was thatas I said some of the people who were refused adoption in America came to Ireland and adopted in Ireland. And I know, from talking to a number of these now adults, children who had gone there as adoptees, that they were adopted by people who were sick and they had very, very hard lives and they came to believe the only reason they had been adopted was in order to work from childhood looking after a sick adoptive parent. So, that was a reality for a lot of these children. I also spoke with one woman at length, who all she knew about her life was that she was sexually abused from infancy right up to the age of 18. When she was 18, she discovered that she was actually adopted from Ireland. She didnt know that previously, she found that she was actually adopted, she was then able to obtain records of her own and she found that while this organization Catholic Charities had been sent out to review her adoptive parents to recommend them as suitable or otherwise and had recommended them, the Catholic Charities had never actually interviewed or met or seen the father, the man who abused her - and the Catholic Charities had been satisfied with the letter from the priest to say that this man was a regular church go-er, and that was the only criteria that they applied. And on that basis, this girl was sent to America to face a life of abuse. AC: Overall, how would you rate the assessment of these adoptions by the Catholic Charities according to what you discovered? MM: I thinkCatholic Charities is a very large organization in America - its the biggest catholic charity in the country, but they admitted themselves at one point to Irish civil servants that they did not have the man power to operate this system of adoption on behalf of the Irish church. They just did not have experienced people who could go out, social workers. If you are placing a child for adoption, it requires a very skilled social worker to go out and assess the would-be adoptive parents to make sure they are suitable in all respects as adoptive parents. Catholic Charities admitted in 1956, one of the head men from Catholic Charities came into Ireland and he was interviewed at length by senior civil servants in the Department of Foreign Affairs and he admitted to them that there were huge problems in the way Catholic Charities administered this scheme. They didnt have the people to properly assess adoptive parents, they had discovered even within their own ranks there was at least one man operating a baby business, that he was somehow getting children from Ireland in the name of adoptive parents that either didnt exist or somehow or another sidestepped. He was accumulating these children for himself and then selling them.

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This is on record in the Department for Foreign Affairs in Ireland. This racket was being run in America through Catholic Charities to sell children to god knows who in America. Now, that in itself is absolutely and utterly scandalous! But much more scandalous in my mind is the fact that Foreign Affairs did absolutely nothing about it! They didnt try to investigate it, they didnt go any further, their main concern - like the Catholic Church - was to avoid scandal and this whole episode was brushed under the carpet. So, even though the Department of Foreign Affairs knew that there were major problems with the welfare of children sent to America, they ignored that problem. AC: Are there documents that somewhere tracked the kind of money involved? MM: Well, what I came across mainly was letters from these Mother and Child Homes, from Nuns to Americans who had adopted children that, as far as I could see, there wasnt a price attached to children. You didnt pay to adopt a child, and in fact, from 1952 onwards when an adoption law was passed in Ireland, that made it a criminal offense to charge someone for an adoption, so it would have been a criminal offense to explicitly charge for a child in adoption. But, what the Nuns did is they wrote very humbly to adoptive parents pointing out that they were still looking after children, that they had very scarce resources, that they didnt have the means to purchase toys or proper clothing or food, but of course that is highly unlikely given that the Catholic Church is quite a wealthy organization! I have seen letters to that effect, from nuns to people who have adopted children in America, and the people who adopted the children sort of feel obligated to write a check, send a check. I think for some people it became habitual, so that year after year, they would send a check every year to the Nuns. AC: Are there documents that show how these children ended up in these orphanages? MM: Well, the way orphanages worked, the children were born in these homes - so they were mother and baby homes. So, the mother would go into the baby home when she was pregnant and they had to work for their keep. So, they cleaned - a lot of the homes had land attached and they kept cattle, they grew vegetables, the girls would work in the fields and they would clean the floors and scrub. They would have to stay well beyond the period when the child was born. The mothers would stay with their child up to 2 years in these homes, they were born in these homes. So, obviously there has been very tight bonding with their child and a lot of stories have been told when an American adoptive parent had been found, the

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Nuns would come in and simply take the baby and its done without notice, without warning. The mother could be told within hours notice to have her child ready, that the adoptive parents had arrived to come and take the child. That obviously was very traumatic for these women. A lot of these women that I talked to, were deeply scared by that experience of having their child virtually snatched from their hands, after being with that child - the child would have been 2 years old when it was taken and that obviously was very damaging. AC: They were taken away without their consent? MM: Well, very often without their consent. They were made to feel that they had to. I mean, there are such things as informed consent. If you are to consent to something, you have to know exactly what it is you are consenting to - and that is Common Law, and it was in those days as it is now. I would image - and from talking to those women - they were put under such pressure that even if

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If you have been a victim of crimes committed by this criminal organization, write to us at: contact@vaticancrimes.us. We are working directly with the Protect Your Children Foundation in regards to the illegal adoption/baby stealing business administrated by the Catholic Nuns. If you are a victim or if you have any further information about these illegal, immoral wrong doings, contact us.

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