Family Life

Jesus's Views & the Early Church
Medieval Christian Practices
Christian Practices from the Reformation
Christian Practices into Modern Times
Christian Kidnapping of Children

Jesus's Views & the Early Church

Modern Churches champion family values, and it may seem surprising that anyone might criticise them for their record in this respect. But this attachment to family values dates back only as far as the 1960's. Before then, the Christian Church had a very different approach to families. Instead of promoting extended families or even nuclear families, it went out of its way to split up countless millions of families - in many different ways and on many different pretexts. This section will therefore contain plenty of surprises for anyone accustomed to the Church's modern position.

The first surprise is that biblical Jesus had little time for families, and his attitude became the accepted Christian attitude for centuries. According to the New Testament Jesus taught his followers to "hate" their families. You can read examples of what Jesus had to say about families here.

Relying on biblical passages, early Christians inferred that family life was worthless and hailed virginity as the ideal. Virgins were holy; others who indulged their carnal lusts were filthy degenerates. The pinnacle of achievement was to remain alone and celibate, and to have no family at all. Sex was an insufferable burden, inexplicably imposed by God, and the creation of children was a sorrow to all. In view of these ideas Christians cheerfully set about the destruction of family life. Converts were lured away from their parents, siblings, spouses and children.

The children of rich converts were often left destitute, their inheritance having been diverted to Church coffers. Like many modern fringe sects, early Christians discouraged members from communicating with non-Christian relatives. The mainstream Church set out, like a jealous mistress, to isolate or destroy her rivals. By the fourth century some clergymen were being coerced into abandoning their wives in emulation of St Peter and the other apostles. As Pope Gregory VII put it "The Church cannot escape the grip of the laity unless priests first escape from their wives"¹. Wives were often left alone. Many were so desperate that they were driven to suicide. Those who were not abandoned were liable to be sold into slavery if the Church authorities discovered them.

Medieval Christian Practices

In the Middle Ages men were encouraged to leave their wives and families for years on end. When preaching the First Crusade, Pope Urban II cited the words of Jesus from Matthew 10:37 and 19:29: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life". Pope Innocent III made explicit the right of husbands to go off without their wives" permission: men could abandon their families without a word of explanation, emulating Jesus" early disciples. Preachers lured many hundreds of thousands of men away from their families to take the cross. When St Bernard preached, women went in fear. Mothers hid their sons from him, wives their husbands, and companions their friends. Bernard proudly informed the Pope of his success in extracting men from their families "I opened my mouth; I spoke; and at once the crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you will see widows whose husbands are still alive². Most of those women were soon to become real widows³.

Edmund Blair Leighton, The Dedication, 1908 An idealised version of a knight dedicating his sword to God at the Church alter, before riding off to the Crusades and leaving his wife a widow.

Back at home the Church remained in control of family matters. People were expected to put their Christian duties before their family duties and inform on any deviation from orthodoxy.

Under Christian hegemony slaves were not entitled to a family life either. They required permission to marry. As chattels, some Christians held that they had no right to marry at all. How could they if they had no souls, and were not therefore fully human. In any case, slave families could be split up, parents separated from their children, fathers from mothers, brothers and sisters from their siblings. Even in nineteenth century America the children of slaves were taken from their parents before reaching their first birthday. Christianity did not accord any value at all to family life per se.

When the Church wished a man dead it extended its ire to his family, asking God to condemn his assets and so ruin his family without regard to their guilt or innocence. The Church evinced no sympathy at all for the family. Here for example is an extract from a fairly typical text of excommunication, asking God to create orphans and widows:

We curse Arduino and his brother Amedeo, marauders and devastators of God's Church; we curse every inhabitant of Ivrea who gave them help and advice; may they be damned in the city, in the fields, cursed be their properties and their lands and herds and their animals, damned the place where they enter, and they go out; may God send unto them hunger and pestilence: may they be damned, vigilants, travellers, sleepers, resters. May God afflict them with misery, fever, hard frost, scorching heat, infirmity until death. May delirium, blindness, madness, fury afflict them at all times, that their children may become orphans and their wives widows soon⁴.

Christian Practices from the Reformation

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, priests assured Roman Catholic women that they owed a greater duty to the Church than to their husbands. For example they had a duty to help priests wanted for treason even if their husbands did not approve — even though by so doing they put their innocent husbands at risk of death. Father Henry Garnet's Treatise of Christian Renunciation contained many helpful examples of families broken asunder by religious differences⁵. Once again the point was clear: families were dispensable.

The Catholic Church had insisted on clerical celibacy (not clerical chastity) for those in Holy Orders explicitly so that the Church would retain its assets and would not be responsible for maintaining the widows and orphans of dead priests. Protestant Churches, aware that there was no theological justification for prohibiting clerical marriage, found an alternative solution to the problem. They allowed clerical marriage, but simply turned clerical widows and orphans out of their houses when a priest or minister died. No alternative accommodation was provided, nor any pension, nor any other sort of support, so that widows and orphans were liable to die of exposure or starvation, as many did. It was this scandalous abuse that led to the growth of insurance funds such as the Ministers" Widows" Fund in the mid eighteenth century⁶., followed by insurance companies such as Scottish Widows in the nineteenth Century. Clerical Medical was another such company, formed a few years after Scottish Widows. Churches could easily have been running their own schemes for centuries, but had perceived no moral duty to support hard-pressed clerical families any more than any other destitute families. On the contrary, Churches sought to prohibit, or at least discourage, all forms of insurance. (For all mainstream Churches, life insurance was a work of the Devil. Its purpose was to ameliorate the effects of Acts of God, since God alone determined who should live and who should die.)

Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1840, Published in Boston by Western & Southard Christian slave owners - buyers and sellers as well as auctioneers - were happy to divide slave families, including nursing mothers from their infants.

The text continues: "Prof Andrews, late of the University of N C in his recent work on Slavery and the Slave Trade, p 147, relates the foregoing conversation with a slave-trader on the Potomac". Prof Andrews is William L. Andrews, of the University of North Carolina, Editor of "The Literature of Slavery and Freedom,"

Knobstick Weddings. A knobstick wedding is the forced marriage of a pregnant single woman with the man believed to be the father. It derives its name from the knobsticks or staves of office carried by the church wardens since churchwardens generally enforced such marriages. The practice and the term were prevalent in the United Kingdom in the 18th century. Motivation for knobstick weddings was primarily financial since local parishes were obliged to provide relief for single mothers. Local authorities therefore encouraged the woman to enter into a marriage with the person presumed to be the father in an attempt to reduce their spending and shift the responsibility to the man concerned. On occasion the parish would pay a man to marry a pregnant girl. There are also accounts of more aggressive tactics, including threats to hang him. Since such practices were acceptable to the Church, a secular equivalent, known as "shotgun weddings", later became common - well into the twentieth century.

For well over a millennium and a half, Christians do not seem to have recognised any moral obligation to keep families together. When the British authorities decided to deport French Arcadians from Canada in 1755, they called all the men to St Charles Church in the village of Grand-Pré. There they were held and promised that there women and children would sail with them, while secret orders were given to Colonel Robert Monckton that the men should be shipped off without them. The Arcadians were treated appallingly, yet no one seems to have considered any aspect of it unchristian, including the breaking up of families.

Christian Practices into Modern Times

Children, even Christian Children, were not entitled to a family life either. Devout couples would traditionally give at least every tenth child to the Church as a sort of tithe, normally at the age of eight. Parents dedicated their young boys to monasteries. These "oblates" were brought up away from their families, by monks, for the service of the Church, never to know a normal family life. Such children had no say in the matter. Devout parents or guardians simply gave away their children. The Benedictine order required a written petition from parents or guardians who gave them their boys. A boy's petition would be tied to his hand with an altar cloth when he was presented to the monastic community^6a.

Girls were also tithed, and countless thousands disappeared into nunneries, along with their marriage dowries. Saint Hildegard of Bingen tells us herself that she was one such child-tithe. At the age of fourteen, girls given away in this way to become nuns underwent a sort of mock death similar to the one the Church inflicted on lepers and criminals condemned to death: victims were made to lie in a coffin, wrapped in a shroud, while a burial service was conducted and prayers said for the dead. The girls were then resurrected with a new identity and immediately married to Jesus, after which, as a Bride of Christ, they lived with their new family of Mother, Father and Sisters, and polygamous absentee husband.

Another indication of the Church's commitment to family life is provided by the practice of surgically removing boys" testicles, denying them the chance to become husbands or fathers. After girls had been excluded from church choirs, the Eastern Churches hit upon the idea of using castrated boys to replace falsetto soprano voices. The idea was copied in Italy and Spain in the sixteenth century. Countless tens of thousands of boys, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were castrated for the pleasure of Orthodox and Catholic churchmen. Popes and Church synods declined to prohibit castration on the grounds that without castrati churches would remain empty. So it was that castrati were entertaining popes in the Sistine chapel into the twentieth century. It was of absolutely no consequence that these boys, when they reached adulthood, were denied the possibility of an ordinary family life. Obviously they could not father children, but Christianity would not even allow them to become husbands, as some castrati wanted to. The Church would not allow them to marry precisely because they could not father children. It was much more important that clerics should be able to hear high-pitched male singing voices than that men should have normal family lives. The practice has stopped now, the last castrato to sing officially at St Peter's having died in the 1920s, though there may have been private performances into the 1950s. Subsequent popes have refused to apologise for the role of the papacy, apparently because they feel they have nothing to apologise for⁸.

Commercial Recording	Alessandro Moreschi The last official Vatican Castrato

The hereditarily sick were also regarded as less than deserving of family life. Historically, sickly Christian children had been discretely killed, a practice justified by regarding them as changelings, and not therefore human.

By the twentieth century, this was no longer acceptable, and more acceptable alternatives were sought. When Hitler discussed them with Cardinal Faulhaber in 1936 the two men had different approaches to the problem. Hitler wanted to sterilise them, but the cardinal had another solution: "The state, Herr Reich-chancellor, is not debarred from removing these vermin from the national community in the interests of legitimate self-defence and in conformity with moral law, but preventives other than physical mutilation must be sought, and such a preventive does exist: the internment of the hereditary sick"⁹. He was talking about what we now call concentration camps.

The cardinal's problem with sterilisation was that it would allow people to enjoy sex without the risk of procreation. Sterilisation was a form of contraception, and therefore contrary to the teaching of the Roman Church. Contraception was morally unacceptable, but there was nothing wrong with splitting up families in order to put the sick into concentration camps.

Anglican attitudes to the importance of family unity had been similar a couple of generations earlier, even for healthy families. In Victorian times parochial charities found it perfectly consistent with Christian teachings to split up poor families when families claimed poor relief. Husbands would be sent to one poor house, wives to another, and children perhaps to a third. Untold numbers of married couples were split up, never to see each other or their children again.

Women in a workhouse. Many of these women would have been separated from their husbands and families

Men in a workhouse. Many of these men would have been separated from their wives and families

Photograph of boys at Crumpsall Workhouse, Manchester, England, c 1895 Many of these boys would have been separated from their parents and sisters

Christian Kidnapping of Children

When Christian missionaries failed to make an impact on the local population, they would sometimes kidnap local children and dedicate them to God, even though their families needed these children. By force or deception the children would have their heads shaved, as a symbol of their dedication to the Christian God. A missionary called Symeon pioneered this around the Euphrates in the sixth century, scorning the objections of the villagers whose children he had shorn. Those who objected died in mysterious circumstances, and the rest gave way.

The abduction and indoctrination of children became a standard technique when missionaries could make no impact on adults, and would be used with effect for many centuries. Children of members of any other faith might be seized by Christian authorities. Sometimes whole families were seized. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jewish families were taken, often by force, by Christian authorities and subjected to what we would now call brainwashing. If some of the family converted and some did not, they were split up, never to see each other again. Sometimes husbands never saw their wives again, sometimes parents never saw their children again.

As late as 1858, acting under clerical instructions, the Bologna police seized a young Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara. Despite an international outcry the kidnapped boy was kept in Rome by the Roman Catholic Church and "re-educated". His re-education was so successful that he became a missionary priest. From the age of seven until his death he was never to know a proper family, either as son, brother or father⁷.

Removing converts from their families in order to discourage apostasy was extremely common. Indeed it was standard practice, and still is among many Christian missionary groups. Converts are transplanted to another community, often to another country, so that they have to depend upon their new Church family rather than their real family. Converts are routinely moved away from families of practising Jews or Moslems, and from family members that the Church consider heathen, heretical, schismatic, freethinking, rationalist, apostate, humanist, pantheist, Unitarian, Deist, agnostic, atheist or even merely secular.

With the complicity of the state Christians have been kidnapping non-Christian children well into the twentieth century in order to indoctrinate them. This practice is generally justified by claiming that non-Christian parents are somehow unsuitable.

In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, African children were routinely removed from their families and placed in Christian missions or orphanages to be raised as Christians. With a suitable education they could then be used as colonial soldiers with no qualms about flogging, torturing, mutilating or killing their fellow Africans. Children raised in Catholic orphanages were brutalised and given basic military training to became members of the Force Publique in the Belgian Free State. Having been themselves brutalised, they provided a useful resource for carrying out further atrocities, flogging, torturing, mutilating or killing men women and children on the orders of officers and on their own initiative.

Nsala, of the district of Wala in the Congo Free State He is looking at the severed hand and foot of Boali, his five-year old daughter Source: E. D Morel, King Leopold's Rule in Africa, pp 144-5 Atrocities like this were committed routinely by the Force Publique

For more on child abuse in the Congo Free State, and the role of the Christian Churches, see Christian atrocities.

Native American children were being taken from their families by the Canadian authorities until at least the 1950s. Aboriginal children were being taken from their families by the Australian authorities until the 1960s and put into Christian orphanages.

Extract from the first page of an Australian Government report, published in 1997

As in so many other areas, the Nazis had adopted and extended traditional Christian practices with regard to children. Nazis kidnapped children and indoctrinated them, just as the Catholic Church had done for centuries. In some cases, churches were used to facilitate the Nazi process. From 1940, Nazi agencies became responsible for the selection of children in occupied countries whom they thought could be 'Germanized' by placing them in German homes. In Poland these children were kidnapped from their own homes and from orphanages. In some cases they were torn from the arms of their mothers on the street. Any child with fair hair, blue eyes, or who 'looked Aryan' was liable to be seized. Some reception centres for selection and racial testing of these children were set up in religious establishments such as the monastery at Kalisz in Poland. Once in these homes the children were forbidden to speak Polish, instead were drilled in German before being sent to Germany, now bearing the names of their designated foster parents. Fraudulent birth certificates and genealogies were invented for the children. More than 200,000 children were kidnapped in Poland by the SS and the Brown Sisters (the NSV, the female counterpart of the SA).

the practice was not confined to Poland. Between 40,000 and 50,000 children were kidnapped in Russia, and in the Hungarian Ukraine another 50,000 were kidnapped. Children under six years of age were adopted out to suitably Aryan German families who were told that the children's parents had been killed in air raids. Children who failed to pass tests were sent Kalisz or Auschwitz, to disappear without trace.

A Roman Catholic organisation in Switzerland was kidnapping Romany children and sending them to be adopted by Catholic families well into the 1970s¹⁰. The children were routinely told that their parents were dead, and that they had no living relatives. The same thing was common amongst the children of unmarried mothers around the world — from New Zealand to Ireland and Brazil. Children were taken by force, with the complicity of the authorities, and given up for adoption as "orphans" to right-thinking Christians. The family unit was of no consequence.

As in other Christian countries, in Catholic Ireland Church and state conspired to punish single mothers for their supposed sin. Mothers were put into the care of nuns in "mother and baby homes" or in Magdelene Laundries. Babies were removed from their "sinful" mothers and both were punished for their sin. Some of these children were shipped off, illegally, by nuns for adoption by Catholic families, often in the USA. Others stayed in homes, separated from their mothers, treated as orphans full of sin, where they were routinely abused, physically, mentally and sexually. Many died at the hands of nuns, either of neglect or harsh treatment. Mortality rates were many times higher than in the population at large. In one mother and baby home, run by the Bon Secours nuns at Tuam, County Galway, between 1925 and 1961, the bodies of some 796 dead children were dumped in a sewage tank^10a. The sinful children had not apparently merited a Christian burial.

Sean Ross Abbey south of Roscrea in County Tipperary, Ireland is a convent and the location of St Anne’s Special School run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. A "mother and baby home" operated here from 1930 to 1970. Babies born in the home were put up for adoption, many of them in the USA. The graves of an unknown number of mothers and babies are located in the unmarked area. Some 438 babies were secretly exported from Sean Ross Abbey to the US for adoption.

In Britain children were not taken by force, but the effect was much the same. Stigmatised single mothers often left their children with Christian organisations, either to be adopted or to be cared for until the mother could take the child back. Many of these organisations sent children to the colonies without their parents' knowledge or consent — even when the mothers had stated explicitly that they would return to take their children back¹¹. The children were told falsely that their parents were dead¹². They were described as orphans and grew up believing themselves to be orphans in the usual sense of the word¹³. They were not given their birth certificates or other identification documentation. Sometimes they were given new names and birthdays. Sometimes their files were burned¹⁴. In some cases when parents came back to reclaim their children they were told, again falsely, that the children were dead¹⁵. Even when they were told the truth, no effort was made to bring the children back¹⁶. The people involved seemed to have no qualms about separating children from their natural parents. When Monsignor George Crennan, a former director of the Australian Federal Catholic Immigration Committee, was asked if he felt he had any responsibility to children who wanted to trace their families he replied "Most certainly not"¹⁷.

In 1947 the SS Asturias took the first post-war child immigrants to Australia

Sometimes two or more brothers and sisters might be sent out at the same time. Usually they were split up — destroying the last vestige of a family relationship. In 1956 a secular government-appointed body recommended that this practice should cease¹⁸. Even so, these children were to remain in institutions throughout their childhoods. Even when families came forward to foster children, traditionalist Churches preferred to keep them in orphanages, demonstrating once again their commitment to family life. An official report in Western Australia in 1959 indicated that "practically all children could be adequately fostered if the institutions were not loath to part with them¹⁹. When offers had been made to adopt children in Roman Catholic orphanages, the answer had been the same²⁰. The children were not available for adoption and would spend their whole childhoods in Church institutions. The Roman Catholic Church was active in encouraging child migration²¹. It had an interest in encouraging children to be sent to overseas orphanages, and looked for ways to increase their intake. In December 1954 a request was made to the Australian government by the Roman Catholic Church to reduce the minimum age of child migrants from 5 to 3. By now the Churches were finding it difficult to fill their beds. The last child migrations to Australia took place in 1967. By then between 100,000 and 150,000 children had been shipped around the world, away from their roots and their relatives. The practice was stopped not by the receiving institutions, but by the authorities in Britain who were becoming ever more aware of the type of future awaiting child migrants.²²

As middle-aged adults, many of these "orphans" discovered in the 1980s that they were not orphans at all. Some parents discovered that their children were not dead, as they had been told. The emotional turmoil caused by this "deceit and deception" was documented by Margaret Humphreys, the woman who discovered and exposed what had happened²³.

Similar practices existed in Australia for the babies of Australian single mothers, as they did in other countries. In the USA, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland, as well in Britain and Australia, for over fifty years, new born babies were effectively stolen by the authorities, or with the complicity of the authorities. Since Christian societies regarded single mothers as sinful and inadequate their babies were routinely handed over to Christian institutions. Sometimes the removal was accomplished by social pressure, sometimes illegally by deception, forgery or fraud. In some cases the babies were brought up as orphans in Christian orphanages. In others they were adopted by respectable couples who could be relied upon to bring them up in the Christian faith. They would be given new identities so that they could never find their natural parents. If the distraught mother made a fuss, she could be committed to a mental institution. She was by definition a sinner and an inadequate mother. Church institutions were involved throughout - from the local church, to the Christian maternity home, to the Church orphanage, and the Church adoption agency. This practice of "forced adoption" is also known as "baby scooping". In Australia, the victims are called the "White Stolen Generations" to distinguish them from aboriginal victims, the "Black Stolen Generations" - who were not necessarily the babies of single mothers (aboriginal children were kidnapped at any age from families that were not sufficiently Christian). The Baby Scoop Era ended in the 1970s or 1980s, as the Churches lost influence and contraception became popular.

From approximately 1940 to 1970, some 4 million mothers in the United States alone surrendered newborn babies to adoption, around 2 million during the 1960s alone. The overwhelming majority would have been "forced adoptions"

Sister Marie Carmine with orphans at the St. John’s Orphan Asylum West Philadelphia, USA, 1950s - but were these"orphans" really orphans?

In 2013 the Australian Government apologised for its role in forced adoption, referring to it as the "cruel, immoral practice of forced adoption". As the government apology pointed out, churches, charities and others had struck at "the most primal and sacred bond there is: the bond between a mother and her baby". Of the mothers it said "Too often they did not see their baby's face. They couldn't sooth his first cries. Never felt her warmth or smelt her skin. They could not give their own baby a name"

In other countries the sheer inhumanity was even worse. In Spain for example Catholic nuns stole new born babies in hospitals, telling the mothers that their babies had been stillborn, and then selling the babies to infertile Catholic couples who could afford "the price of a small flat".24 The same thing happened in Catholic countries in South America.

In Quebec it was even worse. Canadian Orphanages and schools were the financial responsibility of the provincial government but funding for mental institutions was provided by the federal government. This gave a financial incentive for provincial governments to identify orphans as mentally defective. From the 1940s into the 1960s, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and the Roman Catholic Church (which ran the orphanages) developed a scheme to obtain federal funding for thousands of children. Most of these children were not really orphans - they had been "orphaned" through forced removal from their unmarried mothers. In some cases perfectly normal "orphans" were sent to mental institutions. In other cases Catholic orphanages were reclassified as health-care facilities. The children suffered the usual range of abuse in Catholic institutions at the hands of nuns and priests: physical, sexual and mental, but even this was not all. Some of the children were used in medical experiments, obviously without any consent other than that of their Catholic guardians. In the 1990s, 3,000 or so survivors formed a group of "Duplessis Orphans" to start a campaign to publicise what had happened to them. In 2004 the "Duplessis Orphans" asked the Quebec government to excavate an abandoned cemetery at the east end of Montreal. They claimed that the cemetery contained the bodies of "orphans" who had been the subjected to medical experiments. According to testimony by individuals had been at the Cité de St-Jean-de-Dieu insane asylum, the orphans were routinely experimented upon and many died. A Quebec law passed in 1942 had allowed the nuns to sell unclaimed bodies to medical schools for $10. In 2002, a group of 1,100 orphans settled with the provincial government for about $25-million for wrongfully placing them in mental institutions. The Catholic Church has not apologized, and the terms of the financial settlement precludes action against the Church24a

In Canada, residential schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, sterilizing them, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, and also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons. Some 150,000 First Nations children passed through the Canadian residential school system, operated by various Churches, mainly Catholic and Anglican. This photo shows victims at the Canadian Indian Industrial School c1890

The practice of stealing children continued into the twenty-first century, revealed for example by the Arche de Zoë²⁵ (“Zoë's Ark”) scandal of late 2007. French volunteers “on a mission” were charged with kidnapping 103 children in Chad, making out that the children were orphans²⁶ and reviving memories of similar kidnappings carried out by the Catholic Church under King Leopold of the Belgians in the late nineteenth century²⁷. The accused had gone so far as to mock up wounds on the children in order to justify their removal. As in King Leopold's time most of the children were not orphans at all and had been taken from their families by force or deceit. As the President of Chad pointed out, some of the kidnap victims had been “torn” from their Muslim families²⁸. Six people were convicted in Paris in February 2013.

In 2010 ten American Baptists from Idaho, faced charges of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping minors and child trafficking in Haiti. Following a severe earthquake the Baptists had taken some 33 children, aged from two months to twelve years, mainly from the mountain village of Callebasse. The Baptists had then tried to take them out of the country passing them off as orphans without official papers. The plan had been to take them to the Dominican Republic, where the Baptists planned to have them adopted by Christian (presumably Baptist) couples from the US. At least half of the children knew perfectly well that they were not orphans. The Baptists falsely claimed to have rescued all the children from "an orphanage", but when CNN turned up to investigate, they had no difficulty in finding the parents of the "orphans". Some of the parents had voluntarily handed over their children to the Baptists, hoping they would give them a better life in the US. The Baptists had watched tearful parents saying good-bye to their own sons and daughters, before they took them anyway. Such was their Christian concern for family life²⁹. A Dominican friar, Jorge Puello, who was also involved, was found to be under investigation for sex trafficking in El Salvador.

Modern Christian concern for family life and family values is anything but traditional. In the past families were split up for countless reasons that suited the Church. We have seen a few of them: separation from pagans, Jews, Moslems, even Christians of the wrong denomination. People abandoning their families, sometimes leaving their spouses on their wedding day, to devote their lives to the Church. Children removed either by force, or by social pressure. Children given up to be enclosed in Monasteries and Nunneries. Boys castrated. Children taken by force or trickery from slaves, from non-Christian families and even from poor Christian families. Even now missionaries are breaking up families, telling new converts to leave their pagan spouses, siblings, parents and children, just as Christian missionaries have done since Roman times.

For the Christian Church, the historical ideal was lifelong celibacy. This unnatural state was disguised by pretend marriages. Priests married the Church. Nuns married Christ. Any sexual activity therefore constituted not merely fornication but adultery. This photograph is entitled "A Meeting of the Brides of Christ on their Wedding Day to their Lord at the Nunnery in Godalming, Surrey". It was, taken at the Ladywell Convent and is one of a series on the lives of nuns that Eve Arnold took during the mid-1960s. It was bequeathed to the V&A in 2010.

Mother Caroline-Marie helping a new novice of the Institute of Christ the King with her bridal veil.

Eve Arnold - A wedding cake for the Brides of Christ, Surrey, England, 1965.

Families are only important when they serve Christian ends. Otherwise they are dispensable. The current attachment to family values, so popular in certain quarters, is an innovation, and runs contrary to the historical stance of all mainstream Churches, as academic theologians freely confirm. Don Cupitt put it most clearly: "The idealisation of the family is a modern cultural creation, which the Churches have validated, and now no modern bishop would dream of publicly endorsing Jesus' views about the family".

More social issues:

• Slavery
• Racism
• Capital Punishment
• Penal Reform
• Physical Abuse
• Treatment of Women
• Contraception
• Abortion
• Divorce
• Children
• Romanies
• The Physically Ill
• The Mentally Ill
• The Poor
• Animals
• Ecology

* The name is a biblical pun with works in French, but less well in English. In French Noah's Ark is the arche de Noë, just one letter different from the arche de Zoë.

1 "Non Liberari potest Ecclesia a servitute laicorum nisi liberentur prius clerici ab uxoribus".

2 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, p 254, quoting St Bernard, letter number 247 (in Migne, JP, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, I (Patrologia Latina), Paris, 1844-55, vol. clxxxii, col. 447).

3 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, p 254, quoting St Bernard, letter number 247 (in Migne, JP, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, I (Patrologia Latina), Paris, 1844-55, vol. clxxxii, col. 447).

4 The text of this excommunication in the "Varmondiano" code is preserved in the Diocesan library of Ivrea, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy.

5 Cited by Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, p 29.

6 The idea of a mutual fund to provide insurance for the families of Scottish clergy had been pioneered by a minister and mathematician, Dr Robert wallace who founded the Ministers" Widows" Fund in the middle of the eighteenth Century.

6a Bruce L. Venarde (Translator), The Rule of Saint Benedict (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library), Harvard University Press (May 23, 2011) p.193

7 An account of the Edgardo Mortara affair and other such scandals is given in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, PP 266-273.

8 See The Guardian, Pope urged to apologise for Vatican castrations, Rory Carroll in Rome, Tuesday 14 August 2001

A timeline of Papal castrati:

• 1560: The first boys are castrated to provide the "voice of angels" in the Sistine Chapel Choir.
• 1589: Pope Sixtus V issues a papal Bull approving the recruitment of castrati for the choir of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
• By 1625 all sopranos in the Sistine Chapel choir are castrati.
• By 1789 there were more than 200 castrati in Rome’s chapel choirs alone.
• During the 17th and 18th centuries in Italy, some 4,000 - 5,000 boys aged between 7 and 9 are castrated annually for the Church.
• 1870: Castrations banned in the Papal States (the last jurisdiction to do so). The Papal states were taken over by the French in 1870
• 1878: Pope Leo XIII ends the hiring of new castrati by the church (except the Vatican).
• 1902: Pope Leo XIII ruled that new castrati would not be admitted to the Sistine Chapel.
• 1903: Pope Pius X banned adult male sopranos from the Vatican.
• 1922: The Church’s last Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, dies.
• 20 Century: Historians suspect that Domenico Mancini, a private pontifical singer who performed from 1939 to 1959, was a castrato.
• 2001: Revelations that the Vatican encouraged the castration of choir boys in the name of art for hundreds of years prompt calls for a papal apology. Human rights groups, historians and Italian commentators say the Pope should ask forgiveness for his predecessors' role in the mutilation of castrati singers.

9 Faulhaber Remains, item no. 8203, cited by Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, PP 300-1.

10 See Frances Williams, “Swiss Shame over Stolen Children,” Sunday Times (London), June 8, 1986, p. 10; Reto Pieth, “Switzerland's Secret Crusade against the Gypsies,” In These Times, January 27-February 2, 1988, p. 4. In 1926, Swiss authorities began systematically taking Romany children from their parents to provide them with a "better life." An explicitly Christian organization named Pro Juventute, motivated by “proto-Nazi ideas of race hygiene” sponsored a program called "Operation Children of the Road" for many years, its purpose being destruction of the Romany way of life.

10a http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/04/children-galway-mass-graves-ireland-catholic-church, retrieved 4 June 2014.

11 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 252.

12 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 69.

13 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 239. Out of thousands of child migration cases researched by Margaret Humphreys, only one involved a genuine orphan, p 363.

14 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 199.

15 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 240.

16 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 236. A particularly well documented case is described on PP 365-369.

17 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 65.

18 The recommendation was made by the Oversea [sic] Migration Board. See Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 358.

19 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 361.

20 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 364.

21 Humphreys, Empty Cradles, PP 276-282.

22 The forced migration of children from Britain over a sixty year period was the subject of a four part series on Radio 4 in 2003. The series was based largely on the personal testimony of over 150 former child migrants sent to Australia, Rhodesia, Canada and New Zealand. As it pointed out “Particularly guilty were the homes of the Christian Brothers in Australia where several thousand children were accommodated over the years and where physical and sexual abuse and undernourishment seems to have been rife.” And said of the practice that “despite warnings from governments and independent inspectors, it was pursued for almost 6 decades”. The series is still available on-line at the time of writing. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/child_migrants.shtml

23 Humphreys, Empty Cradles.

24 For details of systematic stealing of babies in Spain in the second part of the twentieth century see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12886441. See also http://anadir.es/ (in Spanish).

24a Covered extensively by the Canadian press and at
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/duplessis-orphans
http://www.examiner.com/article/duplessis-orphans-abuse-at-the-hands-of-mental-institutions

25 http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22700419-401,00.html

26 “Historical Wounds Underlie Outrage In Chad”, International Herald Tribune, 5 th November 2007, p2

27 For a more detailed account than most see http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/poller/1177 (Under pressure from the French government the convicted offenders were pardoned by the President of Chad in March 2008, but were to be be re-tried in France.

28 New York Times France: Aid Workers Convicted in Adoption Scheme, By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, February 12, 2013

29 Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2010 (Article by Tom Leonard in New York). Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2010 (US Baptists charged with kidnapping Haitian children, by Tom Leonard in New York).

National Apology for Forced Adoptions
made on Thursday 21 March 2013, by Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia