The Vatican’s Orphans is a 60 Minutes (America) segment on the thousands of Italian babies shipped to American on an “orphan visa” even though most of the babies weren’t actual orphans.

60 Minutes interviewed Maria Laurino who uncovered the orphan program from examining hundreds of documents in the Vatican’s archive.

Sometimes the ‘consent’ form was signed by doctors and nurses who never told the mother; mothers were pressured to give up their babies and “in the worst cases [mothers] were told their child had died”.

Laurino read letters in the archive from distressed mothers who had been told they could get their children back.

According to 60 Minutes, the church charged $475 per child, “about $4500 today”.