Get 'em while they're young

When I was being raised in a fundamentalist church (oh, yes), a standard accusation leveled at Catholics, in a litany of criticism intended to paint them as Satan's minions, was that one of their basic mottos was: give us a child up to the age of seven, and we'll make him a Catholic for life. Fear for the little children, brethren! The Catholics prey upon the helpless.

Well, yeah. So do the fundamentalists.

Another favorite saying back then and there came from the men who advised their sons to take a young woman to wed, so "you can train her up right".

I used to get solicitations from some Catholic orphanage that takes in Native American children, until one day I wrote them a letter saying I'd happily contribute as soon as they started raising those kids in accordance with their own heritage and teaching them Native American religious practices. They don't send me solicitations any more.

Recently, this 1946 letter authored by the Vatican surfaced:

Paris, October 23, 1946

Concerning Jewish children who were entrusted to Catholic institutions and families during the German occupation and are now demanded by Jewish institutions to be handed over to them, the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has made a decision that can be summarized in this way:

1) Avoid, as much as possible, responding in writing to Jewish authorities, but rather do it orally.
2) Each time a response is necessary, it is necessary to say that the Church must conduct investigations in order to study each case individually.
3) Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing.
4) For children who no longer have their parents, given the fact that the Church has responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by the Church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves. This, evidently, is for children who would not have been baptized.
5) If the children have been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now, providing that the children have not received baptism they can be given back.It is to be noted that this decision of the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.
  source

And if they had been baptized into the Catholic Church, then the parents were just as shit out of luck to get them back as if the Nazis had taken them.

Okay, I'm getting to the point....

With reams of hysterical copy coming out of Southeast Asia speculating about children--orphaned by the Tsunami--being kidnapped for sexual slavery, here's an example of Tsunami-victim child abuse that isn't getting nearly as much attention. "Seems some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Last week the Indonesian Embassy tried to quell rumors among Singapore's Muslim population that Christian missionaries were about to adopt 300 tsunami orphans from the conflicted region of Aceh, and raise the Muslim children as Christians. This week, a missionary group from Virginia called WorldHelp (directed by the first-ever graduate from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University), has done just that, airlifting the 300 children out of Aceh to Jakarta, where they will be raised in a Christian orphanage that is yet to be built," says January 13 issue of The Revealer, the excellent daily news bulletin of New York University's Center for Religion and the Media, adding: "While large religious relief organizations have policies against proselytizing after catastrophes, smaller groups like WorldHelp have presented the tsunami as an opportunity to make converts in places that are normally 'closed to the gospel." On their website, WorldHelp appealed for donations by saying: 'These children are homeless, destitute, traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children's home, their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people.'""
  Direland post

Fortunately, their efforts have been addressed by the Indonesian government. It's unclear to me in the reading of these two stories whether the Christian group was blocked from permanently settling the children in Christian homes, or whether they were blocked from taking more children out of Aceh.