NEW YORK — It was a slow Saturday morning in May 2017 when Maria Laurino got a phone call from her cousin, John Mantica. He was seeking directions through New York City, where Laurino lived, but ended up planting a seed of curiosity in her mind.

Mantica was born in Italy and adopted by a Steubenville couple in 1959, when he was only 9 months old. He told Laurino about a social media group he’d recently joined, members of which had also been born in Italy and adopted by American couples through a program run by the Catholic church.

Through the group, he’d heard tales of birth mothers in Italy who’d supposedly been pressured by society and the church to give up their children, many of whom were sent to the U.S. for adoption with no connection to their biological families.

Laurino — an Italian-American journalist, speech writer and teacher — became interested and connected with the group’s founder, John Campitelli, who himself had been adopted through the Vatican-run program and was dedicated to connecting adoptees with the pasts they’d lost.

With that vital connection, Laurino launched into researching the Vatican’s so-called orphan program that affected thousands of Italian birth mothers and their children. A proportionally large number of those children, like Laurino’s cousin, were adopted by families in Steubenville and grew up knowing they were adopted but never knew the circumstances of their familial separation and expatriation.

As Laurino would find, some adoptees have no interest in digging up their pasts, while others mourn the severance from their families in Italy and now struggle to pick up the pieces.

Laurino’s quest for information is detailed in her book “The Price of Children,” published on Oct. 15. She draws from adoptees’ and birth mothers’ personal testimonies, as well as thousands of archival documents originating from church officials involved in the program, namely Monsignor Andrew P. Landi, the program’s operator in Rome, and Monsignor Emil N. Komora of the Catholic Committee for Refugees, who oversaw children’s placement in the U.S. from his New York office.

“(My book) is an investigative piece based on archival documents and the interviews I did in America and in Italy,” Laurino said, “and it’s also an essay because I have a particular point of view, and I was trying to place these (birth mothers) and the terrible treatment of women.”

***Program origins***

Following World War II, the Vatican created the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza to aid the poor of Italy, which at the time was described as a shattered county dealing with many out-of-wedlock births, Laurino said. The adoption program evolved out of this commission initially to re-house war orphans, defined by the U.S. Displaced Person’s Act of 1948 as a child under 16 years old who’d lost both parents to the war.

Congress amended that act in 1950 due to the large number of American couples who wanted to adopt children, Laurino said. Thus, the definition of war orphan was expanded to include children with one parent who was “incapable of providing care” due to the “death or disappearance” of the other parent.

The children actually being adopted hardly fit the image of a war orphan. Laurino noted that, by a few years into the program, children directly affected by the war were adolescents. But American couples wanted babies, she said, so the program dropped the war from its name around 1955.

“All of these children fell under this (orphan) category because it was a very patriarchal society,” Laurino said. “The men were completely not held accountable. They either walked or ran way. … All of the burden fell on the women, and many were forced (to give up their child) because of societal pressure. Mothers turned against daughters. It was a terrible shame to have a child out of wedlock.”

***Children’s paths***

Children of unmarried parents were placed in specific institutions known as brefotrofios, which were known for their high child mortality rate due to malnutrition and disease. Laurino said birth mothers were purposely separated from their children and severely limited in their contact. This was done allegedly to keep the mothers from “polluting” the children with their supposed vices.

With brefotrofios filling up, the orphan program was seen as a pragmatic solution by those involved, who wanted the children raised in good, Catholic homes in the U.S., Laurino said. Estimates place the number of Italian children funneled through the Vatican’s program between 1950 and 1970 as high as 3,700, Laurino said.

To meet the demand for adoptions, priests were sent across Italy to find more orphans, according to records Laurino located. Adoptive parents would pay $475 per child — roughly $4,500 today — and although there was a profit to be made, Laurino doesn’t believe that was the primary motivation.

“I actually think this was more of a moral statement,” Laurino said. “I think the church was very concerned, in Italy and America, (with) the values at the time. …”

Upon a child’s entrance into an institution, birth mothers’ identities were scrubbed from records. Many of the children were assigned false names — something that would cause big issues for adoptees who later decided to trace their roots.

Critical to the orphan program was a consent form birth mothers would sign that relinquished all rights to their children, Laurino said. Mothers often faced pressure to sign away their children, didn’t understand the forms or had others sign their forms in their place without their permission.

Many women were lied to, being told they could reconnect with their children later, only for their children to be put up for adoption, Laurino said. Others were told falsely that their child had died — seemingly to provide some sense of closure for the mother.

Adoptees-to-be were taken from their institutions by train to Rome, where they’d be flown to New York City ahead of placement with an adoptive family, Laurino said.

***The “Steubenville cluster”***

From among the records, two U.S. communities stood out as having disproportionately high numbers of adoptees in relation to their populations: Pueblo, Colo., and Steubenville, which received about 80 and 30 adoptees respectively during the program’s duration.

Laurino hypothesizes that Steubenville’s high number of adoptees is due to some “strong connection” between Steubenville’s Catholic Charities, which managed children’s local placements, and the American Catholic Church in Rome.

Those in the “Steubenville cluster,” as Laurino calls it, weren’t widely aware of their shared backgrounds when growing up but have now come to the realization, decades later.

“It’s this really interesting anomaly,” Laurino said. “How did so many of these kids from the brefitrofios in Italy end up in one town? And how fascinating that they didn’t know. … (Adoptees I interviewed,) they said this blows our minds to know that the boy you were in high school chorus with and sat next to actually came from an institution and you had no idea. … This path that they all shared and they didn’t know or knew only a little part — they had heard about some adoptions here, but not many.”

Each Steubenville adoptee has his or her own story to tell, Laurino said, with adoption being a uniquely “singular experience.”

As for Laurino, she wishes that her book will enlighten readers about what happened in Italy and the questions it raises about the importance of women’s rights.

“I hope readers can come away understanding a story that I felt was shocking and that has clearly still affected the lives of many adoptees and birth mothers.”

(Monday: A look at some of the Steubenville adoptees’ upbringings and journeys forward.)