Who "Bought Pagan Babies?"

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Who here “bought pagan babies” in Catholic grade school? Who here even gets the reference?

We all did when I was growing up. My wife says she has dreams where one of them shows up at our doorstep and says, “Hi, I’m yours!”
 
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Nope. Perhaps local custom?

Closest was “feeding the starving Armenians”. As an adult, I guessed that was also local custom until I heard Johnny Carson mention it once on the Tonight show.
 
Back in the olden times, before Vatican II, before the English Mass, when nuns roamed the Earth in herds and terrorized Catholic schoolboys, there was a program that nearly every Catholic grade school participated in to raise money for the missions. It was called, and I am not making this up, Pagan Babies. It probably had an official name, but it was universally called that.

You got these pieces of cardboard from Sister. The cardboard folded up into a little box with a slot in it. You put your extra lunch money into it until it got to five dollars. When that happened, and you turned it in, you “adopted” a “pagan baby” in the missions and you even got to name the baby. Some schools even gave out adoption certificates, like the one below.

The girls really took it seriously and having a lot of pagan babies was status. The guys wanted to do it to see what kind of a crazy name they could give the kid that would get by Sister. Of course, it was all for show. No babies, pagan or otherwise, were harmed, or adopted, during the run of this program.

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That’s gloriously awful. 🤣 I’m very interested in mid-20th century America so while I can’t imagine this ever happening today, it’s certainly fascinating to know this once happened!
 
Oh my gosh, exactly this!^ Your memory is outstanding jfz!

Although I remember only needing $1 to adopt a baby (this was in the '50s and early '60s). The sisters treated it like a contest. The cutouts of the pagan babies were posted on a board with their names and a running total of adoptees was kept for everyone to see. The cutouts depicted boy and girl children of all ethnicities with exotic clothing. We wanted to fill all the slots on the board. We had a lot of fun choosing the names too! It was usually boys vs. girls but sometimes we competed with other classes in our grade at my school (there were 3 classes for each grade with an average of 80-90 kids per class).

I wonder what happened to all the pagan babies we adopted?
 
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Yes - in the UK too…there was a poster with a ladder adorned by angels, and when your donated pennies got you to the top of the ladder, a little black baby was yours!
 
There was a movie with Jack Nicholson, in which he adopts a child from Africa. As in he was sending regularly money for him and the sister who took care of that child was writing to him letters about how the child was doing. There was no discussion about the child’s religion.
This is the movie - “About Schmidt” (2002). The action of the movie is quite contemporary, I wonder if the story of adopting a child was metaphorical or did have any link to reality? Probably this is still going on for certain missions?
Anyway, “adopting a child” is not “buying a child”.
 
We used to have this at school during lent along with individual mission money boxes that went home. This was in the early 1970s.

We had 2 jars on sisters desk one each for girls and boys. I think whoever had 5 dollars in their jar first got to vote to name the baby. We used to get stickers and a certificate too.

When the boys won, they would pick names like kermit or other,silly names.

We used to win prizes too if our class brought in the most money. I remember winning a desk top cross that was white plastic and the principal came to distribute them

Now the kids have Holy Childhood boxes (mission money)for Lent and Advent.
 
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We did this in my school too, back in the early 60s. Nothing fancy like the adoption certificate and we too called it “buying pagan babies” – except we said it in French. 😀
 
One nun who has a blog proposed doing a “pagan baby reunion.” I think she was just trying to be funny, but it’s an interesting idea!
 
Yes, of course, but “buying” was the common terminology, even with the nuns! No one said “sponsored,” ever, where I was. I have commiserated with Catholics my age from all over the country and they have the same story. That’s the twist that burned into my Catholic brain!
 
Our school had that, but it was the 70s and we were way more enlightened. We “helped the poor pagan children”.
Because they were poor.
But we didn’t get a child’s name or anything, we just collected it and it was sent to the charity that sponsored it. But the brochure we got was very retro and 50s-looking, even to our inexperienced eyes…
My dad and his sibs bought pagan babies, however.
 
Yes. I don’t think the word sponser was around then, lol.

Thank u for sharing this sweet memory. I 💕 the handwriting on the certificate too. Palmer method up top. All Sisters had the same handwriting.☺️
 
Cordelia told Charles she was buying pagan babies, as I recall, in Brideshead Revisited.
 
Is the little Caucasian baby with the red cape in the image Baby Jesus?

We used to collect money as well. But our collection was generally for poor children.
 
Mary888 said:
There was a movie with Jack Nicholson, in which he adopts a child from Africa. As in he was sending regularly money for him and the sister who took care of that child was writing to him letters about how the child was doing. There was no discussion about the child’s religion.
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There are, or at least used to be, a lot of charities that did this, including I believe the one that Sally Struthers used to promote in USA on teary late night tv ads that were widely parodied. The problem is that some of the charities were faking the letters or sending out a form letter, and sometimes people would discover this by, for example, receiving the exact same letter twice. It put people off giving when they realized they were not actually having the personal connection to a child, and made them wonder where their money went.
 
I am too young and my Catholic school was too enlightened to do this activity. A shame, it sounds like it was a lot of fun, though by today’s standards, “politically incorrect”.

We had the fold-up box to put change in during Lent and then we took it into school at the end of Lent to donate to Maryknoll missions, for food, we were told. Lots of pictures of African kids getting big bowls of rice.
 
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LOL

That would be regarded as HUGELY racist by todays standards.
 
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