One of my fellow employees is reading a book called Pagan Babies. I remember someone once making a comment about that phrase, but I can’t remember what it refered to. I think it has something to do with the “Poor starving babies overseas” that people send money to when they donate at Church, but I’m not sure. Has anyone else heard this phrase before, and if so, do you remember what it refers to?
I’ve mainly heard it in a Catholic context…I think they were primarily the ones who used the term. It’s donating money for missionary work. Various Christian missionaries will go to an area, do things like build hospitals and schools, and try to convert the people there to Christianity
Bingo. As a pre-Vatican II Catholic school product, I can confirm. Usually during Lent, we’d be asked to cough up a penny a day or something, to benefit the PB’s.
I think I would tune in every day to watch Jim Henson’s Pagan Babies. But it probably isn’t that.
There’s a play called Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? which takes place in a Catholic grammar/middle school. Some of the boys are very excited about the drive to help the poor starving Indian children. The constantly refer to it as “We’re gonna buy us a pagan baby.” They wanted to call him Trigger (after the horse), but the head priest at the school insisted that the child’s name was Francis. The boys were crushed.
Nowadays, I refer to those who adopt a Chinese girl, or eastern European baby as “buying a pagan baby.” I have to stop myself around those who have actually done so.
Favorite line from the play, a 13 year old boy goes into his weekly confession: “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I lied to my parents twice. I stole my sister’s lunch money 3 times, I took the Lord’s name in vain 3 times, and I had 437 impure thoughts.”
“Pagan Babies”?
BAAAANND NAME!!! 
Absolutely. They played many venues here including regularly at Anna Bananas on South King Street. One of the guys was the father of a kid in my daughter’s preschool. They were good!
I only realised a couple of years ago that the “mission money” I was more or less obligated to bring to school each day (week? who knows) as a child in Catholic school, way, way post Vat-II might I add, was in fact being used to attempt to convert people in Africa to Christianity. I feel fairly crap about this, especially having heard of the “no conversion no food” methods used, and having met too many Africans called Michael. At the time we thought the money was for starving babies, aka “the black babies”, but we had no concept of what that actually meant or what a black baby might be. I was fairly stunned when I realised that I had been financially backing such a thing in my childhood years. The knitting of little woolly jumpers for “Mother Teresa” however does not bother me as much now as it did then. I couln’t for the life of me work out why Mother Teresa would need woolly jumpers in India, sure isn’t it very warm there?
I can’t imagine a Catholic school student, back in the days of pagan babies, when the schools were run by nuns, saying “We’re gonna buy us” out loud more than once.
We did, indeed, “buy” pagan babies. I think they “cost” $10. I don’t recall any coercion. We would just bring in our nickles and dimes until we had contributed $10 at which point we could, they said, name one baby. A few kids “bought” more than one in a year but I think the norm was one.
And, having visited Catholic and other missions all over Africa in the 1970’s and '80’s, I don’t think that Iteki needs to worry that any “pagan baby” money was used for anything untoward. The way I saw the missions operate is that they served as a general resource in the community for educational and health services as well as spiritual resource for Catholics. They would try to be self-supporting but in most of sub-Saharan Africa they needed external support to be able to run schools and hospitals. The idea was to support the community and hope that non-Catholics would develop a high regard for the missionaries and local Catholics alike and thus be drawn to the Catholic community.
Iteki also need not worry about wooly jumpers being wasted in India. Not all of India is hot all year.
The term used at St Patrick’s in the '50s was, IIRC, “ransoming” a Pagan Baby–the implication being that we were setting the poor waif free from the toils of Satan.
While clearing my father’s house after his death, we found a yellowed certificate testifying that a PB had been ransomed by the efforts of one of our classes (whether my brother’s or mine was not specified). The drawing depicted a couple of (white) cherubs conducting a (black) grass-skirt-clad child away from a mosque and a pagoda, towards a (white) Jesus, while two (white) nuns looked on approvingly. In a totally non-PC way, one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in a long while.
(Another brother has the certificate, and despite his promises, hasn’t yet had copies made for the rest of us. The wart. . . .)
Yeah! Yeah has assuaged most of my residual guilt
I have zero problem with church workers providing humanitarian services in places that might need it I would like to add. I don’t even have a problem with them explaining to people that they are doing this because the god they belive in thinks its important to help people or whatever, I had just heard some horror stories whereby assistance was strongly linked to converstion, “Aha, you want a measles vaccination for your baby? Well, you see this clinic is for Catholics only…hint hint”.
For many years I thought Mother Teresa was some sort of little magical pixie-nun, since noone ever actually mentioned that the jumpers were for the babbies. I was not a bright child.
Like many, I read a lot of funny shit on this board, but I hardly ever laugh out loud. This cracked my shit up. Thank you for that one pldennison.
John Powers wrote a seriers of books about growing up Catholic in Chicago. One was called Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, and I’m sure it’s the basis of the play referred to above. I think another one had “Pagan Babies” in the title.
Being brung up Catholic in the 1960s, my sister and I were both expected to contribute pennies to the salvation of “pagan babies”. We still have a couple of certificates from doing so. As OttoDaFe notes above, this was often called “ransoming” them. We were always given the impression that our money went toward supporting such a kid, getting it baptized, and seeing to it that the kid got to lead a good Catholic life out in the wilds of wherever. I’m a little curious about what you really did get for that money, now.
I seem to remember that the deal was that $10 (this was in the 1950s) was sufficient to feed one baby for one year. Did the kids get a new name every year or was one year of feeding all they needed? One disappointment was that, unlike the contributors Sally Struther’s charity, we never got pictures and letters from “our” child.
From Brideshead Revisited (the first thing I thought of while reading this thread) :
I last remember hearing the term “pagan babies” when I was in 5th grade… so that had to be 1971.
At the time, we Catholic school kids were given “mite boxes” into which we were supposed to put the occasional penny, nickel or dime. When we’d collected a total of ten dollars, we got the privilege of “adopting” a pagan baby, and giving it a name. I remember that, occasionally, a name the class had chosen was rejected, as it had to be a saint’s name (heck, how were WE supposed to know if there was a St. Linda, a St. Maureen or a St. Robert?)
But after 1971 or so, I never remember hearing that phrase again, except from ex-Catholic comedians. There were still fundraising efforts for missionaries, but appeals for funds usually dealt with practical benefits (food, clothes, medicine, etc.) for the poor, rather than on their conversion to Catholicism.