Religious Scandal: Convent Sold ‘Blessed Babies’ for $200 Each, All Were Nuns’ Slave Children | HO!!!!

Religious Scandal: Convent Sold “Blessed Babies” for $200 Each, All Were Nuns’ Slave Children | HO!!!!

In the heart of 19th-century Louisiana, where cypress trees dipped their roots into brown water and sugar fields shimmered under punishing sun, a religious institution quietly did the devil’s work in God’s name.

Between 1842 and 1856, the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy in St. Augustine Parish issued birth certificates with a neat, repeated figure in the margins:

$200.

Eighty-seven babies.
Fourteen years.
Three parishes.

On paper, every case was described as a “blessed adoption” — an act of Christian charity, giving unfortunate children new lives with devout Catholic families.

But the fire that ripped through the convent’s east wing in March 1856 didn’t just char brick and timber. It burned through the lies.

Inside a scorched office, investigators found ledgers, lists, and letters that told a different story:

Every child listed as “orphaned” or “rescued”

Every adoption accompanied by a “donation” of exactly $200

And every birth… took place inside the convent walls

The mothers weren’t anonymous “fallen women.”
They were enslaved Black women, forced to labor in fields by day and in childbirth by night.

And they weren’t just housed by the convent.

They were owned.

The Parish That Trusted God — and Never Asked Questions

St. Augustine Parish lay along the western bank of the Atchafalaya River, a patchwork of sugar plantations, slave quarters, and Catholic piety. By 1840, the parish landscape could be counted in numbers:

11 sugar plantations

23 slave quarters

2 cotton gins

1 Catholic convent

That convent, the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows, had been founded in 1808 by French nuns driven out by Napoleon’s persecution of the Church. They came bearing crosses, habits, and a mission: prayer, charity, education.

Local planters gave them 80 acres as an offering to God and a down payment on prestige.

The convent sat two miles from the river, at the end of an oyster-shell road that turned to sucking mud each storm season. The main three-story brick house held the chapel, refectory, schoolrooms, and dormitories. Behind it, tucked away from the gaze of visitors, stood the work buildings:

A laundry house

A kitchen garden

A small infirmary

And a long, low structure called the penitent house

To the outside world, the penitent house housed “fallen women seeking redemption.”

Inside, it functioned as something far colder: a maternity prison for enslaved women.

At the center of this system stood Mother Superior Céleste Beaumont, a 61-year-old Frenchwoman known for her rigid discipline and flawless ledgers. She recorded everything: candles burned, vegetables harvested, linens washed, prayers counted.

And babies processed.

“Charitable Adoptions” — $200 at a Time

By the early 1840s, the sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows had a reputation that blended holiness with practicality.

They:

Ran a small school for planter daughters

Sold vegetables and preserves

Took in laundry for wealthy families

And, through discreet notices in the New Orleans Catholic Register, announced their willingness to “facilitate Christian adoptions”

For parish families struggling with childlessness, the arrangement was ideal:

The nuns said the infants came from “unfortunate circumstances”

The babies arrived healthy, swaddled, and freshly baptized

The parish priest signed every certificate

And nothing more was asked

All it cost was a “donation” of $200.

No one questioned how a small rural convent sourced so many babies. No one demanded to see the mothers. No one asked what happened inside the long, locked building behind the garden.

In a society built on human ownership, it was easy not to ask.

Ruth: “We Were Enslaved Twice There”

The truth begins, as it often does, with one woman.

Her name was Ruth.

She was born enslaved on the Devou plantation, property of Charles Devou, grandson of the family that had donated land to the convent. By 1841, Ruth was 19 and pregnant — the predictable result of a planter who used the slave quarters as an extension of his marital bed.

His wife, Amélie, raised in New Orleans society and educated by nuns, understood exactly what Ruth’s changing body meant.

But in her world, a respectable white woman did not accuse her husband of rape. She erased the evidence.

Her solution was framed as piety:

“The sisters always need help,” she told Charles at breakfast.
“We could donate Ruth’s services. It would be an act of charity.”

Ruth was taken to the convent in April 1841 with no belongings and no say in the matter.

Mother Superior Beaumont met them at the door. Charles explained that he was “giving” Ruth to the convent for as long as they found her useful.

“We accept this charitable gift,”
the Mother Superior replied.
“She will be put to good use in God’s service.”

Ruth was led past polished parlors and quiet chapel pews, out the back, through the garden, toward the long low building she’d barely noticed from the road.

The penitent house.

Inside, a narrow cell waited — a bed, a chamber pot, a wooden cross. The Mother Superior laid out the terms:

Wake at 4:30 a.m. with the bell

Cotton fields until noon

One hour’s rest

Laundry work until evening

Two meals a day

No talking unless necessary for work

Pray for forgiveness

“When your time comes,” she added,
“your child will be given to a good Christian family.
This is God’s mercy toward your sin.”

It didn’t matter that she had never consented to the pregnancy.
In this system, her body was sin. Her child was product. The convent was redemption — and factory.

The Assembly Line of Mercy

The first morning Ruth heard them: doors unlocking down the corridor, feet shuffling, the dull groans of exhausted bodies.

She wasn’t alone.

There were six other women, all in their teens or twenties, all visibly pregnant. All Black. All enslaved. All sent there by masters who wanted them out of sight.

They walked in a silent line out to the fields.

Behind the convent — hidden by a line of oaks — stretched twenty acres of cotton, worked exclusively by these women under the watchful eyes of Sister Josephine, who carried a bell and the authority to punish “sloth” with fasting or worse.

For Ruth, the work was familiar. She had picked cotton since childhood. But pregnancy made it brutal — the bending, the heat, the weight on her back.

At noon they were marched to a crude refectory for beans and cornbread. Then to the laundry house, where steam rose from enormous copper vats and lye soap ate into their hands. They scrubbed altar linens, nun’s habits, and the fine clothes of plantation families who sent their washing to be “purified” by devout hands.

By 6:00 p.m., Ruth could barely stand.
At 4:30 a.m., the bell dragged her up again.

Days bled together — cotton, laundry, prayer, hunger, exhaustion, and a belly growing heavier with each sunrise.

Through whispered fragments in the laundry house, Ruth learned the others’ names:

Hannah, 23, pregnant for the third time

Lydia, only 15, who cried quietly at night

Clara, Esther, Dinah, Naomi — all sent by masters or mistresses who needed to erase visible consequences

Hannah had already given birth to two babies at the convent.

“They took both within days,” she told Ruth in a hush.
“I don’t know where. I only know this:
They pay $200 for each child.”

Those babies were not orphans. Their mothers were right there, working in the sun until their bodies collapsed.

The sisters called it mercy.
The ledger called it income.

The Mathematics of Exploitation

Ruth started to see the pattern.

At any given time, the penitent house held 7–9 pregnant women. Each produced at least one child. Many returned, pregnant again, after being sent back to their plantations. Some stayed for years, delivering multiple babies that disappeared into the adoption pipeline.

At $200 per baby, with 10–12 babies per year, the convent pulled in roughly $2,000–$2,400 annually from “charitable adoptions” alone — a staggering sum for a rural religious institution.

That didn’t include:

The labor extracted in the cotton fields

The paid laundry service

The reputational capital gained by being the “merciful” solution to planters’ sins

The convent’s books — later copied in secret — told the story plainly:

Every baby listed

Every family matched

Every “donation” neat in the margin

What was slavery on the plantations became something more focused here:

Reproductive slavery, sanitized with holy water.

Ruth understood it with brutal clarity:

“We were enslaved twice there,” she would later dictate.
“Once by the masters who owned our bodies.
Again by the church that stole our children.”

Ten Minutes of Motherhood

Ruth’s first child was born on a suffocating morning in September 1841.

The labor lasted 14 hours. She screamed until her voice shredded, then bit through the pain in silence so no one could accuse her of “complaining.”

Sister Marie-Thérèse, the convent’s de facto midwife, delivered the baby with efficient hands.

“A boy,” she said. “Healthy.”

She wrapped him in white cloth and handed him to Ruth.

For the first and nearly last time, Ruth was allowed to hold her son:

Ten tiny fingers

A small, confused cry

A warm face pressed against her chest

“Ten minutes,” Ruth would remember.
“Maybe fifteen.”

Then the sister took him away “for baptism.”

He was named Thomas.
He was gone within a week.

Ruth was not permitted at the baptism. She was not asked to consent to the adoption. She was not told the family’s name. She was not told if they were kind.

She was told to get up and return to the fields.

In the next three months, two more women gave birth:

Lydia’s girl cried incessantly before being carried out.

Clara’s twins — boy and girl — fetched $350 together. Ruth knew the exact amount because she overheard Mother Superior discussing it with the parish priest:

“The Robichaux family was generous,”
Mother Superior said.
“Two children at once, an increased donation by fifty percent.”

“God’s blessings multiply,”
the priest replied.

In the laundry house, Ruth’s hands tightened around the sheet she was scrubbing.

“Blessings. Donations. Orphans.”

Words smoothed over what was happening:

Children cataloged. Mothers erased. Money collected.

The Curious Girl Who Noticed Too Much

Outside the penitent house, another pair of eyes had begun to piece together the pattern.

Her name was Marguerite Bellamy, 17, the daughter of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Bellamy, physician to most of the parish elite. She was precisely the kind of girl the convent school was built for: wealthy, Catholic, and expected to marry well.

She was also dangerously observant.

One January morning in 1842, she arrived early for her lesson and saw Sister Marie-Thérèse hurrying across the courtyard with a bundle wrapped in white.

A baby’s cry slipped out before being muffled.

“Is that a baby?” Marguerite asked.

“A charitable case,” the sister replied quickly.
“We are arranging a Christian adoption for an unfortunate child.”

Marguerite accepted this explanation — for about three days.

Then more details began to nag at her:

The cluster of women she saw working in the distant fields behind the convent

The locked door of the penitent house

How often she saw white-wrapped bundles leaving quietly with sisters

The increasing frequency of adoption announcements in the parish bulletin

At dinner one night, her father mentioned casually:

“Devou sent one of his pregnant house servants to the convent,”
he said.
“He asked if the work might endanger the child.
I told him it might. I doubt he cares.”

The pieces began to arrange themselves in Marguerite’s mind like a grim puzzle.

She noticed.
She asked questions.
The institution reacted the way powerful systems always do when a young woman threatens their quiet arrangement:

They shut her out.

Her access to the school was quietly revoked. A polite letter informed her that the convent would no longer accept students over 16; surely, a girl her age should be “preparing for marriage, not studies.”

When she wrote to the bishop in New Orleans, raising concerns about what she’d seen and asking for an investigation, the church did what institutions do best:

The bishop spoke only to the Mother Superior

The Mother Superior described “charitable adoptions” and “rescued souls”

The parish priest expressed “offense” at the accusation

Her father was summoned, scolded, and sent home angry.

“You will not write another letter,” he told her.
“You will not embarrass this family. You misunderstood what you saw.”

The system had spoken.
God’s house does not answer to teenage girls.

But Marguerite didn’t forget.

And Ruth, watching from the edges of the fields and the shadows of the courtyard, had noticed something too:

This rich white girl saw things.
This girl asked questions.

This girl might be their only chance.

A Nun’s Conscience Begins to Crack

The other key figure was the woman who delivered all those babies: Sister Marie-Thérèse Dumont.

She had come to Louisiana decades earlier, imagining a life of teaching and prayer. Instead, she spent fourteen years in blood and cries and whispered prayers that no one heard.

She delivered 83 children for the convent.

She knew every name.
She remembered every face.
She watched every mother’s arms empty.

Ruth targeted her gently, strategically.

During examinations, she asked questions that sounded like submission but hit like accusations:

“My baby will be happy with his new family, won’t he, Sister?”

“Of course. They are good Christians.”

“Do they know about us? Do they know we’re enslaved? Do they know we didn’t choose this?”

The sister’s hands would pause. Her words would falter.

“The circumstances don’t matter. The child’s future does.”

“If I were them,” Ruth said softly,
“I would want to know if the mother gave her child freely.
Or if the child was taken.”

Over months, those questions wore away at Marie-Thérèse’s certainty like water on stone.

She started praying longer at night.
Her hands shook more after births.
She began to blur the line between obedience and complicity in her own mind.

When Ruth became pregnant again in 1843, she saw her opening.

One day, in a cramped utility room behind the laundry, she asked plainly:

“If someone wanted to write a letter… could you help them?”

The sister recoiled.
Helping enslaved women accuse a convent was unthinkable.
It was also, perhaps, the only way to save her own soul.

Two weeks later, she returned with a notebook.

“If I do this,” she whispered,
“you must never speak my name as the source.
I will lose everything. My vows. My place. My church.”

“We’ve already lost everything,” Ruth replied.
“All we have left is the truth.”

The Secret Record of a Crime

Over the next weeks, in stolen pockets of time, Sister Marie-Thérèse did the unthinkable:

She began documenting the very system she served.

She wrote:

Ruth’s testimony, in Ruth’s own words as best they could manage

Hannah’s account of three babies taken

Clara’s account of her twins being “donated” together for $350

Additional testimonies from Esther, Dinah, Naomi

She described:

The daily schedule in the penitent house

Field labor during late pregnancy

The births

The forced separations

The exact language of “mercy” used to justify it

Ruth’s phrasing cut through the pious veneer:

“We are enslaved twice here.
Once by the men who own our bodies.
And again by the church that turns our children into money.
They call it adoption. But mercy does not come with a price.”

Marie-Thérèse didn’t stop with testimony.

She copied from the Mother Superior’s locked ledgers:

Full pages of financial records showing repeated $200 payments

Notes on twins, “exceptional donations”

Marginal comments about “preferred complexion” for some families

She found the master list:

42 named enslaved women

Dates they arrived at the convent

Numbers of children delivered

Notations of death from childbirth or infection

When she finished, she had:

Five pages of enslaved women’s testimony

Three pages of copied ledgers

A list of women used as breeders

Then she did the bravest thing of all:

She wrote her own sworn affidavit, signed with her full name and dated:

“I, Sister Marie-Thérèse Dumont,
have witnessed for fourteen years the systematic exploitation of enslaved women within Our Lady of Sorrows.
Their children are baptized, sold through ‘donations,’ and sent away.
The Church calls it charity.
My conscience calls it sin.”

Now they needed someone who could move these papers into a world that might listen.

Ruth knew who:

The girl who’d asked too many questions.
Marguerite.

The Night the Evidence Changed Hands

In August 1843, under the suffocating Louisiana heat, Sister Marie-Thérèse left the convent for a “medical visit” to Dr. Bellamy.

She claimed to have a persistent cough. The doctor found her lungs healthy.

“It may be nervousness,” he said kindly.
“Rest in the waiting room.”

When he left to see another patient, she went straight to Marguerite.

From inside her habit, she drew out a small waterproof pouch.

“Read this tonight,” she whispered.
“It contains the truth you tried to tell them once before.
But be warned — if you act, you will be fighting the Church, planter families, and the law itself.
They will not forgive you for exposing this.”

Then she left.

That night, by the light of three candles in her bedroom, Marguerite opened the pouch.

She read:

Ruth’s aching account

Hannah’s grief

Clara’s heartbreak

The sterile cruelty of ledgers marking children as transactions

And a nun’s confession that confirmed her worst fears

When she finished, her hands were trembling.

She needed help. Legal help.

Her father had already chosen the Church over her.
The parish priest was complicit.

But her brother, Étienne, had just returned from New Orleans with a law degree and a slightly more flexible relationship with authority.

She woke him at midnight.

“Read this,” she said.
“Then tell me whether law is worth anything at all.”

The Lawyer Who Took on the Church

Étienne read through the night.

He saw:

The pattern

The signatures

The sums

The naked admission of a nun who chose conscience over obedience

When he finished, he said what Marguerite had feared and expected:

“Most of this is technically legal.”

Under Louisiana law:

Enslaved women were property

Their children were property

Masters could send their “property” wherever they wished

Donations to religious institutions were not easily distinguished from purchases

The Church would argue:

The convent gave children better lives than slavery

Families paid “donations,” not prices

The mothers were “fallen” or “redeemed,” not coerced

“But,” Étienne added slowly,
“we do have something powerful:
a white nun’s sworn testimony and hard financial proof.”

He knew a man in New Orleans who might be willing to risk his career on such a case:

Jacques Devreaux — a lawyer from the same family that had once donated land to the convent, now estranged from them. A Catholic with a reputation for arguing that slavery and Christian doctrine were fundamentally incompatible. A man already on the Church’s bad side.

Marguerite and Étienne sent him the documents.

He read them.
He didn’t look away.

“This,” he told Étienne,
“is the most thorough evidence of institutional exploitation I’ve seen.
We may not be able to send anyone to prison.
But we can make damn sure the world knows what happened here.”

The Investigation That Shook a Parish

On September 1, 1843, Devreaux filed simultaneous complaints:

With the bishop of New Orleans

With the civil court

With the territorial governor

He also did something else — something the Church could not easily control.

He sent copies to three newspapers, including the New Orleans Daily Picayune and the Baton Rouge Gazette.

What followed was a storm.

Within 48 hours, Church investigators and civil officers arrived at Our Lady of Sorrows with warrants to inspect records and facilities.

They:

Unlocked the penitent house

Found nine pregnant women living in cramped, stifling cells

Discovered three newborn infants awaiting “placement”

Seized ledgers, letters, and baptismal records

They questioned:

The sisters (most claimed ignorance)

The priest (who claimed charity)

The women (whose testimony the law barely recognized)

And Sister Marie-Thérèse, who confessed everything

Newspapers pounced:

“CONVENT ACCUSED OF SELLING INFANTS”
“$200 BABIES: THE PRICE OF MERCY?”
“RELIGIOUS HOUSE PROFITING FROM SLAVE WOMEN’S WOMB”

For a brief window, the hidden machinery of “holy adoption” was exposed to the eyes of the public.

But exposure isn’t the same as justice.

Consequences — and Their Limits

What happened next reveals as much about power as the scandal itself.

Mother Superior Céleste Beaumont

Removed from her post.
Sent back to a cloister in France.
No trial. No public confession.

She died in 1851 insisting she had merely “found Christian homes for unfortunate children.”

Father Antoine Dufresne

Reassigned to a remote rural parish.
No charges.
No formal censure.

He continued to serve as a priest until his death.

The Other Sisters

Dispersed to other convents.
Most claimed they had simply “followed orders.”

None were formally prosecuted.

Sister Marie-Thérèse

The woman who exposed the system paid a steep price.

The Church debated. Some saw her as a traitor to her vows. Others as a necessary instrument of correction.

In the end, they chose a compromise:

She was released from her vows, but not excommunicated

Forbidden from serving in any Catholic institution

Effectively exiled from the only life she’d known

She left Louisiana in 1844 and settled in Philadelphia, working quietly as a midwife for the poor.

There, far from the plantations and convent bell, she spent the rest of her life delivering babies to mothers who would be allowed to keep them.

Her tombstone later would read:

“She served conscience above comfort.”

The Law’s Small Victories

Devreaux and Étienne fought for years in courts and committees. They pushed, argued, petitioned.

They couldn’t overturn the central fact of the time — that enslaved women were property — but they did manage three key reforms:

Church Ban
The Louisiana Catholic hierarchy quietly issued instructions:
No more housing of enslaved women for births under religious institutions.
No more “adoption mills” in convents.

Civil Adoption Rules
Adoptions now required registration with local courts and written consent from mothers — at least on paper. For free women, this mattered. For enslaved women, it was more symbol than shield.

Record Preservation
Perhaps most importantly, they secured the preservation of convent records — ledgers, mother lists, adoption logs — in sealed government archives, to be accessed by the adopted children once adults.

Those records would outlive everyone involved.
And someday, they would bring at least one child home.

Aftermath: The Women, the Children, the Long Shadow

When the investigation ended, the women of the penitent house were sent back where they’d come from:

Ruth returned to the Devou plantation

Hannah, Lydia, Clara, Esther, Dinah, Naomi went to their respective owners

For them, the scandal changed nothing in the short term.

Ruth continued working as a field hand and house servant. She was pregnant again by 1845, but this time her child — a daughter — was allowed to remain with her after Charles’s wife died and his need for secrecy faded.

Hannah died in childbirth in 1848 delivering her fifth child.

Lydia was later sold to a Mississippi plantation and disappeared from the record entirely.

Others lived long enough to see slavery end in 1865. Others did not.

The convent closed temporarily, then reopened years later as a girls’ school under new management, scrubbed of its past. In 1956, a fire destroyed its east wing, including what remained of the penitent house.

Officially, it was treated as a minor historical loss.
Unofficially, another physical trace of the crime vanished.

But paper survived.

A Son Comes Back

In 1872, a 30-year-old man named Thomas Robichaux walked up rickety stairs in a New Orleans tenement and knocked on a door.

A woman in her fifties answered.

Her name was Ruth.

Thomas had grown up in comfort:

In a wealthy New Orleans family

Sent to good schools

Employed as a clerk in a shipping firm

Told vaguely that he’d been “blessed by adoption”

When his adoptive father died, papers were found in a trunk — adoption records traced back to Our Lady of Sorrows.

After months of archival digging in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, he had finally found a name in the convent’s records:

Mother: Ruth, enslaved woman, property of Charles Devou.
Child: male, born September 1841.

He found three possible women named Ruth who matched the records. She was the second.

The moment he saw her face — her eyes, her mouth, even a small gap in her front teeth — he knew.

They sat at her small table near the docks.

She told him everything:

About Devou and the plantation

About the convent

About holding him for ten brief minutes before he was carried away

About three decades of wondering whether he was alive, whether he was loved, whether he blamed her

He told her:

About the Robichaux family

About his education

About his constant sense of missing a piece of himself

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said.
“They stole me.
From you. From yourself. That wasn’t your choice.”

From then on, Thomas visited monthly.

He brought food when she was ill, money when she was short, and his children when they were born. He named his first daughter Ruth.

Ruth died in 1884, a free woman in law if not in memory.
Her headstone, paid for by the son who found her, read:

“Ruth, beloved mother. Born into bondage, died in freedom.
Her truth set others free.”

What the Fire Didn’t Destroy

The 1856 fire may have eaten through brick and timber, but it couldn’t erase the paper trail already lodged in archives.

The documents preserved by:

A nun who chose conscience

A young woman who refused to look away

A lawyer who decided the Church could be challenged

show us clearly what the convent tried to hide:

Eighty-seven children sold in eight documented years

At least 42 enslaved women cycled through as reproductive labor

An estimated $32,000–$37,000 in combined profit from babies, cotton, and laundry — roughly a million dollars in modern value

And yet, even those figures miss the real cost.

The real price was:

Mothers who never knew what became of their children

Children who grew up with fabricated histories

A parish that chose comfort over truth

A Church that cloaked exploitation in liturgy and lace

The convent of Our Lady of Sorrows is gone.
The Sisters of Perpetual Mercy have faded into history.

But the questions refuse to burn:

How many other convents, orphanages, and “homes for the fallen” ran similar operations under the banner of charity?

How many children today descend from these transactions without knowing?

How many women’s stories were never written down at all — no testimony, no affidavit, no headstone?

And the most unsettling question:

When institutions dress exploitation in moral language,
how many of us look away because it is easier to believe in mercy than to face the machinery behind it?

The Crime Behind the Cross

The story of Our Lady of Sorrows is not just about one convent, one nun, one woman named Ruth, or one baby sold for $200.

It’s about a system that:

Treated Black women’s bodies as resources

Treated their children as commodities

Used religious authority as a shield

Relied on silence — enforced, threatened, or politely requested

It’s also about what happens when that silence is broken.

Ruth spoke, even when the law said her voice didn’t matter.
Sister Marie-Thérèse betrayed her vows to tell the truth.
Marguerite risked her family’s reputation.
Devreaux risked his career.

They didn’t get full justice.
There were no trials with satisfying verdicts.
No sweeping reforms that ended the exploitation.

But they did something that still matters:

They made the invisible visible.
They wrote down what the powerful tried to erase.

In a world where institutions continue to cloak harm in the language of protection, salvation, or necessity, their story is not just history.

It is warning.

It is evidence.

And it is a reminder that sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do in a holy place…
is ask where the children came from —
and who paid for them.