The Catholic baby smuggling network of The Joy Sowers: 'I could smell that the priest knew who my father was, but he kept his mouth shut'

It wasn't just nuns who traded in babies, whether or not they had been forcibly relinquished, as seen in the VTM series "De Nonnen" (The Nuns). Fathers and brothers were also active in this industry, in which the Ghent adoption agency De Vreugdezaaiers played a key role. Marie (59) was born in a French hospital to a young Brabant mother and was smuggled by a priest to a home in Hasselt. "No one was allowed to know anything about the pregnancy."

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This article was written by Jan Stevens Published on October 13, 2025

In April 1966, a priest from Averbode traveled by bus and train to Malo-les-Bains, near the northern French city of Dunkirk. There, he entered the Clinique Villette, where he introduced himself as Father Serpentier . At the maternity ward, he was handed a warmly bundled baby. The priest took the girl onto the train, ending in Hasselt. There, he delivered the baby to the De Hummeltjes orphanage, run by the Ursuline sisters. They would sell the girl to her new parents.

MARIE "That must have been a strange sight, a priest with a newborn baby in a train compartment."

HUMO Unless there was a woman there?

MARIE : "No, not at all. In 1984, I visited Father Serpentier at the abbey. I was 18. He said loud and clear: 'I brought you here. I brought several babies to Belgium.' I was overwhelmed. Now I think: I should have asked more."

We're sitting in a traditional café near the train station in a Flemish city. Months ago, Marie sent me a message. She had read my book, "Sisters Without Love," published last year, about the atrocities committed by the Sisters of the Childhood of Jesus at the Tamar maternity home in Lommel, Limburg. Victims testified, among other things, about how the sisters smuggled unwanted teenage mothers across the border in the second half of the 20th century. They were forced to give birth anonymously at the Malo-les-Bains hospital. Their newborns were taken away, taken to Belgium, and sold to adoptive parents. To pay off their debt, the teenage mothers were forced to perform months of unpaid slave labor in a textile workshop run by the nuns.

Marie: "My biological mother never wanted to tell me my father's name. We never touched or hugged each other." Source: Saskia Vanderstichele

"I was also born in that northern French hospital," Marie wrote. "Only I wasn't smuggled across the border by a nun, but by a priest from Averbode Abbey. Father Serpentier. My adoption was then handled by the Catholic adoption agency De Vreugdezaaiers."

Marie wanted to tell her story, but not right away. Now she's ready. Marie isn't her current name, but the name she was registered under at Dunkirk Town Hall by a local worker. Registering babies born anonymously was probably a small sideline for him.

MARIE : "I once drove to Malo-les-Bains, looking for traces of my birth. There I heard there had been a fire at the hospital. All the files went up in flames."

HUMO The files from the Tamar motherhouse have also been lost. The nuns set fire to their archives in the 1980s because a stricter adoption law was being drafted. How did you then make the connection with Averbode Abbey?

MARIE : "My adoptive parents, who have both since passed away, were extremely Catholic. They were from Zichem, not far from Averbode. They had a document that recorded my weight and height as a baby. In the margin was written: 'Father Serpentier.' I first saw that document when I was about 12 and immediately asked questions about it. Incidentally, my brothers were also adopted.

Averbode Abbey: "Shortly after my adoption, my new parents had the police at their door. They were suspected of kidnapping a baby born in France."

I wanted to find my biological mother and kept harping on about that Father Serpentier, until my adoptive mother took me to Averbode Abbey when I was 18. She knew he was still there. He had grown old and wore a robe, like all the Norbertine monks there.

He got incredibly angry when we arrived at the door and wouldn't tell us who my real mother was. He did tell us about his train journey to Dunkirk, and that he'd dropped me off at De Hummeltjes in Hasselt. I was ten days old when my adoptive parents picked me up there. My oldest brother still remembers that moment vividly. He was eight years old and panicked because he had to wait downstairs with my other brother. He thought he was going to be abandoned again: when he'd been adopted a few years earlier, he'd already been a toddler.

A few years after my visit to Averbode Abbey, Serpentier contacted my adoptive mother. My biological grandparents had died, and perhaps his conscience was starting to bother him. He said my real mother had been institutionalized: she had gone blind after a brain hemorrhage.

HUMO Did you look her up?

MARIE "Yes, and I shouldn't have done that. The nurses had prepared her for my visit because they were afraid she would go into shock. She was still relatively young, about 40, but she looked very ill. In my mind, I had idealized my previously unreachable biological mother, but before me lay a pile of misery.

Having a meaningful conversation was impossible, and when I asked about my biological father, she became difficult. 'He was the man of my life,' she said. I visited her twice more afterward, but she never wanted to tell me his name. We never touched or hugged each other. During one of those visits, her sister and brother-in-law were also present. The sister cried the whole time, because she supposedly didn't know I existed. Her husband hissed at me: 'If it's for the money, there's nothing to be had here.'

Marie's biological grandmother had been present at her daughter's birth at Clinique Villette in Malo-les-Bains.

MARIE : "My mother asked her after the birth if it was a boy or a girl. She was told she would never tell."

HUMO What kind of background does your biological mother come from?

MARIE "She was the daughter of the headmaster of Veerle, a sub-municipality of Laakdal."

HUMO A stone's throw from Averbode.

MARIE : "Exactly. My mother was 18 and unmarried when she became pregnant. Her father, the school principal, consulted Veerle's pastor. That's probably how they ended up at Averbode Abbey."

When I went to visit Father Serpentier with my adoptive mother, we also rang the priest's doorbell to ask who my biological father was. He didn't dare look at me, but my adoptive mother wasn't shy and asked him point-blank: "You're not the father, are you?" The priest replied: "What about parents' rights?" To which my mother retorted: "And what about children's rights?" I could tell he knew who my father was, but he remained tight-lipped.

Marie: 'No one in my mother's village was ever allowed to know about the unwanted pregnancy of the love of her life.' Source: Saskia Vanderstichele

The priest, in consultation with Father Serpentier, had arranged a complete cover-up for my biological mother. She was placed with a couple in Brussels, and word spread in Veerle's house that she had gone to work as an au pair in France. The Brussels couple had a contact in France, who sent postcards to her best friends on behalf of my biological mother: 'I'm sorry I left so suddenly, but I've been working as an au pair for a few months now and I'm doing very well!'

The woman she was hiding with was also pregnant, by the way. When my mother gave birth to me in France, she had to rush back to Brussels. She'd lost her own child, but she still had to care for the couple's newborn. And back in Veerle, she had to pretend nothing had happened. No one in the village was ever to know about that unwanted pregnancy.

HUMO How did the adoption of your brothers go?

MARIE : "It always went through the same adoption agency, De Vreugdezaaiers. That couple from Brussels was part of a widespread Catholic adoption network. Everyone in that community knew everyone.

"The Joy Sowers was the life's work of another priest, Eugeen Delooz . My adoptive parents were good friends with him. Just before they adopted me, the Vreugdezaaiers had provided them with another girl, but they had to give her back a while later. In the case of a regular domestic adoption, the biological parents had a six-month reflection period, and they wanted their child back. During one of his many visits, Delooz said, 'There's another girl in Hasselt.' They, along with my brothers, rode with him and returned with me. According to my adoptive mother, I was a gift from the priest and she didn't have to pay anything for me."

ILLEGAL CHILDREN

The Ghent adoption service De Vreugdezaaiers was founded in the late 1950s by the Limburg-born Franciscan René "Eugeen" Delooz. In 1958, he met Irma De Rycke , Mother Superior of the Institute for Mulattos, in the Rwandan town of Save. This was a boarding school where the colonial government placed illegitimate children of white men and Black mothers. That same year, three hundred children of the Metis family were flown from Save to Belgium, where they were placed in adoptive families through De Vreugdezaaiers.

Later, Father Eugene specialized in vacations for children from the Parisian suburbs with Dutch and Belgian families. In the late 1960s, he switched to adopting Indian orphans. He made a deal with Mother Teresa 's orphanages, and at Christmas 1970, he shipped the first Indian adoptees to Belgium.

Investigative journalist Thomas Holvoet has delved into the archives of Catholic institutions in recent years. He investigates abuse in the church and worked as a researcher on the VTM documentary series "The Nuns." He also conducted research on Father Delooz's adoption service, De Vreugdezaaiers.

HUMO You're not surprised by priests who smuggled newborn babies from France to Hasselt by train in the 1960s and 70s?

THOMAS HOLVOET "No, there are many traces of that. They are quite powerful stories. Many of the so-called anonymously born children came, depending on the period, from former mission areas or from Paris and the surrounding area. Sometimes they were children of Belgian nuns from those mission areas. Biological children, yes. The fathers could have been colonials, but also priests or native Dutch."

Journalist Thomas Holvoet: 'Biological children of sisters from mission areas were also smuggled into Belgium.' Source rv

HUMO Does the name Serpentier mean anything to you?

HOLVOET : "Unfortunately, I don't know that priest, but I do recognize the methodology. Delooz was in contact with a large number of clergy who carried out such assignments: sisters, brothers, and priests, and from the 1970s onward, lay people as well."

HUMO Was the De Hummeltjes orphanage in Hasselt a regular destination for newborn babies?

HOLVOET : "The Joy Sowers had a similar location in every diocese or province. The Hummeltjes was their permanent base for the province of Limburg. Incidentally, Delooz was active not only in Flanders but also in Wallonia."

In November 2011, De Vreugdezaaiers' recognition as an adoption agency was revoked. The reason: they placed too few adopted children. Today, the organization still operates as a fundraiser for Indian schoolchildren, under the name Joy for Kids. Treasurer Dominique Seeuws informed us via email that no one at the organization had ever heard of a certain Father Serpentier, not even colleagues who were active at De Vreugdezaaiers in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the monks of Averbode Abbey are Norbertines, Seeuws believes the chance that Serpentier visited De Vreugdezaaiers is minimal: "They only had contact with Franciscans."

We sent an email to Abbot Marc Fierens of Averbode Abbey about Marie's adoption and her subsequent visit to Father Serpentier at the abbey. The abbot replied that he had consulted his archivist and had come to the following conclusion: "The name Serpentier does not appear in the list of the Averbode Fathers. I've asked around among the oldest brothers, and the name means nothing to them either. There was and still is a childcare center in the village of Averbode, but the name Serpentier does not appear there either. I will make further inquiries."

The request for a telephone interview was rejected a day later: "I cannot comment on this, as Father Serpentier is unknown to us."

Like the abbot, Marie also finds no trace of Father Serpentier.

MARIE "I've been searching like crazy for the past few years, but I haven't found anything."

HUMO Perhaps the name was an alias, because he wanted to keep the smuggling expeditions commissioned by De Vreugdezaaiers a secret from the other priests in Averbode?

MARIE "No idea. But at some point, he must have stopped. Shortly after I was adopted, my new parents had the police at their door. They were suspected of kidnapping a baby born in France. During that one conversation I had with the priest in Averbode, he admitted that the authorities had started to get difficult in 1966 about smuggling babies from France. 'You're one of the last people I brought over,' he said."

Marie: "I've impressed upon my daughters: 'If you become pregnant unexpectedly, you absolutely must choose abortion. Never give away a newborn.'"

HUMO Do you have children yourself?

MARIE "Yes. I've always impressed upon my daughters: 'If you become pregnant unexpectedly, you absolutely must have an abortion. Never give a newborn away.'"

HUMO You are a fervent opponent of adoption?

MARIE "Adopted children are like birds with broken wings. That question constantly haunts us: why did our parents give us away? I did everything I could to receive love from my adoptive parents. My father was a good, well-meaning man, but my mother was very bitter, even though she was Catholic. Yet I kept trying to please her: I got married in church and had my children baptized. But three years ago, I'd had enough and had myself debaptized. Afterward, I received an email from the diocese confirming that they had removed me from the baptismal register. It included a picture of the former pope waving at me, as if saying, 'Farewell.'"