Once they become the property of the orphanage, the infants were farmed out to wet nurses, in some cases their own mothers, until old enough to eat millet. They were then reclaimed by the Church to be raised as Catholics.
At a very early age these girls were put to work cleaning, cooking, and sewing. Certain products of their labor were sold on the market to provide a source of income for the orphanage and the Church. Having paid their way by long hours of toil—the older girls often worked up to 12 or even 14 hours a day—the young women were betrothed in their early teens to local peddlers, traders, peasants, or soldiers in return for a substantial remuneration.
This not only helped the Church financially, but also insured new converts and a younger generation brought up as Catholics. For in order to obtain a wife from the orphanage the husband had to promise to become a Catholic, and any children resulting from the union were automatically pledged to the faith. Since the orphanage was the main source of unpromised brides, and since its prices were about one-third lower than the average in the region, many poor peasants who wanted to get married had little alternative but to buy a Catholic wife.
This is an account of one of the ways the Church functioned in China during the early-mid 20th century.
This to me though seems like borderline slavery and human trafficking. Did the Church engage in this sort of behaviour outside of China?
This to me though seems like borderline slavery and human trafficking.
... maybe. There's a lot of value judgments woven into the way this information is presented and excerpted. It comes from William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966; p. 61). Hinton conducted his research in 1948, supported by two young translators, both hand-picked by a prominent Communist Party member (Fan Wen-Lan, also a historian and then the president of the Northern University) and one of whom Hinton described as 'an ardent supporter of the Revolution'. Hinton arranged his research through a local District Administrator, who picked the peasants that he would interview and then sent armed guards to accompany him. So all of Hinton's work was filtered through his two translators, carefully supervised by Party members, and accompanied by the threat of armed violence. At the same time, Hinton was also deeply sympathetic to the goals of the Communist Party, although his viewpoints would change later in life (see his obituary). With these factors in mind, his descriptions must be read with extreme caution.
To begin with, it's worth noting that Hinton precedes this passage with a discussion of famine and infanticide:
Because the peasants lived from year to year on the verge of starvation and in bad years often died themselves, it was impossible for them to raise all their children. Boys, when they grew up, stayed home to help support their parents. Therefore every effort was made to save them. But girls, after 12 years of feeding, could only be sold for a few bags of grain, or given in marriage for the equivalent of a few dollars. Therefore in times of distress girl children were sometime abandoned or even killed at birth. The orphanage in Long Bow was built specifically to care for such abandoned children.
This gives us a very different impression of what was happening. We're not actually talking about the big-C Church and some coordinated recruitment plan, exploiting people so that the Church can acquire wealth. We're talking about a few particular Dutch Franciscans, who were reacting to a situation that they considered unacceptable and were trying to save lives that would otherwise be lost. Hinton continues:
From picking up babies in the streets and fields, the custom developed of accepting babies directly from their parents, or even of paying modest sums for girl children in order to encourage their mothers to part with them.
Notice Hinton's careful phrasing—Hinton stops talking about what people were doing and starts talking about how 'custom' was changing. This lets him avoid explicitly stating that, given the choice, poor and starving peasants would rather give their children to the Franciscan orphanage than abandon them in a field. Hinton smoothly suppresses this evidence of peasant complicity and moves right into claims of coercion by the Church—somebody (and Hinton doesn't actually specify whom; this passage is built on implications) is now giving money to these families who, on the brink of starvation, were being driven to abandon their children. Hinton treats this as a transaction and calls it a payment. It's hard to know whether this is just Hinton's wording, his translators' choice, or the peasants who were being watched by armed guards and probably saying what they thought they were expected to say. But I suspect that coming from a very different perspective, the Dutch Franciscans might have called these 'payments' something different, like charity or alms.
This brings us to the passage posted by OP, which I think we're now in a better position to read more critically. Hinton reinforces his allusion to payments by now calling the abandoned infants the 'property' of the orphanage—again, reflecting the Marxist language that may derive from Hinton himself, his university translators, or the peasants being scrutinized by government gunmen. It's hard to believe that the Franciscans actually considered these infants—whom they took the initiative to save—as little more than objects of property.
The proof, I think, comes in the second half of that first sentence: 'the infants were farmed out to wet nurses, in some cases their own mothers, until old enough to eat millet'. Hinton's choice of the word 'farmed' reinforces the impression that these children are being treated as livestock, but look at what's actually happening. Families who don't foresee a way to feed their children decide to give them to an orphanage rather than abandoning them in a field. Not only do the Franciscans in charge of these orphanages give these families a bit of money to get by on, but they also ask that the families keep their infants until they actually become a burden to feed. This would foster family relationships, perhaps offer families a chance to keep their children if their circumstances improved, and must have seemed at least a small mercy to mothers suffering from postpartum depression. Hinton's language hinders us from thinking through these circumstances.
Now that Hinton has primed his readers to believe that this small-town orphanage is really a wicked arm of the Church, he proceeds to talk about how these girls needed to work and were married at a young age. Again, his word-choice makes this all seem little better than slavery, but it deflects attention from what was actually going on. In the longer passage I quoted above, Hinton acknowledges that girls were seen as unproductive and would be sold in their early teens for a few bags of grain. The Franciscans were demonstrating that young girls could be productive members of society—which they probably already were, given that even in times of famine adolescent girls were still worth a few bags of grain.
The implication I draw from this is that the Franciscans were demanding little different from these girls than their families would have—if they could have fed them—but that the girls coming out of these orphanages were seen as especially industrious individuals. Moreover, these industrious individuals ended up being wed—keeping in mind that their families would have also 'sold' them at a similar age—to men who were probably on the brink of desperation themselves, men who were willing to commit to a new faith in order to bring another worker into the house and who may have been unable to afford a full-priced non-Catholic bride. Since Hinton describes a society where female infanticide presumably led to an imbalance of marriageable men, it's likely that there was a very real societal need for the women whom this orphanage was saving.
Hinton's point in this passage, I think, is twofold. He shows that (1) that China was in need of agricultural reform, and (2) Western institutions were using Chinese agricultural weaknesses to promote Western ideologies. This is a cookie-cutter example of a Marxist history: false ideologies (Catholicism) mask the material conditions of production (the Church buying and selling children to amass capital). But a closer read of the passage and careful consideration of who the author was and where his information was coming from encourages us to consider a different perspective. Peasants were indeed desperate, but they were willingly converting from their old customs to seek relief from Catholic orphanages, which representatives of the Communist Party wanted to portray as symbols of Western imperialism. (Hinton actually introduces this chapter with a discussion of the Boxer Rebellion and claims that the Catholic missionary efforts were funded by indemnity money, so that seems to be the bent of his overall work as a whole.)