07/20/2025: The Vatican’s Orphans, A Tutor for Every Student, The Mezcaleros

0:09Bill Whitaker:Mary Rolato grew up in Ohio longing for a large family, only to find out that she had one. In Italy. It was years before she could ask her birth mother the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? The church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah. We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPD can do with voice mode with vision. We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught.

0:49The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it's a good start. Don't patronize me. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence.

1:00Bill Whitaker:You can ask a follow-up question. Designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. Good work, Ayla.

1:11Artisanal mezcal resists machinery. The agave is roasted in underground pits for days. Then it's crushed by horse-drawn mill. The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls. Bubbles indicate the alcohol content. Who knows more about the process? I think he may know more, but I drink it more. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

2:03Bill Whitaker:During the 1950s, the Catholic Church in Belgium separated thousands of newborns from their unwed mothers and put them up for adoption, often without the mother's consent. The women were shamed into surrendering their babies by their families and a powerful church. Last fall, Pope Francis apologized for those forced adoptions. But Belgians weren't the only victims. From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent 3 ,500 Italian children to America on something called an orphan visa. The trouble was, most were not orphans. Like their Belgian counterparts, they too were the children of unwed mothers. Many mothers later went searching for their children only to discover they had been sent across an ocean.

2:54Bill Whitaker:As we first reported last year, thousands of American adoptees are still struggling to piece together their lost lives. It was a day he'll never forget. American adoptee John Campitelli was 28 years old when he was reunited with his Italian birth mother. He'd been searching for her for more than a decade, a mother he'd been told had abandoned him. My mom said, you know, 28 years have gone by. I've never been able to bake a cake for you for your birthday. She says, I don't care what month it is. I'm going to bake you a cake. We need to celebrate because our prodigal son has finally come home. John Campitelli was born Piero Davi in 1963 in Italy.

3:39Bill Whitaker:His mother, Francesca, was unmarried and forced by her family to give him up. He was sent to a Catholic-run institution for the children of unwed mothers. Shunned and disgraced, Francesca handed her baby to the nuns. Immediately, her name was stripped from the birth records. With the stroke of a pen, Piero Davi became an orphan. Campitelli showed us the church documents that changed his life. It says here, they have been in the since birth, and their whereabouts are unknown. They knew damn well where my mom was. I mean, she showed her documents when she handed me over. So this is an outright lie.

4:18Bill Whitaker:A lie John Campitelli has spent his life unraveling. As soon as he was declared an orphan, he was eligible for adoption and a U.S. visa. He says his mother told him she had no idea. She had every intention of coming back for him. She said, I never signed a paper anywhere saying that I was willing to give you up. She thought placing you in the institution was temporary? She thought that it would be her right to be able to get me back someday when she got her life together. She never signed you away? No. She said, I placed you because I couldn't keep you at that point in time because of the family situation, but I never consented to the adoption or to the fact that you would leave Italy and you'd be far from me for the rest of my life.

5:05Bill Whitaker:Piero Davi was one of thousands of children born out of wedlock that the Vatican repackaged as orphans. The church arranged the visas, helped by a 1950 U.S. law that broadened the definition of orphan to include a child with one parent, but one who couldn't provide care. With that leeway, the orphan program boomed. For Piero's mother and thousands like her, it was devastating to learn the child she'd entrusted to the church had disappeared. It seems that many of these mothers had no idea that their children were being sent to the United States. Could they do anything about it? No, absolutely not.

5:47You can't send a baby to the United States and then tell the adoptive parents that the birth mother wants the child.

5:54Bill Whitaker:Author Maria Lerino uncovered the Vatican's orphan program in her book, The Price of Children. She pieced the story together from hundreds of documents in the church's own archives in New York. Lerino told us the program hinged on a consent form the mothers were supposed to sign severing all rights to the child. But Lerino told us doctors or lawyers sometimes signed the consent without telling the mother. Others were deliberately misled. There were women who were trapped into this situation and tremendous pressure to relinquish their children. There were women who were tricked, who signed forms they didn't understand.

6:35And in the worst cases, there were women who were told their child had died.

6:39Bill Whitaker:Told their child had died. Yes. What do you make of that? Yeah, it's so horrible. The thinking, I've been told, was that it was an easier psychological closure to tell a birth mother that her child had died than to let her know that her child had been given up for adoption. So representatives of the church were telling these mothers that their children had died when in fact they had not and they had been sent to the United States. Yes. Loreno told us many more women were told they could get their children back. She found letters from distraught mothers pleading for their return. Now, these are letters that were found in the archives?

7:25Bill Whitaker:That's correct. This is a letter to Reverend Landy, Monsignor Landy. I beg that my children be repatriated. If I cannot again see my children, I will shorten my life. I find myself deceived, and I do not even know how. Monsignor Landy was Andrew Landy, an American priest living in Rome who ran the orphan program. Landy's boss had the ear of the Pope. In 1951, Pope Pius XII personally saw the first children off. Thousands more would follow. How could they be defined as orphans? I know. If they still have a mother, or in many cases a father, still alive. Yes, and to talk to the adopted children today, they get very angry to say, I'm not an orphan.

8:11You know, I spent years searching for my parents. But it was a linguistic construction.

8:16Bill Whitaker:The church charged$475 per child, about$4 ,500 today. But Loreno told us the demand from eager American Catholics grew so fast that Monsignor Landy sent local priests to scour the countryside for more children. The correspondence shows that they traveled throughout Italy looking for cases for children to send. Literally looking for babies born out of wedlock. Yes. It actually turned into a machine. Yes. Looking for babies to send to the United States. Right. John Campitelli told us he had a loving family in New York. But when he found out he was adopted, he says he became obsessed with finding his birth mother.

9:03Bill Whitaker:There were few clues. Even his surname, Davi, was a dead end, invented by the state to cut all ties. Finally, he persuaded an Italian newspaper to publish his story. and then a breakthrough. Someone knew his mother. In 1991, he spoke to her for the first time. She said, all right, are you Piero? Well, no, I'm John. Oh, no, I'm really Piero. Okay, I'm your son. So you were nervous. I was really nervous because it's something that I always wanted to do, but when the moment comes, you're like... Kind of tongue-tied. Yeah, yeah, I was tongue-tied. I finally get to talk to the person that actually gave birth to me, that held me, that had breastfed me for two or three days in the hospital.

9:52So I know that she loved me. What was her voice like to you? It brought me to tears, I must admit. And we said we were never going to let go of each other from then on.

10:03Bill Whitaker:Two months later, he was on a flight to Italy. We had exchanged photographs, but I said, I didn't need a photograph. because I saw that lady there in front of me, and I said, that's my mom. She looks identical to me. And after 28 years, I could say that, you know, I just ran over to her, and I embraced her. And I said, Mom, finally, I kissed her. I said, Mom, no one had to tell me who you were. I knew who you were. I just had to look at you. Campitelli moved to Italy and learned Italian to speak to his birth family. But he told us that didn't undo the suffering the church had caused. I felt that my whole life was based on a lie.

10:40They told her that they would take care of me, and that was a lie. They got rid of me. They didn't take care of me. They cut all relationship that I could possibly have with my birth family, and they shipped me overseas. I became a package for them.

10:55Bill Whitaker:To this day, the church insists the orphan program was the only chance for a new life for these children. Lerino told us Monsignor Landy, who ran the program, died in 1999 without ever expressing any regrets. I think that he believed in the merit of the program, that they were bringing children to good Catholic homes and that these children would be raised well in the United States. How does that explanation sit with you now? Terribly. I mean, because this is how women were treated. And this is why I think of them as disposable women. Disposable. Yeah. It's a terrible thing to give up your child.

11:39But nobody was thinking about these women then. Bella familia, mamma mia.

11:45Bill Whitaker:American adoptee Mary Relato travels often to Italy to see her birth family. She told us she had a happy life growing up in Ohio, but she says she longed for a large family, only to find out she had one. It was 1992 when she first met Anna Maria, her birth mother. The only thing I could do was stare and look at every inch of her for at least an hour. And you're dumbfounded. Not only does she look like me, but she acts like me. I act like her. We're the same weight. It's almost like this is my twin, but older. I know exactly what I'm going to look like when I get older. So now I pay attention to my health.

12:26Bill Whitaker:Mother and daughter say they're still learning about each other. Rolato told us it was years before she could ask the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? I just needed to know her story, her truth, because no mother gives up their child so willingly without grief. Do you now understand why she gave you up? Because she didn't have a piece of bread she said to give us. Poverty. She didn't have clothes for us. She was in a desperate situation, you know. So instead of the church helping her maintain a house and feed her children, instead they took her children. Anna Maria is now 83.

13:14Bill Whitaker:She agreed to speak with us if we withheld her last name. Even decades later, the stigma of having children out of wedlock remains. She told us about her other child, Christian, who was sent to a church-run institution when she became ill. But when she went to pick him up, she says the nuns told her he had died.

13:41Bill Whitaker:I went into depression, Ana Maria told us. I searched for him everywhere. How did he die? Where was he buried? Nobody could tell me. Did you believe that your son was dead? Something inside me didn't feel right, but I could do nothing about it. But Christian had not died. He told us he learned the truth about his mother at age 40. Ana Maria says the church had put him up for adoption without telling her. It was a swindle, she told us. They stole the child that they wanted. So what was it like for you when you found that Christian was in fact alive? I have no words, she told us. There were lots of tears and hugs.

14:37Bill Whitaker:The Vatican's orphan program ended in 1970, but the fallout continues, rippling across generations. Mary Rolato told us she never should have been sent to America. I think the church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. That's all I can think of. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah, I am. I would have a different life too. And while it might have been difficult, I still would have survived it without this kind of grief that I have inside of me now.

15:20We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child and every school in America is taught. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. It's called Canmigo. Canmigo means with me in Spanish. And Khan is its creator, Sal Khan, the well-known founder of Khan Academy, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the U.S. and around the world. As we first reported last year, Khan Migo was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

16:01Its potential is staggering, but it's still very much a work in progress. It's being piloted in 266 school districts in the U.S. in grades 3 through 12. We went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works. Good morning. Just a normal day in chem, right? At 8 in the morning, Melissa Higginson knows it's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry. Are you ready? Are you ready? All right. That's what I want to hear. But these days, she has help. This is acetic acid. The pipette's not going to fill all the way. That lesson Higgison has displayed behind her and is explaining to her 9th and 10th graders was created with the assistance of Conmigo.

16:44She told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter. This next section is your research section. It took Conmigo minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan that would have taken Higgison a week to create. You pull that computer back out, you're going to go back to Conmigo Research. And the students have Conmigo on their laptops too, ready to help them with their questions. We have a couple of questions that we need to ask Conmigo. So for example, I asked it what are three examples of acids and if I wanted to know more...

17:20So it gave you three examples of acids like hydrochloric acid, citric and sulfur. Can you give me more examples? And if I wanted to know even more, I could ask it, like, what specifically some of the acids do. So it's giving you acids and then it's asking you a question, can you think of any other household items that might contain acid? Yeah, so like, it wants to help you understand, like, what it's telling you and not just like give you the information. This school used to be... Finding creative ways to help kids learn is something Sal Khan has been doing since 2005. He'd gotten degrees in math, computer science and engineering from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard, and was working as a hedge fund analyst to build themselves.

18:01When he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins. So if I were to multiply this equation... Not long after, with the help of donors, including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance and started the non-profit Khan Academy. From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was, How do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor? A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child if every kid could have a private tutor that would level the playing field. Yeah, that's the dream. Co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, were fans of Khan Academy and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan's database of test questions and content.

18:47So they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins ChatGPT. What did you immediately think? It was pretty obvious this technology was going to transform society. So it was pretty heady stuff. But on the education side, it was like, wow, people are going to be able to use this for doing deepfakes and fraud and cheat. but if used well with the right guardrails, et cetera, could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback, to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing. Item level analysis.

19:25Educators and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI's technology to build Conmigo. We're going to be using Conmigo for this. And for the last year and a half, the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out. I'll ask it a question. We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Layden and Maddie, who use Conmigo in business class, and Lou and Lily, who use it in English and for SAT preparation. I heard people at Khan Academy came and asked students to break it.

19:58Bill Whitaker:Yes. That was the fun part. That was. Some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer. The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying for the answer. I think that was the elementary school kids. Oh yeah, okay, blame it on the elementary school kids. It's very helpful for those students who maybe don't feel comfortable asking questions within class. Does it have a personality? It's very much there for you. Like, it's very positive, it's very reassuring. It's getting me thinking, and it's not just giving me an answer. Do you ever just want to be like, can you just give me the answer?

20:36Yeah. That was the hardest part for, I know, like me and a lot of other students. Like, why isn't it giving me answers? At the end of the day, that's where your better answer is going to be. It's not going to be whatever the AI gives you. It's going to be whatever you create. So your hypothesis going into the last test is... Teachers at Hobart High don't just use Conmigo to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week. They also monitor their students' understanding of subjects in ways they never could before. You can track how a student is actually using Conmigo. Yeah. I'm going to click usage.

21:09And then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student's been looking at Conmigo. And this is real time because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases. So wait a minute. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. At 8 a.m. she was asking about acids and chemical reactions. So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you're somewhere else in the classroom, you can later check, oh, this is what Abigail was looking at. I understand her thought process on why she got these answers.

21:44So it gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with. Maybe Conmigo throws in a mastery challenge. Sound Khan says they won't sell the data they collect through Conmigo or give it to other tech companies. They do use it, however, to improve Conmigo's memory and personalization. It'll guide them to sort of what to do first. Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who's now a Conmigo product manager, showed us a new feature they've developed to help kids write better and think more critically. I found this essay that I wrote. To test it, I gave Conmigo a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt.

22:23So go ahead and click next, start revising. After just 90 seconds, Conmigo delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay. Okay. It liked some of what I wrote. The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography. But suggested I should revise several paragraphs and my topic sentence. So I'm going to rewrite my sixth grade paper. After a few minutes of tweaking.

22:46Bill Whitaker:Ask it what it thinks. What do you think? that says connecting childhood events to her later life will make her essay more cohesive and insightful. I mean, yeah, that's good advice. I can tell you, as a former 7th grade English teacher, when I assigned an essay, I would limit myself to 10 minutes per essay. I had 100 students. So it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student's first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific, timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it's not possible. So I've now plugged in... To see if Conmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay.