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Doctrinal mind control in Italy and Roman Catholic brainwashing (1) Biagio Catalano interviews Domenico Pacitti PART 1 Biagio Catalano: Professor Pacitti, I see from your writings that you describe yourself as an atheist. In what precise sense are you an atheist? Domenico Pacitti: I am an atheist in that I know of no convincing reason to support the existence of a supreme deity. Nor do I believe in immortality, an afterlife, heaven or hell, miracles or that Jesus Christ was the son of God. Of course, I cannot completely disprove that there is a God in the same way that I cannot completely disprove that there is currently a fully functional Italian restaurant on the planet Pluto or that our world is populated by ghosts that lie in principle beyond our detection. But I consider my scepticism on all three counts to be entirely reasonable and I take the onus of proof to be on the part of the proponents of such propositions. The term ‘agnostic’ I would reserve for those who become more deeply involved in the question and find they can express no certainty either way. Catalano: What was your first contact with Roman Catholicism and how did you first become an atheist? Pacitti: I remember around the age of 4, in Glasgow where I was born and brought up, asking my aunt about the holy pictures she kept in her Sunday missal. One showed St Michael triumphantly driving a lance into a fallen Lucifer. Another depicted the Archangel Gabriel holding the trumpet he would eventually use to announce the end of time. I immediately wondered how a supposedly benign God could promote such pitiless bloodshed and sadistically pull the carpet of time from under our feet. But I received no satisfactory replies to my insistent questions. My vague feeling was that religion had no literal sense and had to be viewed in symbolic or mythological terms, although I was unable to express it as such at the time. I don’t think I ever really believed any of it seriously. So it is not that I became an atheist; rather I simply never became a theist. Catalano: How did your early school experiences reinforce your atheism? Pacitti: At the convent school I attended between the ages of five and nine, the nuns made us learn the catechism by heart: “Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, love Him and worship Him in this world so that I may be happy with Him forever in the next” – that sort of thing. By this time I knew very well that my parents, and not God, had made me and felt it as an affront to them that that this act should, for better or worse, be attributed to God or that I should love Him more than I loved them. The notion of worshipping always seemed intolerably servile and self-abasing to me and unworthy of any self-respecting person. Nor did having to call a nun “Sister” and a priest “Father” do anything to help matters. Part of the catechism required us to accept that a miracle quite literally took place every single time a mass was held and that this miracle consisted in the priest’s transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. I remember asking the nuns whether transubstantiation was not perhaps meant to be interpreted symbolically, like the eating of an apple by Adam. The horrified response was that it all had to be accepted as quite literally true and that I must learn not to be such a doubting Thomas. I should add that my parents’ decision to send me to Roman Catholic private schools was based purely on the supposed high standards of education since my parents were neither practising Catholics nor especially interested in my religious education. Catalano: Can you say something about your later school experiences? Pacitti: Religious education at the Jesuit primary and secondary schools I attended added to indoctrination by rote learning a more subtle form of indoctrination: automatic self-censorship. This was instilled by allowing and even encouraging the asking of questions provided they fell within the accepted doctrinal framework, in other words provided they posed no radical challenge to doctrine. Anything that fell beyond the predetermined bounds was inadmissible.
It began to strike me that the behaviour of believers in God, the afterlife and
immortality was in sharp contradiction to their professed beliefs. On one
occasion a teacher had just died after receiving the last sacraments, which
guaranteed him a safe passage to heaven, and I couldn’t understand why there was
so much sadness. They ought to have been rejoicing, I thought. And I wondered
about all those who,
having died
without receiving the necessary preferential treatment, would
be roasted in hellfire
in accordance with this bizarre doctrine. Catalano: Were there any particularly memorable personal episodes or clashes you can tell us about? Pacitti: There were quite a few incidents. I can tell you about the one that made the greatest impact on me. When I was nine I sat the entrance exam for a Jesuit primary school in Glasgow and had my first experience of a Roman Catholic-style injustice. The headmaster, a certain Fr Tracy, a man intoxicated by priestly power, had been losing patience with Scots Italians for putting their children to work in the family business before they had completed their schooling and he said that he wanted to teach them a lesson. Well the lesson came in the form of denying entry to the candidate with the highest marks, which happened to be myself, on the grounds of having an Italian family background. Meanwhile other Scots Italians, the recommended ones, were being granted places at the school. A determined campaign by my parents eventually brought the headmaster to his knees. I can still remember the anguish on my mother’s face when I asked when I would be getting my school uniform and reassured her that I hadn’t made any errors in the exam. I was told the truth long after the matter had been resolved, when I also discovered that the headmaster was especially annoyed at having to deal with a woman, my father having been too disgusted to want to meet the headmaster in person. It was just one more experience which reinforced my view that priests are viruses in society, corrupting truth and infecting the mind.
END OF PART 1
* Biagio Catalano is an independent researcher who specialises in the history of Christianity. Some of his published work may be read in the Italian online journal www.alexamenos.com. Note: The
original Italian version
of this interview appeared
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