In a speech which he was asked to deliver back in 2017 at St Michael’s Parish Hall, Belfield, Father Mitchell Pacwa was asked to talk about two topics: scientology and freemasonry. Fr Pacwa is an American Jesuit priest, president and founder of Ignatius Productions and is now the senior fellow of St Paul Center for Biblical Theology. So yes, dear readers, thankfully there are priests who still talk about freemasonry and Fr Pacwa is not the only one.
Here is the transcript of the first part of his speech, about scientology which will be covered in two pieces:
“Tonight I’ve been asked to deal with two subjects, both of which are sources of a fair amount of controversy and I’ll do my best to do so with as much honesty and respect as I can. The first is scientology. The second is freemasonry. Now in terms of scientology, let’s deal with that probably a bit more quickly. I don’t know any of you here belonged to scientology? At any rate, it was founded by EL Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was the author of a number of a be quality science fiction books and he did okay by them. But he had a famous quote saying that ‘You can make more money starting your own religion than you can your own corporation’, you know, business. So he started a religion called scientology. And there are a number of basic beliefs – some people tried to say that these are, you know, similar to his science fiction worldview. I don’t know that, I’ve never read any of his novels. But, well I do know from former members of scientology, as well as from the literature I read, about Scientology: that the basic belief is this: There was another planet which was inhabited. The planet blew up and the souls of all the people that lived there, came hurtling through the outer space. When they came into our planet in order to take on bodies on earth, these souls picked up something called engrams. And these are the vibrations or ways, as they might explain it, which caused the people on earth to be mentally unbalance, if not outright crazy.
Now, the goal of scientology is to get you clear of the engrams and clear is one of their standard phrases or standard words to explain the state of your being once you are free from the influence of engrams. Now, how do they know you have engrams? There is a little device that they have. The number of ways that they do this, they’ll start off with psychological testing. I remember being at a play. I was living in New York City at the time, and there was an off-Broadway play that I wanted to go and see. As a college student I could get tickets for two dollars. I liked the price. So I went to go and see the play. And while we’re waiting in line, they offered to do a psychological test. Fortunately, I was with another Jesuit who is himself a psychologist. And he started taking the tests – we thought that well they stay posed as college kids and they’re trying to do this survey. And they want us to help them. Well we were college students so he said sure, we’ll help you out. Well, he started answering this and he said this test is totally bogus, let’s get out of here. So, we got back in line and and got our tickets and saw the play which was not all that good as it turned out.
But, one of the things that they had to do is get you into that test and say well we see that there’s a certain problem here. And then, they’ll have you go and do it an engram meter. Now, what it is – is a small machine and there’ll be what looks like two tin cans and you put your hands on the ends of two electrodes, you don’t get shocked or anything, it’s not painful but you put on there and see and sure enough the Engram meter will go up. Now, as I’ve been told, this Engram meter is the same thing as a lie-detector machine. How does a lie-detector machine work? When you tell a falsehood, your body, you can’t help it, your hands will sweat and so that will make the electricity, you know, you’ll become a conductor in the ground and the meter will go up showing that you’re not telling the truth at the point you say a falsehood, okay?
Now, if your hands are inside two tin cans, what are they going to do? Sweat! So, inevitably the engram meter will go up. Now, there’s a course that you can take to get rid of those engrams. Cause they offer a basic course. And of course if you’re under dollars then there are other courses and the courses get more and more expensive, so that eventually you could end up paying two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to go through all the courses. However, at the earlier stages, you graduate and you become a teacher of the lower courses. And the money you get for teaching those lower courses goes to you for you to pay for your next level course. So, it would be something of a pyramid approach that you can keep going up the scale and be able to take these courses and eventually get yourself clear.”