“Now, another characteristic of the scientologists is that they develop their own language. For instance, the word ‘clear’. If there was a movie, I can’t remember the name of it, I never saw it, but it was starring a very famous scientologist actor John Travolta. And in it he had been someone who is mentally deficient. They did some sort of procedure on him and he became absolutely brilliant. And in that movie, he would keep on saying ‘Oh, now I see it’s all clear to me.’ And he kept using that word clear and he was communicating some of his own scientology lingo.
But there’s a lot of other lingo they do. Now, in most groups there are ways to have no inside language. I mean, everybody does that. As a matter of fact, your whole continent has a lot of inside language that I don’t understand. And I’m still trying to learn some of it. Some of it, I do better at than others but you know, I can’t remember all of them now but anyway anybody has slang of course. We have slang and in words in the United States and those things change over time that’s for sure. But, one of the reasons you can also develop a whole language is so that you can keep a certain amount of control over a group and that is the fear that some critics have of scientology – that they develop this kind of language in order to have their members speaking among themselves as a group who is in the know. This is very attractive. I know what these words mean. And if somebody else like myself uses a word like ‘clear’ they’ll have this sort of knowing smile like ‘he thinks he knows what clear means but he doesn’t really know what clear means.’
And that will be true with any other use of the language; you’ll be considered to be something like a little monkey who imitates them but doesn’t really understand it because you haven’t gone through the process of getting yourself clear, okay? So, that would be one of the senses that they have. Now, this is part of the problem because it keeps a lot of people out; the more you get into it, the more you can learn about what the meanings of the words are and you get into this other world view. And it is truly a world view and they consider themselves to be religion.
Now, during his life, El Ron Hubbard, ran into a lot of difficulties because he called us a religion, however, our internal revenue service, the IRS which collects our income taxes, did not quite understand what he meant by religion and they thought that their definition of religon and his were different. So, he ended up having to live on a yacht in international waters for the rest of his life. He couldn’t come back to land because he was severely wanted for income tax evasion. He was never convicted. He was just wanted for income tax evasion. Now, this is as part of the Corbin. People like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, both of them were raised Catholic and Tom Cruise has apparently no interest, in fact he was in the seminary for a short while. But he has no interest in Catholicism but somebody like John Travolta has oftentimes said ‘There’s nothing inconsistent about being a scientologist and a Catholic. I’m a Catholic and I’m a scientologist, and it’s all okay.’
Well, it’s not. It’s not. You cannot be a good Catholic and a scientologist. Because for one thing, a core difference is that we believe, as Catholics, that the soul of each individual, is created at the moment of conception and is unique to that person. Reincarnation in any form, including from other planets, is unacceptable as a Catholic. That each human being is unique and as was created by God directly. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the great honours that women have. You know, physical matter is no longer being created. You can, according to the laws of Newton, matter may change form but there’s no new matter created. You can change something into carbon by burning but it doesn’t disappear. It just changes into carbon. And then it change from carbon back to something else, if it lands in some place where it can grow into a plant, it becomes another form of carbon. And the wide variety of things can happen but there’s just alteration of the matter. There’s no creation of new matter.
But women, women are privileged. Because the last aspect of creation, goes on in the womb of women. Not during the act of procreation but sometime later. When a sperm and an ovum unite, it’s the woman alone with God. And at that moment, God does something He does nowhere else in the physical universe: He creates a soul and this is why Alice Von Hilderbrand speaks of women’s wombs as being like a holy of holies because it is something that God is acting very powerfully. Well, if scientology were correct, that would not be the case. That there would not be this creation of new souls. It’s using old souls. And that in itself is problematic for a Catholic.
Secondly, we don’t believe in engrams. I mean, there’s nothing that we, that the Church has for or against engrams. I mean if scientists found these things, that would be up to scientists. But what we do believe is that you cannot be redeemed from sin by hanging on to engrams or by losing them. That has nothing to do with the salvation of your soul. This is where the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is determinative. And that reconciliation with God has everything to do with the reconciliation that Jesus Christ works. So, this is something that’s very, very crucial for us to keep very much in mind, that this is one of the things that we have to pay close attention to.
So, I don’t know that there’s much more that I want to say about scientology. I accept as Catholics you may not be a Catholic in good standing and join. I wouldn’t experiment with it. I don’t think that it’s a safe experimentation. Scientology is very wealthy. Scientology has, in fact, bought a very large amount of real estate in Tampa Florida, Tampa St. Pete and they own a lot of buildings there and they are very successful. But there are a lot of stories you can read, books by people who were scientologists and got out of it, and you can get some idea of who El Ron Hubbard was and various literature but hopefully that would not be much of a concern for you and I hope that nobody feels a temptation to either join or to stay within it and order to be a good Catholic.”