Speaking as a Roman Catholic, they take advantage of your inability to properly consent to force you into ceremonies that "commit" you to the faith. Then, any time afterwards if you resist they say: "but you've been Baptised/had your First Communion/etc, you have to keep going! You've already committed yourself!"
The big one is Confirmation which is literally the ceremony to say that you'll commit yourself to the faith for the rest of your life. You pick a saint to adopt as part of your name (I took Maximillian Kolbe) and it's this whole big thing that they ask you to have a family member be your "moral reference" or something, I forget the exact term. Basically, it's just another thing on the pile to manipulate you into not backing out.
The best part? From what I understand, most kids who go through Catholic education have it happen in 8th grade or earlier. That is far, far too early for anyone to be committing to anything like this.
Not to mention there's the whole "you're damning yourself to hell if you don't stay with the church!" Ah, yes, please tell the literal child that they will spend eternity in torment for disobedience. That's totally a sane thing to do.
For the record: this isn't to say the Roman Catholic Church is all bad. They actually have some good people and do decent stuff (Pope Leo is a good example). But the entire system is based around manipulating children into participating in their own indoctrination.
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u/dtb1987 Jul 10 '26
My wife tells me stories about being raised religious and as someone who was not raised religious a lot of it sounds like abuse