Surgeon removes ‘adhesions’ to enjoy peace, restore faith

John Sottosanti, a retired oral surgeon living in San Diego, CA, has been a Legatus member for a dozen years and is a former president of the San Diego Chapter. He grew up in an Italian Catholic family in Connecticut but had little interest in religion as a young man. Instead, he focused on achieving financial success and enjoying worldly pursuits. 

Yet over many years, he experienced a gradual conversion that led him to the active practice of the Catholic faith. These days he frequently shares his story in talks with audiences as well as in his newly published autobiography, Mortal Adhesions. 

Sottosanti’s motivation to write the book was that although in years past he was materially successful, “deep down I wasn’t happy,” he explained. “My faith was shallow. I have since enjoyed some miraculous experiences in my life and have become serious about my Catholic faith. I wanted to share this joy.”

He said he hopes his story will lead those who struggle with faith to realize “God is actually there and active in our lives.”

It was Sottosanti’s Sicilian-born immigrant father who first prompted him to pursue material success. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture his father experienced when coming to New England had been anti-immigrant, with Italians and Irish at the bottom of the totem pole. 

“My dad told me to earn a doctorate degree and make a lot of money, and I’d get respect,” he said. “So I did.”

His mother saw him drifting from the faith, however, and — like St. Monica praying for her wayward son, St. Augustine — she began praying for his return to the faith.

Life is short, heaven eternal

In Mortal Adhesions, Sottosanti relates the many crucial incidents in his life, perhaps brought about by his mother’s prayers, when God taught him the brevity of life and the foolishness of trying to make one’s heaven on earth. 

In 1978, for example, he had planned to take a quick flight from Los Angeles to San Diego onboard PSA flight 182. He was frustrated to have missed the flight, but he discovered later in the day that the plane had collided with another aircraft and crashed, killing all 135 people on board. 

Another time he went spelunking with his two sons and became trapped in a cave with water rising around them. They managed to escape, but his memories of the event are “terrifying,” he said.

Sottosanti said he recognized his own vanity in his interaction with celebrities he met while practicing medicine in Southern California. In the 1970s, for example, actress Angie Dickinson was a patient. “I remember how beautiful she was, but she was worried that we’d mess up her hair,” he related. “I thought, ‘That woman really has pride. She has so much money and fame, yet she’s worried about her hair.’ It made me realize that I was full of pride myself.”

Although at the time Sottosanti doubted there was a God, a used black Mercedes he’d once owned led him to believe in the devil. Four times it was involved in accidents, and it was in a fifth accident after he’d sold it. “I wondered if there was something evil going on with that car; perhaps someone had been murdered in it and that was not disclosed to me when I bought it,” he speculated. “It got me thinking: if evil exists, if the devil exists, then the opposite exists — God and the good angels.”

In the years that followed, he became active in the Cursillo movement and in parish Bible studies. He also walked the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, which became “a transitional point in my life,” he remarked.

Inner peace at last

Sottosanti ultimately turned to God in search of inner peace. In a pivotal moment in his life, a time when he enjoyed “money, a nice house and car, and all the trappings of the American dream,” stress and conflict at work and home left him miserable. One night he looked up to the stars: “God, if you are there, all I want is inner peace. Please help me,” he prayed. After that, “step by step, my life started changing for the better.”

The book title Mortal Adhesions relates to “dependencies that prevent true love and inner peace,” he explained. These “adhesions” are the seven capital sins, which plague all of humanity.

Man’s purpose is to get to heaven, he stated, and the seven deadly sins, because they are impediments to attaining that goal, must be rooted out of one’s life. 

“I share the story in my book of how I’ve battled [these sins]. For me, the hardest sin to get rid of has been pride,” he admitted. “I was egotistical; I was my own god. 

“But the more we make progress in these battles, the more we’ll be able to connect with God and enjoy inner peace.”