C is for Catholic Guilt

Many people who invoke this phrase do so to try and indict the Catholic Church for its perceived overbearing and fun-hating ways (i.e. “If those sisters hadn’t rapped my knuckles with a ruler in parochial school, I wouldn’t have so much Catholic guilt about living with my boyfriend.”) Oddly enough, as of this writing, there is not so much as a Wikipedia entry for Protestant guilt, despite the fact that movies from “Footloose” to “Inherit the Wind” paint Protestants as the ones who make everybody feel bad about anything that might smack of entertainment or inquiry. I challenge the reader to find the employment of alcohol, dancing and gambling on a Protestant campus as an ecclesial fundraiser.

II Corinthians 7:10 tells us that “Godly sorrow produces a salutary repentance without regret, but worldly sorrow produces death.” Godly sorrow is sorrow for our own stupidity, rather than sorrow for the fact that someone told us that what we did was stupid. Perhaps there were strident nuns who were awfully harsh on certain individuals at certain points during their education, but the melodramatic angst of the anti-nostalgic can lead to an exaggeration of how bad it actually was (i.e., the all-too-common sentiment that “a judgment of my actions is a judgment of myself and my family, and how dare you, a mere human, question my standing before God, which I feel indignant about but uninspired to thoroughly explore?!!” It’s not uncommon to find lifelong reluctant or ex-Catholics who moan about the hardships that they endured in grade school. Likewise, it’s not uncommon for outsiders raised in strict Christian households to wonder why Catholics seem to think they had it worse than anyone else.

Guilt, Catholic or no, is an indication that there’s still a conscience buried within us somewhere. Two responses are available to us: 1) suppress it and assume that the discomfort we feel is somehow the result of an irrational pain that our superiors were arbitrarily trying to inflict upon us, or 2) that maybe, just maybe, the wisdom of the Church was wiser than our hormones, attitudes or whatever caused our rebellion against her, and maybe, just maybe, it might be good for us to suck it up and listen. If we don’t, there’s a good chance we’ll just end up feeling guiltier.