Guilt: The Cement Shoes of the Catholic Church.

It is both funny and sad how feelings of guilt can be so ingrained (brainwashed) into a person and surface at odd times.

At work the other day I took the elevator down to the lobby to get the mail. After retrieving it, I went back to the elevator: pushing the button, I waited. The lobby music that played sounded like church music and for a brief moment, I felt like bursting into tears. Why? I told myself it was beautiful music! Seems that the psychological remnants of the Church sometimes die hard.

People are hard-wired to feel guilt when they know they have done something wrong. When a PC encounters an error a dialog box usually pops up to alert the user that something is wrong. Our Great Programmer gave us the ability to naturally notify ourselves when we have done something wrong through moderated feelings of guilt. We feel guilt in order to correct something that we have done wrong. God wants us to correct the errors in order to think clearly and to feel good about our lives and so we can live in peace with others…and ourselves.

The Catholic Church is notorious for drilling the feelings of guilt into a person: you feel guilt when you look at someone with lust, if you eat meat during Lent, if you don’t tithe, if you don’t tithe enough, if you don’t go to church, if you don’t go to confession, if you use birth control, if you choose to stand in the back of the church rather than sit, if you don’t get married in the Church, if you don’t do this, if you do that, etc.

In my 29 years as a Catholic I tried to follow the rules as best I could. But the Church’s “secret sauce” is that your best will never be good enough and they will always let you know that – like a horse with a carrot on a stick. Churn feelings of guilt over something that cannot be rectified. This is the way they want to keep it because if a Catholic corrects the error and this eradicates their guilt, then they feel at peace with God and might just (gasp) think for themselves. Guilt is the Church’s most valuable tool of control. As with anything, the poison is in the dose. I believe this overwhelming environment of guilt wrongly abberates God’s original design for the condition of our mental and spiritual circuitry. If a person's mind is saturated with guilt, how can they have a clear, genuine and healthy relationship with God?

I remember feeling inadequate many times because of this guilt overload. I remember crying in confession on more than one occasion, because of grave sins, because of corporal sins, because I couldn’t shake the sin and because they constantly tell you that you are full of sin – including their favorite imaginary sin of all: Original Sin. Yes, you are supposed to feel guilty for existing at all. They tell you that you are born a sinner. St. Augustine (who felt guilty all the time) conjured up the idea of Original Sin so that anyone out there who didn’t have enough guilt could get their fill. Guilty people want others to feel the same, I guess. The Church latched onto this idea as it is not fully biblical and as scripture goes, it is contextually misconstrued. This lie has created a lifetime worth psychological damage, self-hate and unhappiness to so many people and I am grateful that God led me out of that swamp after being entrenched for so long.

Didn’t Christ die to take away the sins of the world? I cannot reconcile these two views. Seems to me that the Church thinks He failed.

After my lobby moment, I reminded myself that God helped me graduate to the next tier of getting to know Him and I returned to a peaceful state of mind before the elevator reached my office floor. Guilt in ginormous, damaging Church doses may work to keep the spiritually immature in line (if but for awhile), but I believe I’m no longer spiritually immature and feel pity (and hope) for those who are still mired. May God open their eyes.