Catholic Guilt In Everyday Life

By Editor In Chief Lisa Ahern

When I was eight, there was a tradition the day after your First Holy Communion, you dressed up in your little white gown, went to mass and got your Second Holy Communion. 

However I was unable to take my Second Holy Communion the following day. I went to school the following week and it was a massive shock amongst my friends that I hadn’t had a Second Holy Communion yet. There was this feeling that  I had done something wrong. A few weeks later I begged my mother to take me to mass, so I finally had my Second Holy Communion. The guilt eight year old me felt literally drove me to the church. That my friends, is Catholic Guilt. 

What is Catholic Guilt you may ask? It is this feeling of culpability for not maintaining this standard Catholicism has set within our heads. Unfortunately growing up as Catholics, guilt plays a major part of our genes. It sticks to us from a very young age. Now I wouldn’t be a practising Catholic anymore, but still it is always in the back of my mind even if I try to ignore it, something there that makes me feel like there's something I should be doing.

So I decided to ask the people in my life if they ever felt like they did small things, innocuous habits, that arose from being brought up Catholic. The most common one was blessing yourself when you passed a church, a graveyard and or when an ambulance passed. Another one is following the rules of lent, you may say it is for “health” reasons, but really the origin is from our Catholic upbringing.These are only habits, the guilt comes when you “forget” once and are flooded with this distaste for yourself. One of my friends told me that once she had chocolate on Good Friday and she was so overwhelmed with a sense of guilt, she felt like “sin” was written across her forehead.That exact feeling is instilled into our culture which is still stacked full of traditional catholic values. 

Along with these habits Catholicism aids in this stigma of “what will other people think’. Another friend of mine reminisced to me her experience of when she chose to stop practising the Catholic faith. Still to appease her mother she went to mass but decided not to go up the altar for the Communion. In her mother’s eyes this act was seen as a major protest, and was mortified at the thought of everyone in the parish seeing her. Once again there is this over conscious feeling of not being a good enough Catholic. The same guilt I felt when I was only eight years old.

When I was asking the people in my life about Catholic Guilt,  I discovered one thing that I have from my Catholic upbringing. It is this need to get married within a church. I do not go to mass, so I obviously do not want to sit through it on my own wedding day. That is the main factor that turns me away from having my future wedding ceremony in a church. However, I just can’t shake the feeling that I “must” get married within a church or else I am breaking family tradition. That being said, no one in my family ever puts this pressure on me. It is my own mind and guilt that pushes this thought. My friend put it into perfect words when she described how she would not feel really married if it wasn’t done in a church. I think this is what crosses my mind. I was brought into a society where getting married in the church was the way, and I have this guilty conscience if I step out of the “norm” and don’t get married in a church. 

There are so many different small things in life that have shaped the way we are and Catholic Guilt is a big one for many people in Ireland. It is this habit we cannot shake even if we have not stepped into a church in many years.