{"id":4,"date":"2008-06-09T13:46:52","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T13:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/catholic-guilt-try-again.html"},"modified":"2008-06-09T13:46:52","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T13:46:52","slug":"catholic-guilt-try-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/catholic-guilt-try-again.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholic guilt? Try again…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Confess%202.bmp\"Whenever someone tickles the hair-trigger of my seemingly congenital guilty conscience, the response to my reflexive mea culpa<\/em> is that I am s-o-o-o Catholic. Well, yes, I hope so. Then again, the Pilgrim tradition of my youth is no slouch when it comes to guilt, so I can’t say as I took that on with my Catholic baptism. For that matter, would Jewish humor–or Judaism itself–exist without the emotional straight man of the guilty conscience?
\nAnd now comes a study showing that we Catholics (as well as other Christians) are actually no more guilt-ridden than anyone else. (Well, Jews will be studied next, so maybe they’ll stay true to tradition.) According to this write-up <\/a>from Yonat Shimron, the religion writer par excellence at the Raleigh News &Observer, Roman Catholic teens feel no more guilty than other U.S. teenagers:<\/p>\n

If they cheated on an exam, lied to their parents or engaged in serious petting, it’s not bearing down on their conscience, according to a study by UNC-Chapel Hill researchers. At least it’s not making them feel more guilty than their non-Catholic peers.
\nThe emotional fallout of transgressing the Catholic Church’s long list of sins — venial and mortal — may be a thing of the past. Blame the decline of ruler-wielding nuns at Catholic schools, or assimilation into the wider society.
\nThe study, to be published this month in the Review of Religious Research, is based on data from the National Study of Youth and Religion conducted by sociologist Christian Smith, now at the University of Notre Dame and Stephen Vaisey, at UNC-CH. The survey included 3,290 teens, of whom 819 were Catholic — about 24 percent, roughly equivalent to the proportion of Catholics in the U.S. population.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No doubt many doomsayers will view this as more evidence of the widespread loss of a sense of sin. But it may be more symptomatic of a hangover from the longstanding misuses of sin, and guilt, as a means of social control by religious folks (pastors and parents and the rest). Sin and guilt are useful as paths to reconciliation. I have always found the lack of a belief in forgiveness as the real nettle to grasp, and the true heart–and toughest part–of the Christian message. People of all ages resist burdens of guilt not only because they are transparently used as ways to get them to do something (and not necessarily something God wants them to do), but also because they see no way out of the bind of a guilty conscience.
\nIt is noteworthy that the study also showed that for Catholics, going to confession did seem to lighten the burden that was felt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever someone tickles the hair-trigger of my seemingly congenital guilty conscience, the response to my reflexive mea culpa is that I am s-o-o-o Catholic. Well, yes, I hope so. Then again, the Pilgrim tradition of my youth is no slouch when it comes to guilt, so I can’t say as I took that on with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholic guilt? 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Try again…"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/","name":"Pontifications","description":"Catholic Faith and Culture","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71","name":"David Gibson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","caption":"David Gibson"},"description":"DAVID GIBSON is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism. He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}