What's so bad about guilt?
By W. Patrick Cunningham

A number of years ago, a priest friend of mine told a story about a Protestant dad who had registered his son at the priest's Catholic school. When asked why he had chosen St. X to educate his son, the parent answered, "I want him to learn some healthy fears." In other words, he wanted the boy to develop a beneficial sense of sin, guilt and repentance.

Surely no traditional religious word or phrase has today as bad a reputation as "guilt." Psychologists in the thrall of Freud see guilt as a barrier to freedom and psychological growth, as something to be overcome. In contemporary speech, "he/she gave me a guilt trip" means someone felt uncomfortable when reminded of obligations unmet. The situation has not been improved by juries that have rendered "not guilty" verdicts on high-profile defendants who have committed heinous crimes, or who have imposed very light sentences on those whom they convict.

The word "guilt" is not found in the New Testament in the original, although there are some occurrences of similar words that have been translated "guilt." For instance, in John 9:41 Jesus heals a blind man, who subsequently testifies about the miracle to the Pharisees. These then claim that both the blind man and Jesus are sinners. Jesus responds to the Pharisees: "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see,' your guilt remains" (RSV). The Greek word translated "guilt" is amartia, which means "to miss the mark." The meaning, then, is "If you were physically blind, as this healed man is, you would not miss the mark and call the Son of God a sinner. Instead, by claiming a special power to discern sin that you don't really have, you have yourselves sinned." "Missing the mark," then, is one of the primary phrases used by the Greek Scriptures to identify an actual sin. The use of the word "guilt" in this context is inaccurate.

Guilt, on the other hand, is the consequence of committing sin, the subjective result of the objective offense. It is the state of the soul in rebellion against God's will, the state of the soul that has wilfully disobeyed the law of God. In Mark 3:29, we read about the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, after which action the RSV says one is "guilty of an eternal sin." The Greek word used there is enoxos, which has the sense of an enduring state of liability. In other words, "guilt" is a word we have come to use in English to describe the state that persists after a sinful action has been committed. The word "guilt" may not be in the New Testament, but the idea of a persisting sin-related liability certainly is. In fact, the same word is used to describe the negative condition experienced by a Christian who receives the Body and Blood of Christ unworthily (1 Cor. 11:18), and the state entered into by any Jew who disobeys any part of the Law (James 2:10).

Is guilt harmful ?

St. Paul attributes the commission of sin to the interaction between human good intentions to obey its obligations, the obligation of the Law itself, and the weakened human freedom. This last entity he calls the sarx, which the English translators render "flesh." That Greek word does not, however, mean the "meat on the human body" or skin and muscle, as in the phrase "flesh and bones." It refers to the tendency of the human will to make selfish and rash choices. Paul says that he serves the law of God with his mind (good intentions), but is in slavery to the law of sin in his "flesh" (Rom. 7:25). In Paul's taxonomy of sin, therefore, there is a great divide in the human person between the good intentions manufactured by the human mind and the evil actions engineered in selfishness by the weakened will. This gulf is not bridged by the Law, which identifies what is sinful but does nothing to empower the human will to obey its precepts. In fact, because the Law identifies what is sinful, it can make evil more obvious and grave because it makes humans aware of sin without empowering them to avoid it (Rom. 7:7-12).

Paul goes so far as to speak of the Law as a "curse" that Christ redeemed us from (Gal. 3:18). In the same passage, he describes the Law as a custodian or caretaker that watched over man until the coming of Christ, in whom we place our faith, by whom we are justified, and through whom we receive the Spirit of sonship (Rom. 8:15, 29). It is through this redemptive process, then, that we are empowered to do good and to work out our salvation (Phil. 2:12). Guilt as a human phenomenon is best understood in the context of this spiritual process of sin, repentance and redemption. It is the "fever" associated with the illness of actual sin, the necessary connection between sin and repentance.

When a human being does something that misses the mark, either in a strictly physical-sensory sense (missing the nail and hitting the thumb) or a moral sense, his intellect senses the error by a feedback system. The physical feedback system in the case of the missed hammer stroke consists of the pressure-pain sensors in the thumb, connected to the brain by a fast-working neural network. At once the physical body begins to take action against the injury, jerking back the thumb, causing the mouth to suck on it to stimulate circulation, stimulating adrenaline flow and glucose metabolism. Most of this is controlled automatically. The higher-level functions of the brain get involved very quickly, so that the person can determine what to do next to effect healing.

When a moral offense is committed by a morally conscious person, there is at first a similar automatic moral response. Suppose one person shoots another person (and has never done so before). There is a reflex perception that something is different, first of all. The physical action and response of the other person (death) is outside the actor's realm of experience. The intellect then sorts the information it has in order to make a decision. From the results and the feelings engendered by the act, the intellect first experiences revulsion at the act. The conscience function is stimulated. Was the action good or justifiable (self-defense, protection of one's family or country) or evil (essentially every other situation)? Once the perception has been filtered through the conscience, and a judgment has been made, then the intellect can go on to decide what to do next. If the conscience experiences guilt, then the decision may be to flee, or to repent and confess.

Suppose, however, that an evil action is repeated to the point of habit, something the psychologists tell us takes about twenty repetitions. The perception-decision process is short-circuited. It is probably impossible to override the lower-order perception, the adrenaline flow, the basic feelings of revulsion. But if the intellect is to maintain some semblance of sanity, the rest of the sequence of moral consequences has to be altered. The conscience is poisoned by a series of thoughts and decisions that renders it unable to judge against the evil action. Thus, we know from notorious cases that the serial killer of prostitutes reasons that he is ridding the world of vermin. The contract murderer sees himself as a hangman, executing the verdict of an underworld court. The abortionist rationalizes his action by dehumanizing his victims (and often enough, the women on which he operates) and reasoning that they have no rights, or their rights are subordinate to their mothers'. The "feeling" that something is not right may persist, but the conscience function of the intellect has been perverted so that the actor actually believes that he hasn't done anything wrong, or has even done something virtuous. The price of a bad conscience, of course, is a disabled moral immune system. The perverted conscience fosters an inability to divide right from wrong, continued sin and, absent repentance, eternal punishment, as Isaiah said: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Isa. 5:20 RSV) The extinction of the guilt reflex issues in bitter personal consequences.

Guilt, then, far from being unhealthy or evil, is the logical and proper consequence of sin that is accurately judged by a well-formed conscience. Guilt is a sign that our spiritual life has fallen into ill health, just as a fever is a sign of physical illness. Its suppression is a loss to the moral life, and a foretaste of eternal death.

Guilt and sexual sin

For many years, Catholics were routinely excoriated in print for their supposed fixation on sexual sin. It is true that moral manuals and moral catechisms were very rigorous and unyielding on the matter of sins against the sixth and ninth commandment, but neither I nor anyone I know can recall many sermons against sexual infidelity and fornication during our years of Catholic school education. Since the sixties, however, it is safe to say that one very rarely hears or reads anything in the mainstream Catholic press or pulpit about masturbation, adultery, fornication, homosexual conduct or contraception. In fact, in some places sex education even in Catholic schools has been perverted to some very anti-Christian ends. Extramarital sex has been re-evaluated by certain so-called theologians and found to be acceptable, even virtuous. The results should have been predictable-a falling Catholic birthrate, except among unwed teenagers, and increased rates of divorce, disease and despair.

The plain fact is that the pre-sixties fixation, so-called of moralists on sexual sin was entirely justified. Sexual sin occupies a special place in the pantheon of evil. This was recognized long ago by St. Paul. "Every other sin," he says, "exists outside the human person. But the fornicator sins against his own person" (1 Cor. 6:17). Every human intuitively understands that sex is special. It is an appetite with great strength that like food-hunger is oriented toward human preservation and happiness, but that, unlike food-hunger, does not have to be sated in order to live. Although the healthy adult experience of sexuality is focused on relationships, the first adolescent experience of sexual function is frequently as a means of giving oneself pleasure. This selfish end is the only meaning of self-abuse. Frankly, the self-abuser confuses the organ of generation and marital union with a toy. This misidentification of the generative capacity of man is at the root of all sexual sin. Ruth Westheimer and her cackling colleagues in pop psychology have led the charge to remove a sense of guilt about masturbation by entitling it "self-pleasuring." But it is, in fact, self-abuse, a misuse of the most sacred bodily function of human beings. Honest psychiatrists know that there are many men who are in thrall to this habit, and that it is unhealthy. They know that pornography is the ambrosia of the self-abuser. They also know that behind the face of nearly every child-abuser is a self-abuser. Thus the Church's teaching has been consistent over the ages: masturbation is an "intrinsically and gravely disordered action" (Catechism at 2352). Ironically, Karl Menninger himself identified the error of taking masturbation out of the category of sin early in the sexual revolution, without understanding that this was a primal error of psychosexuality (Whatever Became of Sin, Hawthorn, NYC, 1973 at 36). In other words, he said that once self-abuse lost its onus of sinfulness, all other sexual offenses lost theirs as well. But because he agreed with the "rehabilitation" of self-abuse, even as the sexual corruption steamroller lumbered past him, he could only stand clueless and ask "What's happening?"

When one suppresses the natural response of guilt that follows sexual sin, either internally or externally, certain pathological consequences must follow. One sexual sin naturally leads to another, more serious one. To repent of one is hard enough, but each successive offense paves over the conscience with another layer of self-justification, making repentance all the more difficult. In time, the sexual offender becomes an overt or covert proselytizer for sexual sin. Sucking others into the maelstrom of sexual sin is doubly satisfying to the chronic sinner: it gives him another human to exploit, and it helps him quell the voice of conscience in its death throes. After all, with his help, "everyone is doing it."

If we understand the process of guilt suppression and vice formation, we can formulate strategies for preaching and teaching the call to repentance. Understandably, many preachers are embarrassed when they realize they must preach on sexual fidelity and chastity. How do you start? What do you say?

One can take a hint from the Catechism. It gives vastly more space to a celebration of Marriage (1601-1666), to commentaries on the goods of chastity and fidelity (2331-2350) than to sexual sin (2351-2359). The liturgical year provides a matrix for preaching, giving many opportunities in the three-year cycle of readings to focus a sermon or homily on marriage and the goods of family living. Sins against chastity, marital fidelity and the family can then be treated in context. Furthermore, parish classes for parents should focus on helping parents to teach chastity to their children. We know that classroom sex education has been a total failure wherever it has been tried. It is past time to return this responsibility to parents, and to give them the tools to teach their families the truth about marriage and family living.

Beyond the issue of sexual sin, of course, are many others. Business persons should be challenged to examine their business practices, and to confess cheating, overbilling, forgery, unjust dismissals, predatory pricing and all the rest. Family members need to examine their family relationships, and repent of those actions that have disrupted family life, and caused pain to others (very often in the guise of "being honest"). Ultimately, our teaching and homiletics should help form habits of daily examinations of conscience and acts of repentance prior to retiring at night, and regular use of the sacrament of reconciliation.

Honing the guilt response

Guilt is only salutary when it leads to repentance, confession and absolution, and finally to spiritual growth and empowerment to do good. Because so many Catholics have lost their way through this sin-cycle, both education and training must be instituted for two or three generations of them.

The primary means of adult education, whether we like it or not, is going to be the Sunday homily. Ideally, the local ordinary will take the lead in restoring a sense of sin, repentance and confession by mandating or strongly suggesting a series of sermon topics related to this area, perhaps during Advent or Lent. The sermon topics for a series of four would be, for instance, Original Sin, Actual Sin and Redemption; The Results of Common Sins; Forgiveness of Sin and the Way to Confess; Repentance and Healing, and Spiritual Growth. Catholics have to be taught again the horror of sin, the physical and spiritual effects of sin, and the divine plan for forgiveness, healing and spiritual growth. They need in many cases to be taught or reminded of the simple sacramental act of confession, and the good results to be expected from it. They also need to be reassured that their confessor will under no circumstances talk about their sins to anyone.

Young Catholics, in addition, should be trained in our catechesis to understand confession as the supernatural, almost automatic response to sin. Training goes one step further than education. When we train the young to confess, we actually demonstrate for them how it is done, and then give them an opportunity to practice doing it, just as we were given that opportunity before First Communion back in the forties and fifties. Above all, we need to encourage them to consider confession as good, not scary. Priests can do this by reminding them that all men, even priests, need to confess, by showing them that it is easy and nonthreatening, and by inviting them to the sacrament.

In the forties and fifties there was considerable training of priests in the ways of dealing with a sensitive or scrupulous conscience, one that sees sin where there is none. Ultimately, the scrupulous person must learn to put his faith in the redeeming Christ, and the mercy of God shown in the act of Redemption. Unfortunately, for the last thirty years we have been treating Catholics in general as if they had a severe case of scrupulosity. This concern has been entirely misplaced. We have so emphasized in our teaching and preaching that loving mercy, and have so stood aside while many rationalize away their bad behavior, that the Church in the West is in the midst of an epidemic case of lax and bad consciences. As in so many other situations, virtue here lies in the middle. We need to work very hard over the next two decades to restore a sense of sin and guilt, to encourage the frequent use of confession and communion for spiritual health and growth. Then we will reap rich rewards of balanced Catholics who abhor and repent of sin, and respond to the grace of the sacraments by doing good for others. n