December 14, 2025
Dear Friends,
Shame and guilt were, in my experience, the operating feelings of conventional Catholicism, they were, in one way or another, the subject matter of sermons, religious instruction, and pastoral practice. Shame and guilt provided effective means of organizing and controlling people and the organizations and institutions that human beings created with the Christian religions being the most pervasive and formidable of human institutions in the western world.
The idea of the “soul” was reduced to a kind of scoreboard that kept track of our “sins” and most of us were losing the game most of the time and the experience of institutional Christianity came to revolve around sin either explicitly or implicitly with greater or lesser influence that depended on age, nationality, and geographical place of residence as in address.
I want to return to the idea of the “soul” in a few sentences but first, obviously the centrality of shame and guilt in the Christian religions has changed for many complex reasons that have their roots deeply buried in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In my own mind I point to the change in the Catholic Church of dropping the prohibition against eating meat on Fridays.
Up to the time of her death my mother felt betrayed by the Catholic Church because so many, many people ate meat on Friday and died without going to confession and were spending eternity in hell’s fires and all of a sudden it didn’t matter anymore and there you have it.
Most of us have very little experience with the idea of the “soul” since the idea of “sin” has been equivocated by most and abandoned all together by many because as I said above the soul was simply the score keeper and the practice of religion for virtually all Christians was one of souls maintenance during and for Catholics even after life as in offering Masses, prayers, indulgences, etc in getting the “poor souls” out of purgatory a uniquely Catholic concept that had both good and bad ramifications.
Given the virtual abandonment of sin in the western world you would expect that we would live more spontaneous and joyful lives without shame and guilt, but I do not see that as the case. Many lives are dominated by shame and guilt that is a source of chronic depression that has consequences that are increasingly dangerous.
The sources of our contemporary shame and guilt are largely unrecognized and unknown because they come from within us, they come from our “souls” but our deprived knowledge of our souls keeps the actual sources of our sadness and depression from us encouraging us to do better and better and more and more because it all depends on us.
But it doesn’t but we don’t know that.
There are some, perhaps, sincere, maybe not because of the profit motive, efforts in more affluent, performatively educated, Catholic circles to return the source of the shame and guilt back to the institutional Catholic Church in an effort, in my opinion, to reduce moral and spiritual worlds to very small closed systems that avoid the daunting complexity of moral responsibility for our neighbors, the earth and heavens, and the care of our “soul.” These “movements” are based on highly select aspects of Roman Catholicism that avoid other highly select realities that Catholic Tradition has always included such as the poor, immigration and immigrants, how we create and sustain our economic and political systems, the earth, the air, the water, hunger, and a whole host of “soul” issues that go far beyond and far deeper than personal pieties as a practice of Roman Catholic faith.
There are and always have been people with a working knowledge of their “souls” and many of them have generously shared their expertise, sadly, not many of those with souls, knowledge do well in Christian/Catholic institutional settings. “Soul” experts in institutional Christianity including Catholics are typically marginalized and not used in everyday religions, nor are they generally accessible but there are other accessible sources of soul knowledge that anyone can find and use.
You might spend some time answering Jesus” questions in the Gospel for this Sunday, What are you looking for? Answer those questions in a notebook, write down all the words that you need to answer them and do it over a few times.
Read novels, novels that carry some weight, explore your inner life in the words of others who might just know what you are going through or feeling. Novels that teach me are any of the books of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Graham Greene, or Andrew O’Hagan, or try some spiritual classics, The Great Gatsby, for A Man for All Seasons, Death of a Salesman, Giovanni’s Room, 1984, Animal Farm, The Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Little Women, there is a lifetime of “soul” at your local library.
In fact, a visit to your library in itself is a mystical/spiritual act in the world of The Weather Channel, CNN, and Fox News.
I am finding a restoration of hope in reading a few new young male authors who are trying to understand the violence and despair that is so painfully evident in the lives of many men these days. I speak specifically of Kaveh Akbar and his novel, Martyr!, Flesh by David Szalay, Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Hermit by Chris McQueer, and The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong.
Just my experience! I hope you take some time to reawaken your “soul” knowledge with whatever works for you, perhaps, a nature walk, a new puppy, lunch with old friends, telephone calls to your grandkids, kindness to strangers, just try and find an unexpected joy in the midst of a world that appears very sad and conflicted. Pay attention to the events of your day and enjoy the winter skies at day’s end and day’s beginning. Forget the snow, stay in and relax.
Peace to you, my friends,
Father Niblick