Dump Catholic guilt and identify the real sinners

THERE was a survey published last week in the UK that found that Catholics don’t feel any more guilt than other religious adherents: indeed, the results were so striking that the pollsters felt bold enough to claim that Catholic guilt is a myth.

However, the survey concentrated solely on sexual matters — proof, one could argue, not of a lack of guilt but of the astounding irrelevance of what any pope, retired or otherwise, might have to say about matters relating to the uterus.

Catholic guilt, as it has been traditionally exercised, is more all-encompassing and tied to the notion that we humans are mired in sin: no matter how hard we try not to, we’ll mess up. And in a country where the Church managed to have us all feeling terrible about ourselves for hundreds of years, it would be naive to think that the residual traces of those emotions have been expunged: perhaps not about sex any more, but about money.

Despite all the so-called Celtic Tiger so-called excesses, the Irish still have a cultural discomfort with talking about money.

Although excoriated for the comment at the time, I suspect many Irish secretly acknowledged Brian Linehan’s ‘we all partied’ remark and felt a stab of guilt for that mortgage top-up to pay for the decking or the holiday home in West Cork. We slipped back into our economic-religious stereotype and were oddly passive when our Government opted to pay for a banking meltdown we didn’t create: because, deep down, we felt we deserved to be punished for all those goodies we bought.

Of course we are not the only people on earth subject to these ideas. German Protestantism lends people to feel that God wants them to be prudent. We, however, are saddled with a religious tradition that makes us feel that we should be forever on the breadline; because it’s no more than we deserve. This may explain why so much of the public-private sector quarrel is so moralistic in tone; more about what people deserve rather than what can be afforded. If a teacher bought a holiday home during the boom, then this is evidence of how greedy they are and how extravagantly they are paid; if a taxi driver did it they were greedy and foolish.

Yet objectively, there was nothing wrong with the way most ordinary people acted during the boom. The media, the government, the banks, economists all told us we could spend. Perhaps if we could dump the guilt, we might get around to identifying who the real sinners are.