I have never known any one who didn't feel a whole lot better after leaving Confession.
"Ha!" I said internally. "I really am different from the rest of the flock." The aging priest who uttered those words knew what he was talking about; he must have heard thousands of confessions over the course of his ministry. And he never got the impression that someone left the confessional feeling worse than when they had entered? At that moment in the homily, I was reminded of just how different my experience of the Sacraments can be.
Our late Pope Francis insisted that the confessional is not a torture chamber. My brain never got the memo. I often experience Confession not as an encounter with a merciful God, but as a grueling psychological trial. I have exited the confessional feeling that I had deliberately withheld mortal sin; this has led me to give a second "make-up" Confession minutes later. I have exaggerated my faults to the priest "just to be safe", only to weep when the priest seemed to suggest that I had, in fact, committed grave sin. I have ascribed to myself the basest motives for thoughts and actions. I've confessed "sins" committed half-asleep. I once even ran out of the Confessional before the Absolution when asked a question I had trouble answering. In my lowest moments, I've wondered why I'm still Catholic. Why do I do this to myself?
Of course, any priest will tell you this is not the intended experience of Reconciliation. Confession is supposed to be easy; you confess your sins, you say sorry, and you do penance: often a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys. That's a pretty low bar for forgiveness. And yet, for a Catholic with scrupulosity OCD, this bar seems impossibly high. To understand why, we need to consider the root cause of this impairment: namely, obsessive fear of mortal sin.
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The Problem
Catholics are called to detest mortal sin, to examine themselves, and to confess mortal sins straightaway. To discern the presence of mortal sin, you determine whether your action is an instance of grave matter, whether your action was fully voluntary, and whether you fully knew what you were doing at the time. For most Catholics, this process is relatively uncomplicated. For an obsessive Catholic, nothing could be more complicated.
Determining full volition and full knowledge requires some level of introspection. For someone with so-called "Pure O" OCD, introspection is a nightmarish proposition. As my spiritual director once told me, scrupulosity never resolves doubts in your favor. What's more, OCD will present doubtful sins as though they were certain sins. To the obsessive mind, there's no such thing as an innocent mistake or an intrusive thought. You meant to do this and to think that. The only way to convince yourself otherwise is to engage in rituals: neutralize the thought, examine your memory, ask others, or—when all else fails—run to Church and confess the worst case scenario. There is no other path to peace. Or so OCD says.
Even the most "concrete" part of the process—discerning the presence of grave matter—is a trial. How long does a thought need to be in my mind to constitute lust or hatred or blasphemy, and what does it mean to entertain it? If my lunch breaks are too long, does that constitute time theft (individually or in the aggregate), and if so, how much time theft does it take to reach the mortal threshold? If I didn't feel fully sorry during Confession or my resolution not to sin again wasn't strong enough, have I committed Sacrilege? If I fail to do direct restitution for music piracy from 15 years ago, is that itself a mortal sin? Do I need to try to recall the names of all the songs and purchase them one-by-one?
People with Scrupulous OCD often respond to these questions by reading the Catechism and Catholic blogs, applying principles in ways that can diverge from pastoral advice. When faced with a "permissive" response, the obsessive person will doubt the priest's advice ("he's soft on sin"), or they will experience a temporary relief which will inevitably crumble under the weight of tomorrow's moral crisis, or they will feel some confused combination of the two. The obsessive person's response to priestly guidance may come off as arrogant. It isn't. It comes from an intense, terrorizing fear, a prison of the conscience from which there appears no escape.
This obsessive disposition—this fundamental distrust of oneself—can make reception of the Sacraments seem impossible. How can you approach the Eucharist when your mind is screaming "you're about to abuse Christ!"? How can you accept the absolution of sins when you feel that, by your own free actions, you've invalidated the sacrament?
A Tender Conscience?
Many will agree that the obsessive disposition I've described is unhealthy. But hey, it's better than laxity, right? Endure a bit of unnecessary pain and doubt in this life for the sake of Beatitude in the next. Blessed Henry Suso insisted that "Scrupulous souls die continually, they suffer a perpetual purgatory, and so they leave the earth to fly to Heaven purified and free from sins to expiate." Sounds like a decent trade-off.
On bad days, I twist this sentiment to justify my own scrupulosity. But let me tell you what those bad days look like. I sob uncontrollably. I hit myself in the head. I find myself unable to work; indeed, work itself provides ample occasion for scruples. I beg my wife to let me do whatever thing I've determined is necessary for the salvation of my soul, and when that fails, I make loud demands. In the deepest depths of my despair, I long for death.
There is nothing "tender" about such a conscience. It is a destructive force. It is vicious in the literal sense of the term. It landed me in a Partial Hospitalization Program.
Scrupulosity is not a safe road. It blinds one to God's grace. It turns one's attention inward, ironically running afoul of the two greatest commandments. Whilst in an unmanaged scrupulous condition, one cannot truly love God and neighbor, because scrupulosity—like OCD in general—is fundamentally selfish. Yes, in many cases, scrupulosity isn't culpably selfish, but the destruction is no less catastrophic for that. If hell ultimately boils down to exclusive preoccupation with oneself, scrupulosity provides an unseemly foretaste.
How can religious devotion go so wrong? Because it's not religious devotion. It's OCD masquerading as devotion. The scrupulous person focuses on the state of their own soul at the expense of all else, as if engagement in and service to the community of believers that constitutes Christ's body is a marginal roadside attraction on the path to salvation. It is spiritual self-interest: a Pascalian wager where the chips are your marriage, your family, your vocation, and your ability to serve others. The scrupulous person strives to bet everything on eternity, but in so doing, they lose the very gifts by which they cultivate and demonstrate virtue. It is not self-emptying but rather self-destruction, and the collateral damage can be immense.
I am reminded of the character Chiti in the brilliant TV show The Good Place. (Spoilers ahead!) He is a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics. He agonizes over the smallest of moral decisions, so dedicated is he to living a moral life. In his singleminded pursuit, he sacrifices many good things. As I watched the first season, I came to admire him. So when I discovered that he was in the Bad Place, I questioned the writers' judgment. Surely he wasn't in the same camp as the others! But I later found that others understood this without difficulty. Chiti really did get wrong the spirit of the moral life. He shrunk his life to accommodate his moral anxiety. He followed the scrupulous maxim: "Nothing ventured, no sin." And he suffered the consequence.
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