Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and I'm here with Ascension Presents.
So—
I do this all the time, don't I?
I do.
You know, it's one of those things that I find a lot of people
will accuse Catholics of having this kind of sense of being preoccupied with guilt.
And it's probably relatively accurate but it's funny.
Whenever you watch a TV show or see a movie where they're talking about Catholic guilt,
you know, Catholic guilt this, Catholic guilt that,
it's funny, my mom always says like, "There's nothing Catholic about guilt. It's just guilt."
Like if you've done something wrong, then you should feel guilty, right?
I mean, that's kind of how it goes.
And I want to talk about that though because there's a difference I think between guilt and shame.
Guilt, a lot of times, you might hear people say this,
that guilt is feeling bad about what you've done, feeling bad about what you've done
whereas shame is when you feel bad about who you are.
And sometimes, that's a good way to divide it
but I think that—I was listening to some psychologists talk about this
and they said they didn't think that it was accurate enough.
They made the distinction and they said this.
They said guilt is an awareness of having violated some objective standard.
I'm gonna say that again, it sounds complicated.
Guilt is the awareness of having violated some objective standard,
like I'm supposed to be nice to people, I'm supposed to be polite and I wasn't polite.
If I violated that objective standard, I'm guilty of that. I'm guilty of being rude.
Now, that could either be true or it can be false.
It can be like true, it can be toxic, in the sense of, yeah, there was a real standard and I really violated it
versus like a false standard or there was a real standard but I didn't really violate it.
Sometimes, we get that mixed up and so we feel guilty about stuff that we haven't even done,
we haven't even done wrong, we don't need to feel guilty about.
Shame on the other hand is an awareness of having failed in someone else's eyes.
See, when it comes to guilt, it's me against the standard and it's kind of internal
but shame— it can eat us up because it involves others,
whether that other be God, whether that other be my family or friends,
but it's an awareness of having failed in someone else's eyes.
That also can be accurate or it can be false.
You know, sometimes we think that we've done something wrong.
We think that we failed in someone else's eyes and we haven't. So the question is this:
When it comes to guilt, when it comes to shame, what's the remedy?
Like how do we ... what do we do with it?
Well I think that when it comes to guilt, if it's an awareness of having violated some objective standard,
then what I have to do is I just have to tell the truth and that's what confession is all about.
I mean it's saying, OK, here's what I've done. I'm admitting it, I'm acknowledging it, I'm confessing it,
especially when we connect it to God's grace in the sacrament of confession, it's freedom.
But when it comes to shame—you know, we can confess something and now the guilt is gone
the sin is gone, I've been forgiven of it,
but I still feel the shame. Why?
Remember, because shame is having an awareness of having failed in someone else's eyes
so it's how I'm perceived.
When it comes to shame, one of the remedies
has to do with other people, has to do with the relationships.
There was a priest from Africa who recently visited my diocese
and he was telling a group of parishioners about how there's a lot of violence in his home villages
and a lot of violence in the place where he is.
And one of the terrible things that happens in the midst of this violence,
some of these—I guess you'd call them rebels or whatever—
will take women, older women, younger women
and violently abuse them, sexually abuse them, and rape them and whatnot
and then bring them back, give them back to the community
and you can imagine the kind of shame—there's no guilt there because women didn't do anything wrong,
but you can imagine the shame, like no, I've been disgraced.
I've been shamed in the eyes of everyone else.
But what they do in these villages, it's remarkable.
They will welcome these women back to their community
with just absolute joy and absolute acceptance and just this sense of, We want you. You're part of us.
You're received back into—
And so these women, while they have the memories and they have this terrible trauma,
they don't have shame
because of the fact that the people gather around them
and they give them love and they show them that they're wanted and that they have not failed in their eyes,
that they don't look at them in any different way.
So that's what I'm going to invite you to do.
if you have an awareness of some guilt, you know what you need to do.
You need to tell the truth about it. You know if I've done something or if I failed some objective standard,
then I need to go to confession.
But sometimes we have a deeper wound and that deeper wound is shame.
One of the things you can do is you can reveal that wound.
Now I'm not saying go spread it around the internet or whatever
but I am saying like to someone you can really trust
to reveal that wound, and to ask them and to tell them,
I've been carrying a lot of shame with this. I feel like I'm a failure in other people's eyes
and I need to be reminded that I'm not a failure. I need to be reminded that I'm more than this.
"You are not the sum of your weaknesses or failures or sins.
You are the sum of the Father's love for you and your capacity to be an image of Jesus Christ to the world."
That's a quote from Saint John Paul the Great.
There's no need for a Christian to live in shame.
So many of us do,
but you've been received into this community, into the family of God.
You are loved
and you are treasured.