For many, a Catholic writer bringing up shame cues an eye roll or a sigh and a wisecrack about “Catholic guilt,” but that’s just brain sloth. “Catholic guilt” is a cheap, overused punchline that has harmfully mischaracterized and socially diminished the value of a formed conscience; it has little to say to anyone younger than my own boomer generation. It’s unlikely that people coming through religious education or Catholic schools in the past 30 or so years even have a clue as to what “Catholic guilt” means. The charge has devolved into an intellectually lazy broadside used against something that is quite real, but which we’re no longer supposed to talk about — the actuality of sin. The fact of sin and our own accountability for its effects.

Some will react to these words — shame, guilt, sin, accountability — with an instinctive and visceral dislike, arguing that while shame and guilt are nuisances to the conscience, sin is too subjective, and too bound up with Christian over-scrupulosity, to be reliably defined and that accountability can only be outlined by authorities. ...

The old civil solutions are broken; they do not work in a society that teems without a conscience. The leadership is out of ideas. It might be time for the people — divided, but able to agree on the basic human morality identified here — to not only imagine a different way and suggest creative alternatives, but also work together to help an unformed generation learn important truths: that, quite contrary to what they’ve been told for decades, it’s okay and even necessary to feel guilty when they’ve done something really bad — like treating a person like a thing. That it’s good and useful to feel ashamed — to permit that nagging little voice within to say “you shouldn’t have done that; that was wrong,” especially if it means not making that error, not missing the mark in that sinful way, again.