If you can pinpoint my guilt, and it’s not hard, you can control me like a sock puppet with low self-esteem. Actually pinpoint is probably a bad descriptor. Squish my guilt against any hard surface with a large piece of plywood is more accurate, I suppose.

I was raised Catholic (I’m listening to Godspell right this very moment), and though the Jews generally get all the credit for having the market on guilt cornered, we Catholics quietly, shamefully know the truth. Frank McCourt, the Irish author, explained the reason for the success of Catholic guilt — we call it Hell — to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1996:

“I have never come across anything like [Hell] in Jewish literature, the walls a million miles thick and the heat a million degrees and so on, and imagine being there a million, million, million years and so on, and devils chasing you with pitchforks, ready to ram them up your behind for eternity. Eternity, boys, eternity.”

A dirty, disgraceful, dirty sense of pride wells in me as I read that passage.