It is said that a Catholic education stays with you. I am told that Catholic guilt has its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) yet I cannot find evidence of this. As surely as our education experiences are formative, imagine the innocence of a child submerged in a world view where everything is overshadowed by the concept of original sin.
As you are prepared for the world and the transition to adulthood, you are inculcated with the idea that you are inherently sinful and evil for which the only salvation is obedient submission to almighty God. The punishment for turning away from this benevolent God is revealed as Hell. Hell was visually depicted as an otherworldly locale where flames licked your extremities as you were surrounded by serpentine demons with horns, pitchforks and tails.
In order to save yourself from this nightmarish fear of eternal damnation you were to follow the teachings of the church. Only through this path, could you attain a sense of overcoming your inherently evil nature through religious evolution. By marshalling the power of this ever loving God, we could not only save ourselves but the world in which we live. When presented with the problems of world in the 1970s, among these was child starvation in the third world.
This worldly crisis was presented to us as the prosperous west being a unique island of comfort in a world where the developing world’s children had a good chance of dying of starvation. Only if the west set aside its materialist pleasures could the children of the world be saved. We as Catholic children of the west basking in our Christmas present festooned life of ease could either ignore this plight or appeal to our godly nature and save the worlds’ children through our good deeds.
In this dynamic, we were set upon the community with the orange Unicef Halloween collection boxes to save the world’s children. This mission was put to us in such a way that their fate lay in our hands. Being sent out with this mission had a lasting psychological effect and not necessarily in the way our educators intended. This was long before the church’s split from the UN over birth control and reproduction.
This responsibility was not put to us in racial terms. Keep in mind this was the mid 1970s before mass immigration and multiculturalism. Our schools were almost exclusively composed of kids from white families of European origin. The dynamic was set in our minds that we had the means and the power to defeat starvation of children in the developing world simply by virtue of having been born in North America.
There was no discussion of class or poverty. It was just assumed that with divine inspiration and initiative, you had the power to sustain life — not unlike a doctor with the Hippocratic oath.
Project this mindset outward a few years and assume that you and your family were not well traveled and received your world views from church, television and media. You could go your entire life thinking that being a middle class worker in North America gave you this seeming omnipotence to end world hunger.
Update that for today’s race politics and you could not be blamed for thinking that being white was like being some kind of super power infused with world changing ability.
Add to this the concept of original sin and you have the makings of a society that has been programmed to believe that the world’s major inequities can be solved by you and your neighbors. The sense of moral responsibility would weigh heavily on those with any kind of humanitarian disposition. From this, you have a homegrown recipe for a mentality of responsibility for world wide salvation.
Your prosperity and ability to take on this mission are just assumed. No mention is made of the necessity of acquiring skills required to survive in a labor market and provide the necessities of life for those you love. You are among the anointed for you are white and born in North America. Your life’s good fortune is described like an all inclusive cruise vacation where everything is provided for.
If you are not disabled, it is taken for granted that you are not only rich but burdened with the means to save the world. How you are to maintain humility when ascribed such God like power is never explained. You are to know that when you see pictures of starving people it is because you are selfish and didn’t do enough. Your sins, individual and collective, will stay on your soul until you submit your will to almighty god.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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