Catholic Guilt

Published in The Blackbird, 2022.

Cathal Doyle became aware of his Catholic Guilt the first time he masturbated. It was a Wednesday night in October. The house was quiet save the TV in the living room blaring a supper time game show he had watched every night religiously for years. He had just finished his English homework. His notebook an open mouth on the floor. The duvet cold against his arse when he lowered himself down, interned. His trousers were bunched around his ankles. When he stretched his legs – in either pleasure or discomfort, he wasn’t sure – he felt like a prisoner. There was silence for much of the whole ordeal, save a few final grunts – more whines than anything else – as the flesh clutched in his fist sighed suddenly and fell limp. He looked down at himself and frowned. How sad the thing seemed, almost as though it were weeping.

He was fourteen, a bit late to the game his mates had been playing for years. In school he learned that puberty could and would surely strike at any time. The man who taught him this, his science teacher, was ancient and said such things as though they were something to be afraid of. As though puberty were something to repent. The Catholic secondary school Cathal stalked through was old and made out of pale, cold stone. The main building like a scowling face, all high arches and narrow eyed windows, perpetually leering. The classrooms echoed your words back at you, as though mocking you for simply existing. It was here that Cathal learned to be quiet – and it was here, too, that he learned about Catholic Guilt.

Puberty hit Cathal like a sliotar in chest, but the urge to explore his body trailed several hundred yards behind his white-headed spots and emancipated balls. In the changing rooms at training, he shied away from the boys when they discussed what porn they had watched the night before, or what things they had got up to with their girlfriends. He remembered one assembly when the priest spoke at length about purity. A girl from the sixth form had gotten pregnant and had left school to have the baby. This was all very cleanly covered up. None of us were allowed to even mention it. Cathal had never met the girl, had only seen in her passing in the playground or in the hallways. He remembered thinking she had always seemed dead on, nice even. The indirect way the priest spoke about her, however, conveyed something different. Cathal could not stop focusing on the way he said the word ‘purity’, the bulk of the word, the knife sharp warning in it, the way it trickled out of the mouth, warm and thick like spilled blood.

Purity.

From the moment a couple of the lads had pointed at his snail trail and the hair forming around his nipples and laughed, he felt marked. He was conscious of his body’s sudden transmutation, and conscious too of his purity. How easy it would be to destroy it. And how crushing the feeling of guilt that would follow.

Before training, he always rehearsed a response were he cornered by the lads. As closely as he knew his growing Catholic Guilt, he knew, too the necessity to fit in. If they asked which girls were fit in his opinion, he would say Ciara O’Neill because her tits had come on her like two melons and most days her tie could barely hide the strip where her buttons strained against their pressure. He would joke that he was scared one of the buttons might take his eye out. If they asked him what porn he liked he would laugh and say that anything got him off really.

He had googled porn categories one night when he was sure his grandparents were asleep. The list of hyperlinks, leading their way to different sites and a plethora of videos, was organised alphabetically. It went from Asian all the way through to Young and Old. He noted with some interest that there was no porn category for the letter Z, and then an ad protesting that he might like the Squirters Club burst onto his screen and he tried his best not to throw his phone across the room. 

Sex never interested Cathal in those teenage days. When he got the talk in science, a class he usually loved, about the reproductive system, he didn’t raise his hand once. The labels for the different bits were repulsive, and the illustrations even more so. His only saving grace was that the school had not condoned the display of actual photographs of the reproductive organs. He didn’t know what he would do if he were shown a picture of the vagina surrounded by a class of his peers. 

Aside from hurling, he was more interested in reading books, or playing his Playstation. He made little time for sex. He knew the moment he crossed that line with his body would be the exact moment he had really grown up. He would have to pack away his toys, which he still played with occasionally, even at fourteen, and turn his mind from the Disney Channel and to Pornhub.

And then one weekend he decided he couldn’t play pretend for much longer. Most of his mates had girlfriends, the rest of the single crowd out every weekend at parties riding rings around each other. He would have to acclimatise or he would be left behind.

He loaded up the same webpage he had fled from years before, and there, in a tiny box room in his grandparent’s house, he laid waste to his youth. 

The Catholic Guilt was almost immediate. Above his bed was a picture of Jesus. His gaunt face was drawn forward, his eyes wet with pain, his head adorned with his bloodied crown of thorns, freshly crucified. He had never thought much of it before. It was grotesque, but much of his experiences with faith were. The stain glass windows that looked down on him at chapel held the same distressing imagery. Catholicism was a strange religion, much of it unpleasant to look at. He had been wary of the picture when he first moved in with his grandparents, but was too full of faith to remove it from the wall. After a while it became exactly what it was - a picture. 

When he got up after the act was said and done, however, and saw Jesus hanging there, staring through his half opened eyes, Cathal felt the guilt like a stone in his gut. Something thin and weak within him bent and snapped. What was once a picture was, in that moment, naked and having just shred the last of his childhood, a numen. Cathal felt burnt under the painted gaze. It was like on the third day the stone had rolled away from the tomb and instead of his disciples, Jesus had come face to face with Cathal’s cum hanging like a bat from his fingers. He was laid bare, having realised that the picture was witness to the whole thing.

Jesus had watched him wank. 

He didn’t even know if masturbation was a sin, but he was sure that doing it in front of Christ crucified was.

He went to sleep that night with his back to Jesus Christ, whispering Hail Mary’s until he fell asleep. He wondered had he said enough, and considered even going to confession, but he couldn’t even imagine how he would tell Father Lynch what sin he had just committed. He attempted an Act of Contrition, but he couldn’t remember it, so he supplemented the Hail Mary’s with the occasional Lord’s Prayer, hoping that would be enough for Jesus. 

When he woke the next morning to shower, eager to wash away the night before, he passed the font in the hallway and scrambled to bless himself, but the font was dry. He blessed himself anyway, finding himself more mortified than purified. When his granny came up the hall, asking why he was blessing himself, he couldn’t even find an answer for her so he turned and ran into the bathroom. He could practically hear Jesus laugh his arse off all the way from his bedroom. 

From that moment onwards, Cathal Doyle felt Catholic guilt for a lot of things. It was weird the things you feel guilty for because you’re a Catholic. Anytime he touched himself, he felt guilty, even after he had found a new place for the picture of Jesus, and even after he had moved out of his grandparent’s house altogether. He felt it the one and only time he had sex, too. He lost his virginity when he was seventeen, to Ciara O’Neill of all people. It was in the back of his car. She told him not to finish inside her, but as he pulled out his foot slipped and he finished instead on the dusty car seat. No matter how much he scrubbed in the days that followed, that stain would not lift. Almost as if Jesus would not let it.

After he had dropped Ciara home in his little Seat Ibiza with the R plates, he had felt so guilty he drove out to the chapel, but Father Lynch had locked up for the night. Cathal lingered at the door.

He didn’t know what he was more guilty about; the fact he had had sex, or the fact he had used Ciara as an object of sex when she was so much more than that. He knew where the Church stood on the whole thing, but the Church realistically helped neither he nor Ciara. He knew that. He knew, too, that his Catholic Guilt was an unfortunate by-product of his taught faith, but nevertheless he was shackled to it. That word came to him again, in blood, through the darkness. Purity. What had driven him to the Chapel to repent was also created by the Chapel. He was just too stricken with guilt to see the paradoxical nature of his remorse. 

Some of the candles were still lit at the front of the chapel. Father Lynch was forgetful like that. The candles winked at him like eyes in the dark. When he got back to his car, he prayed and promised God he wouldn’t have sex outside of wedlock again. Then when he got home to the picture of Jesus above his bed, he said the same prayer and made the same promise.

He also felt Catholic Guilt for smaller - less sinful - things. When he missed Mass some weeks to go to training. When he passed homeless people on the street and pretended he couldn’t see them. When he told his mother he loved her, despite everything. 

After a night spent at a club in Belfast with his uni mates, he accompanied them to McDonald’s and accidentally broke lent. He was too drunk to even realise he had done it, or too drunk to care. He was amazed by the amount of sins he was able to commit simply because he had had a drink. That year he had sworn off takeaways, and was determined to see if through to Easter. When he woke, hanging like a noose, to the corpse of the McDonald’s bag at the end of the bed, the guilt had clutched him as it had that first time, standing naked in front of the picture of Jesus. He said as many Hail Mary’s as he could when he was sure his flatmates weren’t listening, but no amount could erase the Big Mac nestled happily in his stomach. He didn’t eat a takeaway again for another four months, well after Jesus had left the desert.

He worked part time in Spar. The flat he shared with a couple of lads from school was close enough to the shop. He was thinking about his Catholic Guilt for having missed Mass to cover a shift in work when Lucy Deans walked in. She hadn’t spotted him. He sunk behind an offer end in a sudden desperate effort to stay hidden from her.

Cathal had not seen Lucy since results day in school. When he arrived that morning to collect his results, having already received his confirmation for his course at Jordanstown, she was coming out of the front doors. She smiled when she saw him, and pulled him in for a hug.  

Mrs. Morris already told me you got Jordanstown, she said. Well done. Computer science. Look at you!

Cheers, he replied, trying his best not to blush. How’d you get on?

Two As and a B.

That’s class, he said.

I know, Lucy replied. I’m off to Liverpool for History.

Cathal didn’t know what to say so he smiled. He and Lucy had been in school together since they were four. All the way from P1. They used to be friends way back when you were friends with everyone in your class, and then they grew up and found their own different cliques. In third year they had sat beside each other in English. She was intelligent in a way that made him both jealous and desperate to impress her, but he wasn’t convinced he ever did. She hung about with the girls in the year above. Sometimes, in that chasm after leaving school, he had missed her. Things were easy around her. He didn’t need to pretend the way he had at training with the lads, or with the folk he passed himself with in work. With her, he felt like himself. He had always thought she was beautiful, and didn’t feel guilty about it, either. 

He crept around the corner and down the dog food aisle and hoped to nip out to the storeroom to avoid her, but as he came to the end of the aisle, he bumped straight into her. It was like something from a film. She muttered some apologies before she noticed him. Oh my God, she said smiling. She pulled him into another hug. The years seemed to ebb away. Long time. 

Sorry, Cathal said. I didn’t even see you.

You’re grand. Her hair was different. She had dyed it. It fell like a shadow around her shoulders. How’re you keeping?

Aye, not too bad, he said. How’s Liverpool?

She laughed. That didn’t last long. Turns out Liverpool’s a bit shit.

Really? Why?

When they tell you it’s just like Ireland, they’re right. Everyone’s up their own holes.

So you came home to folk similarly up their own holes?

It’s cheaper to live with the arseholes at home than the arseholes across the water, she said. How’re you getting on at Jordanstown?

He felt a little giddy that she remembered where he went. It’s not bad, he said and didn’t elaborate. 

I see, she said, reading his shrug. I’ll say no more then.

A buzz rang around the shop which told him he needed to serve at the tills. He looked back at the line. When he turned back to her, her eyes were on him. I’ll let you go, she said. It was nice seeing you. 

You too, he said. He stood in front of her for a beat too long and then turned, embarrassed. He was just at the bottom of the aisle when she called out to him. Yeah?

Maybe we could catch up sometime, she said. She looked older than she had in school, despite the fact they had been barely out of it three years. She was as beautiful as ever; he felt as guiltless for thinking so as he always had. 

Definitely, he said, and then the buzzer went again and they laughed in unison. 

He picked her up outside her house in town. It was reading week, and he traded his student house for his own home with its grandparents and its picture of Jesus which now hung in the backroom. She was back living with her parents after dropping out of her course at Liverpool. When he pulled up outside, she was already at the door. She let out a long breath when she got in the passenger seat which came out as a soft chuckle. Her dad was standing in the garden, watching her leave. Cathal lifted his hand to wave, but the man only nodded at him before turning his back. When they were in primary school, Lucy would sometimes say she wished her dad would die, but Cathal hadn’t thought anything of it then. He thought that everyone might wish their dad would die when they were seven.

You still have the same car, she said. 

Yeah, he said. It’s never done having something wrong with it, but it gets me up and down the road. 

Fair enough, she said. He pulled off and drove out of her estate slowly, too nervous to ask what she wanted to do. When they got onto the main road, she told him she booked bowling at the Ice Bowl for six o’clock. 

How does that sound? She asked. She was looking at him. 

Sounds great, Cathal replied, too afraid to look at her in case he saw the redness of his cheeks. 

Bowling went well, at least in Lucy’s case. Cathal protested that he had let her win rather than admit he was just shite at bowling. When they got back to the car, they laughed at all the times he had thrown the ball and it had barely made it into the arrow zone before slipping off the lane. You should have seen yourself, she said, stamping her foot. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen. The couple who were in the lane next to them had joined in on Lucy’s laughter anytime he stepped up to the line. Usually this would have mortified him, but Cathal was too intoxicated by Lucy’s energy to even be bothered by it. When the couple finished their match and left, they winked at Lucy and wished Cathal good luck because he’d need it.

He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the car park. He took her to McDonalds and when he asked her what she wanted, she said an Oreo McFlurry. He got the same. He drove them to the hill overlooking town to eat them. She got out and sat on the bonnet of his car, and he followed her. The sun had already set, but the sky, refusing to sleep, caught beautifully in her eyes. He looked at her several times, glancing away before she noticed. They spoke very little, but the silence was comfortable. It felt like how it did when they were younger; nice and easy and honest.

It was not until he looked out at the chapel on the edge of town that he realised he had not felt his usual Catholic Guilt once that day. Not even when he cut someone off at the roundabout coming into Ards and the driver blared the horn at him. It had been a guiltless evening with her. He didn’t quite know how to feel about it. He felt a distant tightness clutch his chest, but attempted to breathe it away. 

When the crimson bled to black in the sky, he looked at Lucy again. He could see that she was looking at him in return. He held her gaze. She smiled, and he couldn’t help but smile back. Cathal hadn’t seen her in years and suddenly, in the space of a few hours, it was like they had never left each other. They said nothing for a moment, and then Lucy closed the space between them and placed her lips gently on his. He lifted a hand and rested it on the side of her face. The skin there on her cheek was soft. He used a thumb to trace a small, slow circle. A gentle, peaceful loop. When she opened her mouth to him, she tasted like vanilla ice cream. Her hands here on his chest, his own in her hair. Their tongues met, and distantly he could feel the night close around them, like it was watching them. When she pulled away from him, he could just about make out her smile in the dark. Would you like to come back to mine? She asked.

Yes, he said, without hesitation. 

Her parents were out with her aunt for some reunion thing, she said. The house was in darkness, aside from the porchlight which they had left on for her. They got out of the car in unison, and she led him inside, holding his hand and giggling as she had when they were bowling. 

They spared little time, kissing intensely as they fell into her room and onto the bed. It was dark. She had missed the light switch when she swung out her arm, and they both cared too little to go in for a second attempt. She lay down on the bed, and he followed her lips until he was on top of her. They laughed when his erection rubbed against her jeans. Take them off, she said. He did his best, while she removed her own. When they found each other again in the dark, he let out a long sigh as they clicked together. He pulled off his shirt. His skin felt cold against the air in her room. She rolled him over and lay back into his lap as she struggled with her bra. Fucking thing, she cursed. Hang on. 

She leaned over to turn on her lamp and flooded the room with light. When she looked down at him she smiled, but his own face was caught in shock. His hands left the place they had taken on each of her exposed legs. 

Are you okay? She said. Her lips were caught in the motion of a kiss. 

He didn’t have an answer for her. His eyes were caught by the picture that hung behind her head on the wall. It was a picture much like the one that hung above his own bed as a child, but this time Christ’s eyes were open and staring right at him. He felt that familiar stone drop resolutely into his gut. He closed his eyes, once, then twice, but couldn’t get the picture to preclude its accusation. 

He pushed her gently off him and stood to put on his jeans.

What’s wrong Cathal? Her voice was soft. She reached out to him but he avoided her touch. 

I don’t know, he said, his own voice short and dismissive. She looked hurt. He turned from her but it wasn’t her eyes that burrowed into the back of his head. It was the picture’s.

Was it something I did?

No, he said quickly, bending for his shirt. She pulled the covers around her, and he tried his best not to notice the tears in her eyes.

Then what?

He didn’t answer. When he turned to her again, he found he couldn’t even look at her. Her eyes were as wide and as hurt as the picture that hung on the wall. He had crucified her. He had crucified himself.

I have to go, he said, and left her house without another word.

He thought about going home, but couldn’t stomach it, so he drove to the chapel instead. He was chanting Hail Mary’s under his breath when he went to the door, as he had the night he slept with Ciara O’Neill. The door was locked. The gravestones in the cemetery stood witness to his excommunication. The stone in his gut turned to iron and dragged through him. Dragged him down. His Catholic Guilt was a sentient thing, devouring him. The picture of Christ above his bed had started it all, but its roots went back further than that still. His Catholic Guilt was inescapable. It was made that way. A prison of pews and iconographs. 

There were no candles still lit inside the hall when he looked inside the stained-glass window of the chapel. They had been blown out. The world was in darkness. 

Jamie Ryan Anderson