Is the concept of scrupulosity "ridiculous," as this one critic says?

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Yes, I agree fully. It does not just apply to this condition. We seem to be in such an age of identity politics that people tend to identify with their particular dis-ease, whatever it may be.
 
I wouldn’t really say that it’s a badge of identity, but more an acknowledgement of something from which we suffer. Besides, it’s a pretty relevant piece of information to provide when discussing scrupulosity-related topics with people who have no understanding of the condition, or with other scrupulants who are having trouble managing their symptoms. It’s not like we say, “As a scrupulous person, I find that Diet Dr. Pepper does taste more like regular Dr. Pepper” or, “As someone with scrupulosity, I love the Red Sox” (which a scrupulous person would never say, as being a Red Sox fan is a mortal sin…no seriously, it’s right in the catechism-ok maybe not, but it should be).
 
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When I say “As a person with scrupulosity” I’m not identifying with it, I’m saying I have a better perspective and a good amount of experience on the subject.
Which allows me more ability to talk about it than someone ignorant enough to say it’s a good thing… or someone who refers to the recognition of a mental disorder with the deflective buzzword of “Identity Politics.”
 
Yeah I don’t know if I’d call it “identity politics” necessarily. I think there’s a different psychological phenomenon going on when people identify with their scruples, or whatever it may be. Something like that gets to be such a constant reality that it’s hard to see oneself apart from it. That’s what I mean by “identifying with it,” and I think “identity politics” is quite another thing altogether.

-Fr ACEGC
 
I think I’m a wretched stupid worthless Catholic, one most certainly destined for hell, so I was flabbergasted this past Saturday when during confession my priest warned me against scrupulosity!!! I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I perceive myself as being very far from sinless, and in need both of God’s grace and of doing an enormous amount of work on myself.

I think others are certainly excessively scrupulous, and so I don’t think excessive scrupulosity is in any way ridiculous when applied to them, but, when I think of myself as being overly scrupulous . . . well, let’s just say that that is just ‘a bridge too far’ . . . :roll_eyes:
 
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Scrupulosity always reminds me of that old saying ‘He can’t see the forest for the trees’. It is the evil twin of being ‘detail-oriented’. In a way, scrupulosity that is not caused by OCD is almost like being so wrapped up in yourself that fear begins to take over your life: fear of sinning, fear of Hell, fear of committing sacrilege, etc. One possible answer might be for the scrupulous person to tear himself away from the mirror, metaphorically speaking, and direct his concern and his love outward to his fellow man. Kind of like an agoraphobic forcing himself to leave the house.
 
In some spiritual books I’ve note that scrupulosity of the type you describe is a type of selfishness. As you state, one needs to stop self-ruminating and start looking at Jesus and, in charity, at others.
 
I’d say it’s the religious counterpart to the problem with anxiety and perfectionism in the secular realm. The effect is paralytic. With non-religious anxiety, so much energy has to be spent on avoiding things that are sinful, that the person finds themselves unable to go about normal life and engage in the spiritual growth process because it might be a sin.

An example: A normal Catholic might engage in choosing how to direct his charitable giving. He may give money to someone on the street, or to a charity. A scrupulous person would worry, if he gives money to a beggar is he complicit in sin if the beggar buys drugs? But then if he doesn’t give is he withholding charity from those in need? There’s no option he can take that couldn’t make him think he’s in sin.
 
That’s why our approach to the moral life should be to strive for virtue, not only to not commit sin. We play to win, not to avoid losing, as it were. If our focus is on doing good, we will naturally avoid evil. If our focus is only on avoiding evil, evil is all we will ever see.

-Fr ACEGC
 
edward_george1 said:
That’s why our approach to the moral life should be to strive for virtue, not only to not commit sin. We play to win, not to avoid losing, as it were. If our focus is on doing good, we will naturally avoid evil. If our focus is only on avoiding evil, evil is all we will ever see.

-Fr ACEGC
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Thanks. This made my day. (Don’t have scruples, just enjoy wisdom)
 
Scrupulosity seems poorly understood.

Sometimes one hears this from others who themselves don’t want to feel uneasy about missing Mass on Sundays and they may say this to someone who is visiting them and DOES himself make the effort to get to Mass that day.

Sometimes some lax priests - and it may be understandable, they’re trying to help people - will in Confession suggest a concern about scrupulosity because they hear in your opening prayer that you’ve been to confession the week before and then they hear you saying something like “I let my interior complaint about my work spill out to my wife”.

And since you’re not confessing adultery or murder, they suggest you might be scrupulous!

I can’t imagine that real scrupulosity is all that common.

The devil can get to us suggesting that our daily prayers, Rosary, Mass are acts of scrupulosity, when in fact our intention is to love God and our family more by drawing ever closer to God through the means He gives us.
 
As I’ve said, scrupulosity isn’t all that common, in my experience hearing confessions. And “my last confession was one week ago” is not a major indicator of it for me, although taken together with other things the penitent says, it might be. The main things I’m listening to are an excessive attention to detail, especially as regards intention and/or mental state at the time a sin was committed, an excessive judgment of the actions themselves (“I did X, and I know that’s really really bad,” especially when X isn’t really, really bad), and an excessive judgment of oneself in the course of describing these things.

But you’re right that it isn’t well understood, and in the age of the internet, which as I’ve also said, seems to enable such a problem, it would behoove priests to understand it better.

-Fr ACEGC
 
Thank you Father, good points of differentiation. I hear some people bemoan confession or what some priest may or may not have said or supposedly said and I can only compare it with my own experiences, which have always been either great or good enough for me to begin again with God.

I know that when I say “Father, help me struggle to make a good Confession”, the priest ALWAYS moves into the breach to help me.

Thank you for your priesthood and for what you do and offer us here.
 
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I don’t know how often scrupulosity occurs noawadays - I’ll defer to Father’s judgment on this - but for those who are affected, and for their loved ones, it can be a living hell.

I am the father of three children who have suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It manifested itself in various ways, but for two of my children, the illness took the form of extreme scrupulosity. And I mean extreme – going to Confession, spending 30-40 minutes with their confessor, and then within a couple hours, feeling the need to go again.

One of my children morphed from a smiling, happy-go-lucky kid into a screaming, hysterical person I did not know. The sin that she zeroed in on was sacrilege. She saw mortal sin EVERYWHERE…a few examples:

• She “broke the Communion fast” because she swallowed her saliva and it might have contained particles of food from her breakfast. I told her to brush and floss her teeth thoroughly after breakfast to remove all particles of food. She then “broke the Communion fast” because she might have swallowed a minute amount of toothpaste that was left over in her mouth.

• She “committed sacrilege” because she sneezed after she returned to the pew after receiving Communion and she might have expelled a particle of the Host. She was in hysterics because she did not go through the hair on the back of the head of the person sitting in front of her, looking for the particle.

• She “committed sacrilege” because her finger Rosary fell out of her pocket and landed on the floor.

• She “committed sacrilege” because she thought about the Blessed Mother while she was using the restroom and therefore equated Mary with human bodily waste.

• Every time she went to Confession, she “committed a mortal sin” because she didn’t “do it right” – she might have not said she words of the Act of Contrition correctly, her Confessor didn’t understand exactly the sin she was confessing, she might have not counted the number of her “mortal sins” correctly.

Her confessor (one of the holiest and finest priests I have ever known) and I struggled mightily to reason with her that she had not committed a mortal sin. She then turned on us, accusing us of trying to send her to Hell because we “knew she was in mortal sin”. I offered to take her to a different parish for Confession and she then accused me of trying to kill her because she “knew we would get into a traffic accident and she would die and go to Hell because she knew she was in a state of mortal sin”. There was absolutely no reasoning with her. Her life – and ours – was beyond awful.

Praise God, we found a therapist who was as thoroughly Catholic as he was professionally skilled. Through therapy, spiritual direction with her Confessor, a regimen of medications from a psychiatrist that the therapist referred us to and prayer - LOTS of prayer - she was able to overcome the scrupulosity.

Not having read the article referenced in the original post, I can’t comment on what the author said.

But I can assure you that for those people afflicted with scrupulosity and those who are close to them, it is far from ridiculous.
 
First off, that’s definitely a very painful Cross that your daughter and your family bore, and I am glad that relief was found.

Second, what your story bears out is that scrupulosity is not only real, it is also not only a spiritual issue. In fact, it is largely a psychological issue, one that underlies a spiritual one or is dressed up in spiritual clothes, so to speak. Someone on here posted in another thread the other day an insight into this that I thought was very much correct–if a scrupulous person became an atheist, they would still be scrupulous, just not over the same things. This is why it is necessary to treat these things on all fronts, not only the spiritual, but the psychological and physiological as well. It’s very often a mental problem masquerading as a spiritual one, to put it another way.

Thank you for sharing your story and thank God that you and your family found relief.

-Fr ACEGC
 
Father, you are 100% correct. It’s a psychological problem and it can manifest itself in many different ways.

For my one daughter referenced above, OCD was exclusively an issue of scrupulosity. For my other daughters who have dealt with it, it took other forms. One dealt with an intense round of scrupulosity and was able to overcome it quickly, but she also showed OCD symptoms in other areas of her life. My third daughter with OCD has never been scrupulous.

Speaking with a priest regarding issues of scrupulosity is a good start, but it’s just a first step. This problem needs to be, as you noted, treated on all fronts.
 
I would suspect, among your average Catholics in general, laxity is probably far more common than scrupulosity.

Among average, non-lax, regular Church go-ers there might be some anxiety about sin, but after confession, they can put it behind them. They don’t work themselves into a panic when confronted by uncertainty.

And even then, there is a distinction between scrupulants. You have those who get nervous, but after talking with a Priest, they will feel at more at ease and move on. They might scruple about something else down the road, but after a good confession, a good Priest will have them feeling on the up and up.

Then there are those that are “pathological”, people who likely suffer from OCD in other forms as well. These are the kinds (like me) who a few minutes after leaving the Confessional, find themselves analyzing everything they said to make sure they didn’t give a false impression to the Confessor, or fear their Confessor didn’t understand just how malicious their sins really were and fear they are being let off easy when they should be being interrogated by a tribunal or that the Priest doesn’t know what he is doing and I better check with the people on CAF, or 1 or 2 or 3 other Priests to make sure he made the correct judgment etc etc.
 
In those latter cases, that’s why it’s good to know the Church’s usual position on any legal matter, which includes the confessional, namely that:

“Odia restringi, et favores convenit ampliari.”

Burdens are to be restricted, and favors to be multiplied.

This is the principle of charity as applied to the law and to the administration of the sacraments. One must be contrite, or at least be motivated by the desire to avoid hell, in order to make a valid confession. Okay, so the granting of the graces of the sacrament is a favor–which means we have to allow for that as broadly as possible. If someone is in my confessional confessing their sins, I assume that the they are at least sufficiently sorry so as to warrant absolving them. I can’t read souls, and I’m not going to assume that they’re not sufficiently sorry, unless they actually manifest to me that they’re doing something grave that they don’t intend to quit (e.g. contracepting and not planning on stopping).

If you’re in there, and you’re confessing, I assume you’re making your best effort and I grant absolution. It doesn’t matter how malicious you were or weren’t in your sins or whether or not you conveyed that. If you say “I did X, this-many-times,” that suffices. That’s why confession needs to be as simple as possible, ESPECIALLY for the scrupulous. Scrupulosity, being as it flows from compulsive tendencies, is remedied by hard boundaries.

-Fr ACEGC
 
edward_george1 said:
But you’re right that it isn’t well understood, and in the age of the internet, which as I’ve also said, seems to enable such a problem, it would behoove priests to understand it better.
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I would also say in some cases it can get mixed with what’s simply a catechetial problem. Talking to others who came out of fundamentalist protestant backgrounds, a certain amount of similar behavior tends to be common. Lacking someone familiar with that sort of background and the corrections needed to be made, it’s quite easy for the convert to fall into similar errors.

Looking back on my own past that’s definitely been a struggle. Most of my teaching simply presumed that converts came from a fairly liberal background compared to Catholicism. The IFB God where every stray thought or error was just waiting for divine punishment wasn’t something they’d ever experienced and often inadvertently strengthened that view. I wouldn’t say it was a result of any mental disorder, just a result of importing some ideas that I’d picked up into the faith and not really having people around who knew what to do.
 
I’ve seen that a lot, both with actual converts and with virtual converts, i.e. reverts who become far more devout when they get back in touch with their faith. Insofar as it’s a catechetical problem, I’d characterize it as something like “High information, low formation.” The internet lets you absorb lots and lots of information about morality and sin, but doesn’t serve as an effective pedagogue to guide the learner as far as prioritizing and contextualizing and applying the knowledge are concerned.

-Fr ACEGC
 
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