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Comment by Scea91 | Hacker News Reader

Recently I was attending several catholic weddings and I was taken aback by the level of religious fervor and literal interpretation of the bible there. I was expecting the preaching to be more focused on how to live a good life and be a valuable member of society, but instead it was more about how I will burn eternally for not believing.

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> Recently I was attending several catholic weddings and I was taken aback by the level of religious fervor and literal interpretation of the bible there. I was expecting the preaching to be more focused on how to live a good life and be a valuable member of society, but instead it was more about how I will burn eternally for not believing.

Literalism isn’t a big thing in Catholicism, but you can run into it and, what sounds to be more the issue here, there are definitely some (IME, a small minority, but they are quite noticeable) Catholic priests who love to use events where they are likely to get non-regular churchgoers in the congregaton as an opportunity to try to deploy a fear hammer to get people back to Church.

These attitudes come in cycles in the Roman church. There was a 50 year period of liberal thinking. The current has era has swung back to the conservative. When an organization has a 1600 year life span you can expect things like this. Just wait a while...

It could also be regional. My experience in Catholic churches in Texas was a lot different than the upper Midwest. Also, the attitudes of the clergy don't necessarily mirror those of the laity, and there are divisions within the laity as well. The people in the pews get their ideas from a lot of different places, ranging from liberal to evangelical. This was many years ago, haven't been involved for a long time.

> There was a 50 year period of liberal thinking.

I'm not sure that's justifiable.

> The current has era has swung back to the conservative.

In the American particular Church more than in the Universal Church that seems correct. (Up through the papacy of Benedict XVI, I would have responded differently.)

The guilt is definitely pushed strongly in Catholicism and probably the worst part of it. But I don't think Catholics are too literal in their interpretation of the bible - in fact I think they are generally more rational than most other denominations. For instance, Catholics generally accept scientific explanations for evolution and the origin of the universe unlike many (most?) protestants.

Lifelong Catholic here -- I've never felt that the guilt was pushed too strongly. What I do feel is that the Catholic Church is very willing to say that certain beliefs and practices are proscribed, that sin is real and should be avoided. What people are calling guilt is their own attachment to sin, and their reluctance to abandoning it.

(That being said, God's capacity for love is beyond human conception and no person can ever be beyond redemption.)

can you explain further?

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