“Mama, if you’re listening,  I’m so terribly sorry,  but I did not mean to love that beast of a man. I did not even wear that red cape, those red shoes just the armful of poppies and maybe they looked like blood or maybe they looked like healing  but I found him first,  and dropped them like bloodstains on the forest floor.  Mama, he was howling,  and oh, if you’d heard, the oh, of his grief  even the moon was crying for him even the night was weeping mama, I know that we met on the edge  of some awful precipice but he folded my hands into his claws made sure they didn’t draw blood  I asked him about his dark and he said ‘who will love me now?’  I did, mama.  I fell in love with him then, And he took me home and kissed me  till my heart looked like pulp  and we undressed each other from the inside out  and we loved till it was brimming  and mama, it was a disaster  and it was devastating  and it was light.  I lost your poppies.  I lost myself, too.  And now there’s a beast and he’s crying and he’s asking ‘who will love me now?’  And mama, I didn’t mean to but I will, I will.”

Scottish catholics: healthy amount of guilt and shame, usually chill, same as the irish re: the mammy thing though.

French catholics: no shame, some guilt, guilt coped with by smoking.

Italian catholics: a bit of guilt, lots of fucking, lots of shame about said fucking.

Eastern eauropean catholics: not quite guilt or shame, more an all encompassing sense of dread. Unparalleled art and architecture though. Like honestly, amazing.