I see from your reactions to previous pages that the guilt complex, which young people do not suffer any more from, was certainly important for earlier generations. I’ve quoted experiences taken from autobiographies I’ve read, and someone has sent me this one by a well-known actual Spanish writer:

“Sundays in the forties were long days, sad days with rain and bad cinema. On Sunday morning we remained in bed a little longer, without going to school, or they made us get up early to go to Church for confession and communion. It could also happen that we had gone to confession the previous day, Saturday evening, and then we would wake up on Sunday morning with a start, with the fear of having committed sin during the night in our dreams, or having drunk water, or having been rude to somebody.

Many hours had passed since confession, and it was not sure that the grace of absolution was still intact in us. Perhaps we were going to go to communion in a state of sin, so that even a small sin could become a serious one, because guilt has its own dialectics and always increases. The sin is always greater than the sinner, it weighs on them, envelops them, and the child who did not want to eat the soup can end up feeling a monster in hell because its lack of appetite has made its grandmother weep.

If one thought much on one’s sin – whatever sin, even a distraction in prayer or a blow to one’s friend – guilt increased only by thinking of it. It one forgot, one’s father, mother, confessor, teacher would one day remind one, and meanwhile the forgotten guilt had grown in our breast like a venomous and monstrous plant. So that Sunday, which was the Lord’s Day, was, precisely, because of that, a delicate day in which one ended up by feeling one was in sin for one reason or the other.”

(Francisco Umbral, Memorias de un chico de derechas, p. 28)