Aug 12, 2026 · 20 min · 13 segments
Saint Ignatius of Loyola once considered walking off a cliff because he couldn't stop confessing sins he wasn't even sure he'd committed. That's scrupulosity and it's more common than most Catholics…
Now listen, if you say it's scrupulosity, scrupulosity, which some people do, good for you.
So The kind of title of this is really scrupulosity when your conscience lies to you.
So St. Ignatius of Loyola once considered walking off of a cliff because he was so tormented by the belief that he had committed sins that he couldn't remember confessing.
His own memoirs describe a period of roughly a year where he would confess a sin, he would feel relief for a few hours, and then he would become convinced that he had left out some detail that invalidated the whole entire confession.
And then he would go back to repeat it, sometimes multiple times in a single day, until his confessor eventually forbade him from confessing anything from before a certain date ever again.
St. Alphonsus Liguori, a doctor of the church, a very careful moral theologian, spent years convinced that God had already rejected him no matter what he did, and he actually went on to write some of the church's most detailed guidance on how confessors should actually handle penitents caught in this exact trap.
They were two of the most disciplined, most spiritually serious people in the history of the church, and both of them suffered from something with a very specific name.
So today we're going to talk about what it is, how it's different from having a healthy conscience, where religious OCD fits into this, and what actually helps.
Scrupulosity is an unreasonable, often obsessive fear of having sinned, combined with a compulsive need to resolve that fear through confession and prayer and even mental checking that never actually resolves it.
Now listen, if you say it's scrupulosity, scrupulosity, which some people do, good for you.
So The kind of title of this is really scrupulosity when your conscience lies to you.
So St. Ignatius of Loyola once considered walking off of a cliff because he was so tormented by the belief that he had committed sins that he couldn't remember confessing.
His own memoirs describe a period of roughly a year where he would confess a sin, he would feel relief for a few hours, and then he would become convinced that he had left out some detail that invalidated the whole entire confession.
And then he would go back to repeat it, sometimes multiple times in a single day, until his confessor eventually forbade him from confessing anything from before a certain date ever again.
St. Alphonsus Liguori, a doctor of the church, a very careful moral theologian, spent years convinced that God had already rejected him no matter what he did, and he actually went on to write some of the church's most detailed guidance on how confessors should actually handle penitents caught in this exact trap.
They were two of the most disciplined, most spiritually serious people in the history of the church, and both of them suffered from something with a very specific name.
So today we're going to talk about what it is, how it's different from having a healthy conscience, where religious OCD fits into this, and what actually helps.
Scrupulosity is an unreasonable, often obsessive fear of having sinned, combined with a compulsive need to resolve that fear through confession and prayer and even mental checking that never actually resolves it.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
