Vatican Lists New Sins for Society
Facing the Age of Globalization, Latest Sins Concern Global Issues
Mar 10, 2008
SUV drivers, beware: you may be committing yourself to eternal damnation.
Well, maybe not that severe, but the language of the Vatican's new mortal sins is ambiguous enough to be left open to interpretation. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary and second-in-command of the Vatican's take on sins and penance, told L'Osservatore Romano that the Vatican has updated its list of sins to keep hip with the phenomenon of globalization.
Once more individual-focused, the new list of sins condemns actions that affect the entirety of human society:
- Bioethics: "We absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," Girotti said, according to the Times.
- Pollution: Girotti also condemned "ecological offenses," the Times reported.
- Being too rich: Any social injustice that yielded "the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few" also made the list, as reported in the Times.
- Drug use: Deal or take drugs, and you're committing a mortal sin.
Girotti summed it all up nicely when he told L'Osservatore Romano: "You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour's wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos," before also tacking on dealings in drugs or causing excessive wealth or poverty to any one group of people.
But the new list didn't abandon tradition; abortion and paedophilia were also mentioned as two dominant mortal sins.
The announcement of the new list is timely, as Girotti himself points out: Milan's Catholic University recently conducted a study that revealed scary numbers for the Catholic Church -- up to 60 percent of Italian Catholics have stopped attending confession, a crucial aspect of Catholicism. And it gets worse: the same study showed that 30 percent of Italian Catholics believe that the role of the priest as God's intermediary is rubbish, and that 20 percent feel uncomfortable discussing their sins to another person!
Perhaps the new list, which as stated encompasses just about everyone at some level, will spark a newfound fervor for confessing. After all, a 2006 study by the United Nations research institute concluded that the richest 2 percent of the world's population controls more than half of all household wealth; furthermore, the poorer half of the population only controls 1 percent of that wealth! And almost everyone not living a completely sustainable lifestyle is guilty of leaving some carbon footprint.
Also, are the scientists that created synthetic insulin to save the lives of millions of diabetes patients guilty of mortal sin for their work? Synthetic human insulin was the first direct result of recombinant DNA technology and launched the biotech industry forward.
The issues that the new mortal sins bring up are legitimate thorns to society and need to be addressed. But deeming them each a mortal sin in the same context as a study coming out showing that not enough Catholics are attending confession not only politicizes the Church, but the ambiguous language cheapens the severity of the issues at hand. If these "acts" are worthy of potential eternity in the Lake of Fire, don't they deserve more credible descriptions?
The amount of questions regarding the Vatican's new decree is endless. Perhaps that is precisely the effect the Vatican was hoping for. It had been about 1,500 years since the Catholic Church has updated its list of sins; why not spice things up a bit?
