Vatican presents new list of Deadly Sins for 21st century
Wed Mar 12, 2008 at 11:43:55 AM PDT
The Vatican has doubled the number of mortal sins, adding seven new transgressions that will land your soul in Hell if you don’t confess to them prior to your death. I know that I may not be the best person to write this diary, as I’m a.) not Catholic and b.) not pious, but I am intrigued by this new list, because they fall into the category of "social sins", as encapsulated by this list from Bloomberg News:
- ``Bioethical' violations such as birth control
- ``Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research
- Drug abuse
- Polluting the environment
- Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
- Excessive wealth
- Creating poverty
These new sins are dramatically different from the original deadly sins, which, in my wholly untrained opinion, deal with personal failings and not necessarily sins against a wider community. For those of us who aren’t of the Catholic faith, they are: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. The new sins were presented by "Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti at the end of a week-long training seminar in Rome for priests, aimed at encouraging a revival of the practice of confession - or the Sacrament of Penance in Church jargon," according to this BBC article.
For someone like me, who has a hard time with organized religion, there’s a lot to disagree with. I’m pro-choice and have used birth control; I believe that the right to an abortion and the right to safe family planning methods are human rights. I’m also in favour of stem cell research. So obviously, I’m not going to believe that birth control, abortion and stem cell research are hell-worthy acts. I also note with great disappointment, that some of the senior prelates in the Vatican have not been able to come to terms with the pedophila crimes that have victimized so many innocent children and shaken the faith of so many. From the BBC article:
In an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Archbishop Girotti said he thought the most dangerous areas for committing new types of sins lay in the fields of bio-ethics and ecology.
He also named abortion and paedophilia as two of the greatest sins of our times. The archbishop brushed off cases of sexual violence against minors committed by priests as "exaggerations by the mass media aimed at discrediting the Church".
But I am intrigued by the focus on wealth and poverty and environmental degradation. I’ll throw it out there for you to discuss: do you think this new list is relevant? Does confession and the Catholic Church’s pronouncements on the nature of sin matter anymore? Will this have any impact on preventing some of these actions?
