You will be pleased to know that finally the Vatican decided to honour Gallileo for his scientific accomplishments like discovering Jupiter, many things about our Moon and the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He will get a statue in the Vatican gardens.

It only took them about 4 centuries after trying and convicting him for heresy.

There's a little more below the fold...

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:

1. ``Bioethical' violations such as birth control

2. ``Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. 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.

Last Friday, the Vatican announced that babies who die go to heaven, not limbo. They didn't snuff the concept of limbo, they just placed it in...limbo. Slate's Explainer chronicles the fluctuating Catholic cosmology of the infant afterlife:

The fate of unbaptized babies has confounded Catholic scholars for centuries. According to church catechisms, or teachings, babies that haven't been splashed with holy water bear the original sin, which makes them ineligible for joining God in heaven. At the same time, as innocent beings, they surely don't deserve eternal torment. St. Augustine concluded in the fourth century that the babies must be punished in the fire of hell, but only with the "mildest condemnation." Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas thought infant souls wouldn't go to heaven, but they wouldn't suffer in the afterlife, either (and they wouldn't even know what they were missing). Theologians eventually settled on limbo as a hypothetical compromise—a state of natural, though incomplete, happiness.

St. Augustine! What a hard-ass. I'm amused by the idea of a bunch of old men, hunched over crumbling texts written by other old men, who themselves hunched over crumbling texts written by other old men, etc.–– millennia of geezers pondering the fate of babies' souls.

Other concepts upon which the Vatican has reversed its stance include slavery, religious freedom, and charging interest on a loan.