The Seven Modern Wonders of Sin.

“Polluting, genetic engineering, obscene riches, taking drugs, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice join the original seven deadly sins defined by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and sloth.”

“Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, responsible for absolving Catholics from their sins, named the new mortal sins in an interview with the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, yesterday.”

These are two paragraphs from the Sydney Morning Herald, actually listing the “new” seven deadly sins. The New York Times Online article did not provide such a categorical list. You read the headlines and it is like there is a new list published by the Roman Catholic Church. Read more indepth and you can see that the church is providing more information on what it calls “mortal” sins, sins that, if unrepented, lead to damnation.

I applaud the church for taking seriously how sin affects us today, and for taking on the systemic nature of sin in our globalizing world. The idea that sin existed in two arenas was one I learned
about in Seminary.

The first arena was in the human heart, the sins I commit, the ones I am responsible for, the pain and suffering that I cause by what I do. The second, more expansive, is that sin exists in institutions and systems. For example, sin exists in capitalism because by its nature, some people are left behind as other people advance. The trouble is, unlike personal sins, systemic sins do not leave someone specific to blame or to confess for what has happened. That seems to be the shift taking place in the Roman Catholic thinking.

The theological technical term for sin (although hardly universal) is “Harmatology”. And that is a tough sell these days. Point to something and call it sinful can make us anything from judgmental to irrelevant. We are judgmental for nosing into someone else’s life. We are irrelevant because “sin” as an idea has faded from real consideration.

I was getting ready for work today and I caught a promo for Good Morning America. A woman has discovered that her best friend’s husband is having an affair. The question was whether or not it was any of her business to let her friend know. The question of right and wrong, sin or not sin, was not in the affair itself. Now there is a commandment about that, it is a ‘shalt not’. Thou shalt not commit adultery. The question of right or wrong was whether the friend should divulge this information.

The implication I took away is that to reveal the affair could be an ethically negative activity, in other words, a sinful activity. That assumes that someone else’s sin is none of my business. The question of when sin becomes my business is generally at the line where it becomes criminal.
Adultery is not a crime, unless specific circumstances turn it into one (sex with a minor or someone mentally incompetent). If it were a criminal activity, I would have a civic duty to report it. But if it isn’t a crime, the implication is that I ignore the sin or leave the sin alone, or just make the sin NOT my business.

If sin is irrelevant, then the need for forgiveness is irrelevant. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to give grace to the world becomes irrelevant. Heaven, the moral values that religion are supposed to provide as the very minimal token of its existence becomes irrelevant.

I am not prepared to argue for or against the sins added to the list of mortal sins by the Roman Catholic Church. I think it is a convenient media ploy to list seven of them so we can grab the soundbite made popular from Dante to “Seven” with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt.

I think the culture at large has lost just about any sense of what ‘sin’ is supposed to be and the church has not been able to fill that gap of knowledge. Heaven, it seems like within the church, what sin is seems to be a lost subject. The news reports citing these new deadly sins also cited the statistic that 60% of Italian Catholics do not go to Confession, corroberating proof to the general irrelevance of sin to the modern mind.

Believing in Christ means accepting him as the Way. It is the Way to heaven, away from Hell. But we seem to be losing the very sense of what this Way is taking us from.