Sunday March 16, 2008
Modern life trivializes traditional sins
When I took my car to a car wash the other day, I committed one of the seven deadly sins – sloth. I let a machine do work I could have done myself.
I took Joan out to a restaurant and pigged out on the buffet. Another of the seven deadly sins – gluttony.
Angelina Jolie whisked across my TV screen dressed in something that left little to the imagination. For a second, the 20-year-old who still lurks within my 70-year-old body twitched with lust.
Another deadly sin.
I don\’t mean to trivialize the traditional sins — pride, lust, sloth, gluttony, envy, covetousness, and anger. I don\’t need to. Society has already done that.
Making virtues out of vices
Eliminate the first six of those sins, and the entire world of advertising would collapse. Remove anger, and every justice movement in the world would slump into apathy.
Because the traditional seven vices are also the virtues on which our civilization runs.
Someone invented a machine so he wouldn\’t have to work so hard. Thanks to sloth, we are no longer limited to being hewers of wood and carriers of water. Now we can struggle for hours to master Microsoft Vista.
Pride has another name – self-esteem. Envy and covetousness provoke ambition, and BMW sales. Without gluttony, no fast food outlet could supersize its portions.
And anger is the raw fuel that fires movements against racism, prejudice, oppression, exploitation, poverty, homelessness…
In other words, our culture has rendered those traditional sins irrelevant.
Why, after all, should I confess that I took the car to a carwash, and repent, humbly, in hope of saving my soul from spending eternity in hell? If that\’s the punishment merely for having a clean car, how come Robert Willie Pickton can slaughter six women – possibly another 43 – and get the same destination?
Seven Deadly Sins updated
I don\’t believe in hell any more – at least, not as a future abode isolated from God. I don\’t believe that anyone is ever permanently out of reach of God\’s forgiveness. That doesn\’t mean offenders get off scot free. Like losing a finger in a circular saw, mistakes have lasting consequences.
Last Monday, the news media reported with glee that the Vatican had revised the traditional list of Seven Deadly Sins as defined by Pope Gregory the Great around 600 A.D.
The story was based on an interview with Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, number two in the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary, published in L\’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican\’s semi-official newspaper.
“Yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension,” Girotti said. “Today it has a resonance beyond the individual… because of the phenomenon of globalization. In effect, sin presents itself more urgently today than yesterday, because its consequences are wider and more destructive.”
Media manipulation
Despite media hyperbole, however, Girotti did not issue a new list of mortal sins.
Girotti is, at best, a second-level official; he cannot issue a definitive list on the Vatican\’s behalf. And he certainly did not call them the “New Seven Deadly Sins.”
Girotti had just finished a training course with priests on revitalizing confession. Girotti cited some examples – the interview transcript makes them almost random thoughts – of contemporary actions that priests hearing confession should treat as sins.
From those examples, Bloomberg News distilled a list of seven modern sins:
1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. The widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty
Most other news sources based their stories on Bloomberg – not on the original transcript.
Indeed, after checking about 30 news stories worldwide, I sense that few news outlets bothered checking the published interview at all. (For an English translation, go to http://blog.acton.org/uploads/penitentiary_interview.pdf.)
Several newspapers even included pedophilia and homosexuality in their lists, although Girotti himself never mentioned them.
Significant perspective
Nevertheless, Girotti\’s views are interesting, because they presumably reflect the thinking of the Vatican as a whole.
I\’m left with mixed reactions, though.
I agree fully with the new class of sins defined by the Vatican. It\’s high time that the most influential office in the world took seriously the afflictions that threaten human well-being around the world.
It might be argued that the kind of sins Girotti named are not biblical. They relate specifically to our time, our culture, our technologies.
But as Moira McQueen, of the Toronto-based Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, explained to the Toronto Star, "These things weren\’t possible back then."
McQueen added, “People ask me, what did Jesus say about contraceptives? He didn\’t say anything. And he couldn\’t say anything about coming off artificial ventilators, either.”
As the Star\’s Stuart Laidlaw noted, the church has struggled for generations “trying to apply ancient teachings to modern ethical dilemmas.”
Snared by sin To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
At the same time, I wonder how many devout people went to bed on Sunday night, thinking that they were furthering God\’s will by earning obscene wealth while emptying their customers\’ wallets and dumping waste products for someone else to clean up later. And then woke up on Monday morning to discover that they had become sinners.
They\’re probably thinking it\’s not fair to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Indeed, that\’s a hallmark of sin, Montreal theology professor King Gordon suggested 70 years ago. You don\’t chose to sin, he said. You believe you\’re doing the right thing. And then one day you discover that what you thought was right was actually wrong. And you find yourself mired in sin up to your eyeballs.
Could Girotti\’s offhand set of examples become a definitive list like Pope Gregory\’s? I doubt it. He didn\’t include war, for example. Or child pornography, a “sin” enhanced by modern technology.
A definitive list would require much more deliberation.
But if Girotti\’s examples make even a few people think differently, the exercise was worthwhile.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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