Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?
Drug pushers, the obscenely rich, environmental polluters and “manipulative”
genetic scientists beware – you may be in danger of losing your mortal soul
unless you repent.
After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by
adding seven new ones for the age of globalisation. The list, published
yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came
as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “securalised
world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.
The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal
sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before
death through confession and penitence.
It holds mortal sins to be “grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the
Beatitudes”, including murder, contraception, abortion, perjury, adultery
and lust.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the
souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell”.
Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the
broad seven deadly sins or capital vices laid down in the 6th century by
Pope Gregory the Great and popularised in the Middle Ages by Dante in The
Inferno: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.
Christians are exhorted instead to adhere to the seven holy virtues: chastity,
abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.
Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican
body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said after a
week-long Lenten seminar for priests that surveys showed 60 per cent of
Catholics in Italy no longer went to confession.
He said that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the
horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of
globalisation”. Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an
invididual matter, it now had “social resonance”.
“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,” he said.
Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs,
and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of
wealth by a few”.
He said that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were
abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women”, and paedophilia,
which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and
institutional fragility of the Church”.
The mass media had “blown up” the issue “to discredit the Church”, but the
Church itself was taking steps to deal with it.
Addressing the Apostolic Penitentiary seminar, the Pope said there was “a
certain disaffection” with confession among the faithful. Priests had to
show “divine tenderness for penitent sinners” and admit their own failings.
“Those who trust in themselves and in their own merits are, as it were,
blinded by their own ‘I’, and their hearts harden in sin. Those who
recognise themselves as weak and sinful entrust themselves to God, and from
Him obtain grace and forgiveness.”
The Pope also complained that an increasing number of people in the
secularised West were “making do without God”.
He said that hedonism and consumerism had even invaded “the bosom of the
Church itself, deeply undermining the Christian faith from within, and
undermining the lifestyle and daily behaviour of believers”.
Eastern Catholics do not recognise the same distinction between mortal and
venial sins as the Western or Latin Church does, nor does it believe that
those people who die in a state of sin are condemned to automatic damnation.
The original offences and their punishments
Pride Broken on the wheel
Envy Put in freezing water
Gluttony Forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
Lust Smothered in fire and brimstone
Anger Dismembered alive
Greed Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
SlothThrown in snake pits
Source: The Picture Book of Devils, Demons and Witchcraft; Ernst and
Johanna Lehner
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