Wednesday, 03.12.08

Same Sins, Different Era

Photo by Flickr user Omar Omar under a Creative Commons license

Newspapers reported that Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, an official in the Vatican office that oversees confession and conscience, had listed seven new "social sins" of the modern world.

Now that the very idea of sin and penitence seems hopelessly Old Europe, the earnest moral language of Catholicism -- sin, virtue, evil, salvation -- lends itself easily to caricature. The bishop gave an interview early this month, and by Monday, journalists had distilled his thoughts into tabloid headlines: "Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?" and "Pope Identifies Seven New Sins!" The articles claimed Girotti's ad-hoc list expanded or even (in more grievous misinterpretations) replaced the familiar litany of deadly sins -- pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth -- codified by Pope Gregory the Great in the late 6th Century, fine-tuned by Aquinas in the 13th, and popularized by Dante in the 14th. But even those seven were less "sins" than categories of impropriety, attitudes that could lead to spiritually destructive personal behavior.

Girotti -- who wasn't speaking for the Vatican -- meant to show that today even personal sins occur in a broader context of global community. "If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension," he said, "today it has an impact and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization." Loving your neighbor as you love yourself was never easy, but it used to be more straightforward. In 2008, your neighbor isn't just the guy in the apartment downstairs, but the factory worker in Shenzhen who makes your laptop, and the rickshaw driver in Dhaka whose streets are flooded by rising waters, thanks to your carbon footprint. Girotti wasn't positing a "new" list of sins; he was asserting that the old moral language says something important about the new world.

— Timothy Lavin

Filed Under: Catholicism, media, religion, sin