Scoop’s Views

The Vatican announced today that pollution is among sins — for a new generation — that can lead you to burn in Hell.

Until recently, the Catholic church has listed seven deadly sins: those of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. That list was compiled by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, and until now, served well.

In talking with AP Television, Father Antonio Pelayo, a Spanish priest and Vatican expert, said, “There are many other sins that are perhaps much more grave that don’t have anything to do with sex — that have to do with life, that have to do with the environment, that have to do with justice.”

In an interview published on Sunday by the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti said known sins become part of our human behaviors, and that causes damage to all of society.

Girotti, who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican entity charged with issuing stands on matters of conscience and grants absolutions, said in the interview that while sin used to concern the individual, today it had a mainly a social resonance as a result of globalization.

Wow. Sin is no longer something I commit by a single act, such as having sex with a one-legged stuffed animal on the third Tuesday of the 15th odd month following the second full moon before my odd-number birthdays. Now it is something “social” due to people jetting back-and-forth or playing on the Internet. Well, let’s not get into that cybersex issue, okay?

When asked to list the new areas of sinful behavior, Girotti said they included “certain violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments, genetic manipulations,” as well as drugs, which weaken the mind and obscure intelligence; pollution; and the widening social and economic differences between the rich and the poor that “cause an unbearable social injustice.”

Somehow, the man-made rules about sin just don’t mesh up with anything the Bible tells me is sin.