The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

Updated list o' sins
(just in time for St. Patrick's Day!)

What does the church really need to focus on in these days? Why the sin of ecological insensitivity, natch!

The Roman Catholic church has come out with new, modern sins for Catholics to avoid. Just when you thought it was safe to not recycle that milk jug, now you have to go to confession for your littering. I wonder if all American Catholics will have to repent in the confessional for being citizens of the ecological evil empire?

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today's "new sins," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

"(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

Girotti, in an interview headlined "New Forms of Social Sin," also listed "ecological" offences as modern evils.

In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had become gravely important for the entire human race.

Under Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, the Vatican has become progressively "green."

This is not to make light of the need to be responsible stewards of the environment. But merely recycling and drinking environmentally friendly coffee is not enough to assure salvation. Rome has a fundamental misunderstanding of sin, and that has led to lists of does and don'ts that mislead people into a false sense of self-righteousness. Rome's big failing is the issue of authority, church over Scripture and priest between man and God in the spot rightfully held by Christ. Sin is not an individual act, but a state of being. No human priest has the right to tell one that their sins are absolved because of confession to a man.

The report also laments how rare it is for Catholics to go to confession these days...

Girotti, who is number two in the Vatican "Apostolic Penitentiary," which deals with matter of conscience, also listed drug trafficking and social and economic injustices as modern sins.

But Girotti also bemoaned that fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession at all.

He pointed to a study by Milan's Catholic University that showed that up to 60 percent of Catholic faithful in Italy stopped going to confession.

In the sacrament of Penance, Catholics confess their sins to a priest who absolves them in God's name.
But the same study by the Catholic University showed that 30 percent of Italian Catholics believed that there was no need for a priest to be God's intermediary and 20 percent felt uncomfortable talking about their sins to another person.

Is it any wonder that when the Roman church makes sin so incredibly confusing that people stop going to confession? Or maybe it is because individual Catholics no longer buy into the authority of the church? Or better yet, perhaps Catholics are reading their Bibles and realizing that the Roman priesthood caste is unbiblical and unnecessary for those who are in Christ? We can only hope.