The New Seven Deadly Sins – Taking Social Sin Seriously
Article written by David Tutty, Catholic Justice and Peace Office.
Most would have seen or heard media reports claiming the Vatican had released a list of seven new deadly sins. On the whole these reports missed the key point of Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti’s comments. As a senior member of the Vatican Apostolic Penitentiary, Girotti was attempting to name the modern face of social sin. The seven that he named – genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs – he believes have an impact and resonance that is above all social.
Attempting to name sin in a way that is more than individual and personal has a long history and is not at all new. It can be found at the very origins of our Judeo-Christian tradition. The early Hebrew slaves named the legalised and structured Egyptian political economy as unjust and oppressive. The Deuteronomists and the writers and editors of Leviticus riled against the economic and political structures established by the Hebrew leaders after they arrived in the land flowing with milk and honey. Here, poverty and inequality soon became institutionalised and the orphan, the widow, the slave, the labourer, and the debtor became victims trapped by the way power was structured. And the theologians who contributed to the first eleven chapters of Genesis clearly were trying to demonstrate not only the social effects of sin but also that whole peoples can think and act in ways that are not of God.
This struggling to name the collective institutional transgression continued. The
various Hebrew prophets condemned not only individual unjust actions but also the injustices structured into the political, economic and legal systems. Jesus is recorded as using parable
after parable to name that the dominant institutionalised social, political, economic and religious relationships needed to be turned upside down. No longer would the bulk of the people be oppressed and excluded because God’s new reality would give first place to the least.
Christians have continued to struggle with the complex reality of sin. The social dimension is clear in St Paul’s sense of the world and of the reign of sin and in John’s Gospel’s pejorative use of the term the world. Early theologians like St Basil, St Augustine and St John Chrysostom attempted to name that the gross economic inequality that existed in their day was unjust and that God’s intention was for a radical egalitarian redistribution. And over the last century or so, Catholic Social Teaching, in particular, has attempted to address the collective sin, be it dominant ways of thinking, unjust institutions or systems or policies and decisions that harm human beings and/or the rest of creation.
So there is nothing new in Archbishop Girotti’s attempt to name the contemporary face and challenge of social sin. And there is nothing new in the sins he named – John Paul II had already named each in a variety of ways and a number of them are just modern attempts to name the very concerns found in our biblical heritage. But we cannot leave it only to Church leaders to be talking about social sin. Girotti’s challenge is that it is the responsibility of each of us to have some sense of our own participation in and support of social sin.
Even just to take a few of Girotti’s seven social sins is very sobering and challenging. From the perspective of hundreds of millions of people earning just a dollar or two a day we are, in this country, excessively wealthy. We are amongst the ones who have the largest ecological footprints and contribute to a far greater level of pollution and carbon emission. We are amongst the ones who benefit from the way the economic and trade systems are structured. We are the beneficiaries of the capitalist siphoning up of wealth and thus we are a party to causing greater poverty. And on the whole we do not see the injustice (the sin) in all of this.
Girotti’s challenge is for us to take social sin seriously. The painful task is to admit that we benefit from the way global political, social and economic power is structured. And thus the call to repent is a call to change our ways, our power relationships and our institutional structures.
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