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The Vatican’s New List of Seven Deadly Sins

The Vatican’s New List of Seven Deadly Sins

Last updated on: October 16, 2024 at 10:11 am by Gene Veith

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The Vatican’s New List of Seven Deadly Sins 2024-10-16T10:11:12-04:00 Gene Veith

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The Christian church has long warned against the Seven Deadly Sins. These have been staples of Christian art and literature. Now the Vatican has (not for the first time) put out a new list of Seven Deadly Sins, reflecting some different moral preoccupations.

According to Roman Catholic theology, the deadly sins are “capital” or “mortal,” meaning that unless they are specifically confessed and absolved they can send you to Hell. But they aren’t just a Catholic thing. The Wikipedia entry linked above says that the great Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz, the mind behind the Book of Concord, urged pastors to warn their flocks against the Seven Deadly Sins (referencing Chemnitz’s Ministry, Word, and Sacraments: An Enchiridion; The Lord’s Supper; The Lord’s Prayer [St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007]). And Christian authors from the Catholic Dante to the Protestant Spenser have explored them with imaginative symbolism and literary depth.

Here are the original Seven Deadly Sins:

Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride

In 2008, the Vatican supplemented the list with some new vices characteristic of our time. Here are The Seven New Deadly Sins:

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

That last one includes abortion and euthanasia, violations of the right to life. The others target capitalism–making too much money will damn you!–and evils in science, as well as addressing the drug problem and and environmentalism.

Now, the Vatican has issued another list of Seven Newer Deadly Sins:

Sin against peace
Sin against creation, against indigenous populations, against migrants
Sin of abuse
Sin against women, family, youth
Sin of using doctrine as stones to be hurled
Sin against poverty
Sin against synodality / lack of listening, communion, and participation of all

These lists don’t replace each other, but are supplements. Lust and Pride will still damn you. But so will having too much money. And “using doctrine as stones to be hurled,” evidently meaning accusing others of false doctrine in the way conservative Catholics are doing to liberal Catholics. That liberals think their conservative critics deserve eternal damnation seems rather “conservative” of them. The sin against “synodality” alludes to the new practice in liberal Catholicism of holding a series of meetings involving not just bishops but laypeople and experts to “discern together where the Holy Spirit is leading us right now.” I assume the sin is broader than just refusing to pay attention to the recommendations of these groups–though if you don’t that would be damnable–but that not listening to someone else and not participating with others is also damnable. (If I were a Catholic and taught in a Catholic college, I could have used that one to make my students pay attention and take part in class discussions!)

Hélène de Lauzun discusses this most recent list in her article for the European Conservative entitled A Catalogue of New Sins: A Catholic Self-Criticism Session? She sees a contradiction in the one against sinning against “indigenous populations” and sinning against “migrants.” She recognizes the woke obligation to oppose colonialism, which one archbishop and cardinal-to-be is saying requires “that evangelisation should be abandoned as it constitutes a form of violence against indigenous people.” But De Lauzun says, aren’t the residents of today’s European countries “indigenous,” descendants of the ancient tribes that inhabited France, Germany, England, etc.? So aren’t the flood of “migrants” from the Middle East and other non-European societies sinning against indigenous people? But if those indigenous people oppose being colonized by those “migrants,” is that sinning?

She adds,

As for others included in this new list, such as “sin against women, the family and young people,” their deliberately restrictive wording gives the impression of a media spotlight on a few sins that are highly regarded in today’s world. Isolated in this way and brought to the fore, they appear to be communication ‘signals’ chosen to appease the spirits of political correctness. What makes a sin against a woman more serious than a sin against a man? And why does a sin against a ‘young’ person deserve more attention than a sin against an ‘old’ person, especially at a time when the race is on in Western countries for euthanasia, with the unavowed aim of shortening the rather too long hours spent by the elderly on this earth at taxpayers’ expense?

Of course, we also see in these new list of sins the influence of the “social gospel” of mainline liberal Protestantism, which manifests itself in Catholicism not in a gospel at all but in a “social law.”

A FURTHER THOUGHT: The genius of the original list is that they focus on inward dispositions of the soul rather than external behaviors. (Dante described them as distortions of love–loving oneself more than one’s neighbor [pride, anger, envy], loving in excess to the harm of oneself or a neighbor [greed, gluttony, lust], and deficient love [sloth, as in not loving yourself or your neighbor enough to do something about it].)

These new lists concentrate instead on external behavior. “Excessive wealth” is not sinful in itself, but can be if it is a function of the interior vice of “greed.” Criticizing someone for their doctrine is not sinful in itself, but can be if it is a function of the interior vices of “anger” or “pride.”

The Ten Commandments cut both ways, addressing both the external act and the inner motive, as Christ’s Sermon on the Mount emphasizes and as the Catechism makes clear.

Illustration: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things by Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1500), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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