SEVEN MORE SINS

Apparently, the Ten Commandments, Golden Rule and Seven Deadly Sins weren’t enough. Earlier this month the Roman Catholic Church upped the stakes by issuing its list of Seven Social Sins. And it’s not about social failings such as wearing white after Labor Day or telling your sister her new baby is ugly.

These sins, courtesy of the Vatican, are the new measures of the morality of our society. Way overdue, some might say. The sins – environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, excessive wealth, inflicting poverty, drug trafficking and abuse, morally debatable experiments and violation of the fundamental rights of human nature – sound more like they were lifted from a Ralph Nader speech than from Sister Mary Catherine’s Catechism class.

The reviews, judging by news reports sampled from around the English-speaking world, have been mixed. Is the new list a marketing-driven ploy to make the church more relevant in these post-modern times? Or is it a sincere effort to use the church’s moral authority to affect a culture facing difficult public dilemmas? Giving the church the benefit of any doubt about its motives, or about its moral authority in the wake of priest sex abuse scandals, the list seems well crafted for our times.

Churches long have advocated agendas that are outside the scope of an individual’s struggle to live a godly life, and often they’ve been panned by nonfollowers. The Catholic Church has consistently supported candidates for elected office who want to make abortion illegal. And the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and 700 Club founder Pat Robertson have used their church organizations to support Republican policies that curtail gay rights.

But this list – or at least components of it – could be embraced by both the right and left. Evangelical Christians, who have been the backbone of the Christian right in the U.S., have recently begun accepting the liberal idea that caring for the natural environment is part of their call to be good stewards of God’s creation. The warnings about seeking excessive wealth and about “inflicting poverty” – there’s an interesting phrase – may fly in the face of conservatives’ faith in market principles, but they correctly reflect Jesus’ teachings about the temptations faced by the rich.

The phrase “genetic manipulation” recalls President Bush’s opposition to stem cell research, and “morally debatable experiments” suggests cloning, also opposed by the religious right. But the phrase “violation of the fundamental rights of human nature” seems ambiguous enough to be appropriated by both the left and right.

It has been 15 centuries since the church named the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. The somewhat amorphous nature of the new list reflects the moral relativism of the times, but it can be used as a moral reality check. Or as a means of judging presidential candidates.