Globalisation has caught on at the Vatican. The Catholic Church on Sunday updated the 1,500-year-old list of seven deadly sins, publishing the new list in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
Now, the souls of drug-pushers, the obscenely rich, environmental polluters and “manipulative” genetic scientists will go to Hell, unless they repent and seek redemption.
The list came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “securalised world”.
Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body that oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation”.
The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins. It holds mortal sins to be ‘grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes’ and holds that ‘the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell’.
There is no definitive list of mortal sins, but believers accept the seven deadly sins laid down in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularised by Dante in The Inferno: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.
{{/usCountry}}There is no definitive list of mortal sins, but believers accept the seven deadly sins laid down in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularised by Dante in The Inferno: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.
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