Confess This

The Vatican has brought up to date the traditional seven deadly sins by adding seven modern mortal sins it claims are becoming prevalent in what it calls an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

"They need to be more aware today of the social face of sin - the inequalities at the social level. They think of sin too much on an individual level. I think priests who hear confession should have a deeper sense of the violence and injustice of such problems - and the fact that people collaborate simply by doing nothing. One of the original deadly sins is sloth - disengagement and not getting involved," Father O'Collins said.

BBC News

Protestants largely have an ideological view of the Reformation that serves a "thank God for intervening into history at just the right moment to save us from popery" that colors a lot of how we understand Catholicism. Well, there's that and a whole lot of continental violence. Still, something like indulgences is broadly understood as the voodoo that Luther rescued us from. Remember indulgences? The last straw that inspired the wholesale return of the church to Jesus Christ, never to need fixing again?

Anyway, they're still something. That's right. There's a whole bunch of the world that believes that sins are actual things and actual sins have actual consequences and a part of the demonstration of our remorse at having actually done something is to seek to actually make amends. That's how they understand indulgences- demonstrating and participating in forgiveness.

Dummies. They don't realize that God does everything so you are entirely off the hook.

In a demonstration of how far they take this nonsense of making amends, the Catholic Church has just released the work they've been doing on understanding the manifestations of sin in our actual world. So with that comes teaching and training priests to properly understand contemporary sins and how one might demonstrate the forgiving transformative grace of Christ and do something that corresponds. That's the sense of an indulgence.

Talk about silly. Someone else telling me what is a sin? Telling me what to do? Like they know something I don't. I'm sorry, guy in the fancy robe, I have a book I carry around in a zippered nylon case with a velcro pocket for carrying colored pencils and it tells me everything I need to know about MY personal relationship with God. So stick it in your rectory.

And still worse, could you imagine if we thought of the social consequences of sin? Yeesh. I might end up doing something and before you knew it, I would think somehow my salvation was connected to what I did. Sin is personal, just like Jesus, and I'm not "doing nothing" as you say. Perhaps if you understood how dead all your works are, you would understand, that what you call doing nothing, I call Blessed Assurance.

Jesus Is Mine!
Ouch Ouch Ouch- The Briefs
Shoplifters of the World Unite- The Smiths
Consternation- Tito Puente
Thanks for the Memory- Stan Getz
Sloop John B- The Beach Boys
Down by the Riverside- Sister Rosetta Tharp



I hate the way it gets all bunched up down here now.