KEY POINTS:
This week I was delighted to hear we've come up with some new sins.
I've had only a cursory glance down the list, but it appears that GE, pollution, drugs and causing poverty while enjoying the fruits of magnificent wealth have now joined the iconic line-up of cardinal failings that have been the delight of masochists since Gregory the Great arranged them in an orderly fashion 1400 years ago.
It's a fairly pedestrian line-up, but at least the green slant is very on-trend.
It was a bit inevitable that the Catholic Church would come to the Save The Planet party in the end. What better way to rehabilitate the image of a crumbling bulwark against progress than by jumping on the bandwagon of the trendiest inconvenient truth? (Not that inconvenient truths have bothered the church much in the past - Galileo anyone?).
Fashionable and all as the war on carbon may be, it's going to take more than Al Gore to convince me I'm going to hell for littering.
The line-up of new sins may be average, but I'm glad they're there all the same. I was running out of reasons to feel bad, having run the gamut of the first seven and made my peace with my propensity for indulging in all of them, finally. All on the same Thursday sometimes. If I'm lucky. Pride, Lust, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony.
A litany of mortal transgressions, devised to formalise mankind's relationship with God, and basically give us something to kick against. Each one of those words contains a multitude of possibilities for spiritual degradation as well as the undeniable promise of a damn good time in the flesh.
They used to have power, they used to be whispered, these deadly sins. What does it say about us now that taken together they're a takeaway menu? Nothing maybe, except that the Hell Pizza guys are clever.
But back in the day, sins actually meant something. They meant sinning. The idea of sin, and of being a sinner, is something that Catholics get used to early in life.
As a child, I imagined sin as a physical thing - a stain as distinct as a birthmark and about as easy to get rid of.
I was hazy on the details of what a sin actually was, and what sinning actually constituted, but I was in no doubt as to the reality of the action, and the consequences. That's important.
When Gregory the Great tallied up his all-star roster of major infractions, he wasn't simply issuing prohibitions. Naming these sins means acknowledging our propensity for committing them. When we think of ourselves as sinful, we're also recognising our own free will, our capacity for going ahead and screwing things up in our own special way.
Going to confession involves contemplating one's sins. Tallying them up, composing a litany of transgressions, and then culling the really outre numbers - you're telling a priest after all - and replacing them with slightly more acceptable infractions.
Yes, I'm aware this goes entirely against the spirit of shriving, and what's more, involves lying, which is of course another sin. It's a vicious circle.
Hair-raising experiences at confession aside, however, I don't think I would want to live in a world without sin. We need sin. To help us understand our potential and recognise our limits.
And there's always the shiny flip-side that is virtue if the potential for messing up starts to look too dark. The thought of a prelapsarian Eden leaves me cold. If forced to choose between innocence and experience, the prospect of acting as a free and sentient being, making bad choices and taking the consequences, wins every time.
