KEY POINTS:
They say hell is only half-full but that might be about to change now that the Vatican has beefed up its list of mortal sins.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, I can tell you that eternal damnation is no picnic. We're not talking about some low-security country club where you can hit the gym, catch up on your reading and pick up a law degree. Eyewitness accounts are in short supply but the picture that emerges from the Bible and 2000 years of fire and brimstone sermonising is that going to hell is rather like becoming a human marshmallow: you're impaled on a fork and roasted over a hot flame. For ever and ever, amen.
Even among the faithful, belief in hell is waning - 60 per cent of Italian Catholics no longer bother to go to confession - but the Roman Catholic Church didn't get where it is today by being unwilling to ignore inconvenient developments or, for that matter, reality.
In another sense, though, this exercise smacks of a desperate bid for relevance in a rapidly changing world: ruining the environment is now down there with coveting your neighbour's wife while scientists who tinker with genetics can also look forward to a long, hot afterlife.
Being on the rich list should occasion pity rather than envy since "excessive accumulation of wealth" is now a mortal sin, along with paedophilia and murder. That might seem to suggest the Vatican has entered into an unholy alliance with the anti-capitalist atheists of the far left but organised religion, in its historic role as an instrument of social control, has always promoted heaven as a glittering consolation prize for those condemned to earthly poverty.
Consigning the obscenely rich to hellfire is simply a re-statement of the New Testament warning that "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God".
By attaching a moral cachet to poverty and promising the poor and downtrodden bliss in the hereafter, the Church effectively portrayed a rigidly stratified and unjust social order as God's will and discouraged the deprived masses from doing something about their lot - for instance, tearing the lord of the manor limb from limb.
Despite these warnings, Christians have been and continue to be just as eager to accumulate wealth as the ungodly.
In his brilliant polemic God is Not Great (a must-read for anyone interested in the subject, particularly those perched on the fence), Christopher Hitchens argues that religion does itself no favours by continuing to swear by its repertoire of "miracles" and divine interventions in this increasingly sceptical and scientifically enabled age.
Last week the Italian press reported that a historian has discovered documentary proof in the Vatican archives that Padre Pio, a monk whose stigmata (the otherwise inexplicable appearance of wounds on the hands, feet and side replicating those suffered by Christ on the cross) gained him a huge following early last century, was a conman who created the effect by mutilating himself with carbolic acid.
But Padre Pio was canonised five years ago and as the head of the Catholic Anti-Defamation League pointed out, "canonisation involves the infallibility of the Pope". Seeing the Pope couldn't possibly be wrong, the documents must be.
I suppose if you can accept that a Polish priest named Karol Josef Wojtyla became infallible the moment he was elected pope, it's not much of a stretch to believe in stigmata, weeping statues and the Virgin Mary's likeness appearing on a beach umbrella.
Meanwhile in Spain, the Catholic bishops were clearing the decks after the re-election of the Socialist government whose first term featured the legalisation of same-sex marriage and fast-track divorce and the removal of religious instruction from the school curriculum.
"The path of abortion, express divorce and ideologies aimed at manipulating the education of the young doesn't lead to any dignified destiny for man and his rights," thundered one bishop, "but to the breakdown of democracy."
Leaving aside the dubiousness of this woolly assertion, the Catholic Church knows all about the breakdown of Spanish democracy since it enthusiastically supported General Franco's overthrow of the republic and imposition of a fascist regime that lasted four decades.
You have to give the Vatican credit for consistency: it also supported fascism in Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Vichy France and, last but not least, Germany where the accommodation with Nazism extended to celebrating Hitler's birthday and handing over parish records to assist the state in determining who was and wasn't "racially pure".
