Abortion is one of the “new sins” listed by the Vatican

Abortion is from now on one of the seven updated deadly sins for the age of globalisation. The list, published in March in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

In the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great laid down seven initial deadly sins or capital vices broadly popularized in the Middle Ages by Dante in “The Inferno”: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.

Besides abortion, the new deadly sins include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before death through confession and penitence.

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women,” and pedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church.”

Source: http://blog.emceebeulogue.fr