I am going to Heaven because I believe St. Peter will take my Bribe

March 10th, 2008 – Pope Benedict XVI’s 2^nd in command (therefore God’s third in Command) Archbishop Gianfranco Giotti has thought long and hard to give us 7 new deadly sins. I know you are all disappointed because you had a special place in your heart for the original 7. They were a perfect cocktail for a guaranteed memorable outing on the town (Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Pride, Anger) or alone at home (Sloth). They also had awesome consequences at the hands of Kevin Spacey. Don’t worry too much, just in case you found a loophole in the last seven that could actually get you in heaven, the new 7 “social sins” as they are called, are cumulative to the classics and retroactive (I’m guessing).

You may question why the Roman Catholic Church would take the time to draft these up today instead of 500 years ago or 200 years from now but that would make you a heathen. Now go say 25 Hail Mary’s with your eyes closed on the priest’s lap. If you want a serious albeit cynical answer, my hypothesis is that the Vatican is very slowly acknowledging the fact that they are a corporation and have thus appropriated themselves with the indispensible Marketing Department. The marketers have assessed the current market image of the Church and have been telling their CEO (God) that a miracle could turn things around. When nothing happened and they remembered the mysterious ways thing (God’s Hawaii vacation loophole), they searched world media for trendy and easy changes they could implement.

The first trend they found was “Hollywood”. They saw how much money and media coverage surrounded such movies as Seven, The Passion of the Christ or the Da vinci Code and are simply going to rework some basic fundaments of their religion accordingly to modernise them...without actually changing them (Keep an eye out for the new ten commandments sometime in the future).

Keeping in our trendy vein, the new sins involve, directly or indirectly, drug abuse, abortion, stem cell research, global warming and globalisation. Clearly the archbishop ran out of sins to include Britney Spears, vegetarianism, Feng Shui, PETA, haki sacks and emo kids. Far be it for me to call the Vatican opportunist hippies...

For your intense pleasure and immediate relegation to the deepest abyss of popular memory (where the new 7 wonders of the world are now), here are the new deadly or “social sins”. They were kept vague by intentionally bulletpointing and not phrasing them.

1) Environmental pollution

2) Genetic manipulation

3) Accumulating excessive wealth

4) Inflicting poverty

5) Drug trafficking and consumption

6) Morally debatable experiments

7) Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

As you can see, the Marketing department got Al Gore to write these up. My only immediate problem with this new declaration of very little relevance and importance is two-fold. Firstly, as with the first 7 sins, I can quote from memory, Popes that have been guilty of all of these. Secondly, The Vatican’s PR department must know this and thus take us for illiterate morons once again.

I accuse Pope John Paul II of massive campaigning against birth control in Sub-Saharan Africa thus contributing to overpopulation, the single most influential factor inflicting poverty in the area (4). I accuse Pope Leon XII of abusing Cocaine and extolling the virtues of its daily consumption to the world (5). I accuse Pope Pius XI of complying with the Nazi removal of all Jews from Rome (7). I accuse all popes in the last millennium of accumulating excessive wealth in the midst of constant and renewed poverty and suffering (3). Finally, I accuse Pope Benedict XVI of not have an Electric Popemobile (1). I am pretty sure certain popes personally experimented with human-sheep hybrids to literalise the Bible (2,6) yet I can only back this up with very little sources (and by very little I mean none at all, that’s good enough for Catholic people, right?).

Hell is going to be really crowded...

(Pictured: Bosch's Renaissance depiction of the original sins - God's henchmen are conspicuously always white)

End.