<whine>I have to apologize for going AWOL on y’all. I’m grateful to xJane for picking up my slack and challenging you with her wonderful posts.  Work is sucking up volumes of my time and energy; the little that’s left gets sprinkled inadequately onto family and school work. My efforts to reach my new year’s writing, blogging and running goals left me pretty burnt out as well. I skipped a Leaving the Garden and a Music Monday post, but I plan to get back on track with those.  I owe several of you emails, and my plan is to respond to you by the end of the week. Sorry! </whine>

Back to your regularly scheduled blog post:

This is lukewarm news, I know, but the press is hyping the Catholic Church’s “seven social sins.”  According to the Catholic News Agency, these are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Thankfully, Internet addiction is not included.  If so, my Purgatory would consist of coffee shops with faulty wireless routers, and camping in the wilderness.

The list was designed to highlight those devilish behaviors that so tightly twist the Papal Knickers.  We see modern expansions on the prohibitions against birth control and abortion (Note: the idea that ensoulment happens at conception is a relatively modern reinstatement of a pre-Augustinian notion–for centuries there was much ambivalence on the connection between early term abortion and murder).  That means that horny teens can no longer engage in cloning and genetic manipulation.  *sigh* Is it too much to ask for a little science-friendly religious proclamations on occasion?

That said, I am excited to see numbers four through seven. Religious fanaticism towards protecting the environment may be the only thing that will prevent climate change, since it requires buy-in from billions of people.  Get Catholicism, Islam and Pentecostalism on board, and we may yet halt the creation of a literal hell on earth.  We’ll deal with the social consequences later (Would littering may be punishable by chopping off the offending hand?  At least burnings of factory owners would be replaced with the more environmentally friendly death by composting).

I’m fascinated by five through seven.  Remember how anti-Communist the Church was just a few decades ago?  Yet three of the seven social sins it chooses to highlight are anti-poverty, anti-accumulation of wealth.  I see this as a tacit endorsement (or at least a co opting of some aspects) of one of the greatest religious movements in modern times: liberation theology.

To put it crudely, liberation theology is a sort of Marxist Christianity.  It was developed by Latin American priests in the fifties and sixties who were concerned with the suffering of many of their parishioners. It diminishes the importance of individual iniquity and highlights collective sin–the emphasis is on social justice and political activism, especially to improve the plight of the poor.  Christ is elevated as the symbolic liberator of the downtrodden, rather than as exclusively as the redeemer of individual sin.

I am not a huge fan of Marx, but his critiques are a powerful counterweight to the doctrine of individual property rights that has dominated our global and personal politics, economics, and social behavior for centuries.  While the concept of individual rights is deeply ingrained in my psyche, I think these have been emphasized to the point that we largely conceive of ourselves as individual actors living in little bubbles of responsibility that are no larger than our spheres of immediate influence.  It is good to see the Catholic Church incorporating some of these same criticisms, helping its believers to be more aware of their interconnectedness to others and the ripple effect of their choices throughout the rest of the world.  The more we learn to take responsibility for the global, potentially apocalyptic effects of our choices in aggregate, the more hope there is for the future of collective humanity.