Some comments on the Vatican’s list of modern sins:

“Forgive me father, for I drank coffee that wasn’t shade-grown”

The problem is that the Church hasn’t built a convincing guilt-case for these first. As the BBC article says, we can relate to sins against individuals, but these require a new mindset. This is an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of theist morality: while I hum&haw in the grocery store over whether to support an aggregate of farmers in Ethiopia, the Catholic beside me need only remember that “coffee plantations make baby Jesus cry”.

“Forgive me father, for I voted for a candidate whose party leader appointed a health minister who increased funding for stem cell research”

The old list of sins were both general and concrete. An 8-year-old could easily think of examples in their day-to-day life but they applied just as well to complex sins like running Enron. Half of these are so specific and topical that they’re never going to get a single confession for them.

“Forgive me father, for my investments accidentally grew to an excessive size when I wasn’t managing them”

Some of these are just specific examples of the original deadly sins. I know they had to round out the list to seven but it has the feeling of being slapped together by a committee. There’s some promise in things like “denying human nature” that just get cheapened with the rest.

“Forgive me father, for I shopped at Walmart”

One fundamental error in Judeo-Christian morality is that sins of commission are considered worse than sins of omission. But the problems of modern world are not fixable just by making the right choices, you also have to examine the status quo and choose to change it.