Polluting the News

Most of the time I'm OK with the fact that Ray Moose runs the mass media. Then, once in a while, silliness exceeds all bounds of excess and I compulsively...blog.

It started innocently enough. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, a Vatican official, gave an interview with L'Osservatore Romano in which he was asked what "new" sins we have to deal with today. He commented on the effects of globalization, and remarked that the capital sins have found new ways to manifest themselves; for example, gluttony comes out as pollution.

But with slothful speed, "capital" sins became "deadly" sins, which then morphed into "mortal" sins, and the headline read: "Pollution and drugs are on a list of new mortal sins produced by the Vatican." Now is that a list produced by the Vatican of new mortal sins, or is it a list of "new mortal sins produced by the Vatican"?

As the situation deteriorated, reporters tried their hand at theology by introducing a distinction between "mortal" and "deadly", as in the the following "news" article:

There are now seven “mortal” sins added by the Vatican to be placed alongside the traditional seven deadly sins: envy, pride, gluttony, lust, hate, greed, sloth, and envy. These new sins are deemed to be more apparent in today’s world.

By the time it trickled through to treehugger.com, a bold-printed headline blared "The Vatican Declares Pollution One of the Most Deadly Modern Sins," and the article sanguinely remarked that

“Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" might soon be incorporated in the Ten Commandments.

Depressing, I know. But perhaps there is a homiletic chance in all the hullabaloo. The idea that greed and gluttony now show themselves in corporate waste dumping is certainly right; pollution is a sin. But in a talk given in 1989, John Paul II turned the whole idea on its head. Sin, he argued, is a pollution:

I am sure that, like almost all young people of today, you are worried about air and sea pollution, and that the problem of ecology upsets you. You are shocked by the misuse made of the earth's products and the progressive destruction of the environment. And you are right. One must take a coordinated and responsible action before our planet suffers irreversible damage.

But, dear young people, there exists also a pollution of ideas and morals which can lead to the destruction of man. The pollution is sin, from which lies are born.

Imagine the slogan potential: "Go Soul Green." "Stop Global Sinning." "An Inconvenient Truth." "Save the Earth."

Some of these slogans have already been taken, it occurs to me, but surely they apply more to the cause than to the effect. After all, that was Monsignor Girotti's point.