*SOLO-International Press Release:

Sin Comes of (New) Age * *March 12, 2008 *

Primitive superstition meets contemporary vacuousness in the revised list of mortal sins issued by the Vatican, observes SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.

"Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Catholic Church's Apostolic Penitentiary, arguably the world's foremost conclave of witch doctors aside from the Iranian parliament, has just announced some 'cool' new sins because the old ones were becoming 'like, so not this week' in this, the Age of the Airhead," scoffs Perigo.

"The Pope—Chief Witch Doctor and enforcer if not author of *Crimen Sollicitationis, *the secret document in which Bishops were instructed to protect the Roman Catholic Church and priests at all costs in cases of sexual misconduct and child abuse—confesses his sins once a week," Perigo notes.

"He bemoans the fact that 60% of Italians no longer confess at all, and that people worldwide are losing their very *sense *of sin and 'slowing their spiritual rhythm.'

"So this supposedly most conservative of popes has decreed that sin must be modernised, imbued with 'social awareness' and 'social responsibility' so that it will 'resonate' with brainless gum-chewers, illiterate text-messagers and cacophony-addled MTV-watchers. The old sins—sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride—are to be downgraded as having a 'rather individualistic dimension,' according to the Monsignor.

"Outranking them now as morbid misdemeanors for which one will burn in Hell are: being excessively rich (somehow we think this is aimed more at those who acquire wealth by creating it than at parasitic institutions like the Church who appropriate it by fear-mongering); inflicting poverty (somehow we think that is aimed more at Bill Gates than at Castro or Mugabe); genetically modifying; polluting; taking and dealing in drugs (somehow we doubt that Jesus will be sent back to Hell for his water-to-wine stunt); conducting "morally debatable experiments" (that is, experiments of which the Church disapproves, designed to combat disease and suffering); and violating fundamental rights (this'd be good if the Vatican's current notion of rights didn't come straight out of the *Communist Manifesto*).

"Lest we be inclined to think they're not serious, the Vatican iterated just after the new, improved list of sins was released that indeed one could land oneself in Hell by failing to recycle plastic bags.

"The monstrous absurdity of the Church's teachings has always beggared description, but this time it has surpassed itself.

"The Pope is a fraud fostering a fiction. In his desperate struggle for relevance, he piles *fashionable* anti-life, anti-man nonsense upon

* unfashionable* anti-life, anti-man nonsense. If he wants to redeem himself as a human being, and if he wants to do something *truly* 'socially responsible,' he should confess his fraudulence, admit to the nonsense—and renounce all of it," Perigo concludes.

ENDS

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