So as if it weren't hard enough to cope with a simple seven, the Pope's closest aide has to come bumbling along with seven more deadly sins, new ones, he says, although [Benedict XVI] himself remains silent on the subject. What's worse is that the offences on Archbishop [Gianfranco Girotti]'s list are communal sins -- they're not like lust, where you actually get to do the dirty yourself; here you get blamed for what your neighbours might be doing.

As every kid who ever rode his bicycle home from confession knows, however, sin is an intensely individual thing -- you get to do it, you get to pay the price. In an increasingly collectivist world, the archbishop and perhaps even the Pope himself appear to have lost sight of individual responsibility. But there is this consolation -- every communal act (why does that sound so dirty?) in the new group of sins can be explained by and included in the list of the old sins -- lust and birth control are joined at the hip; excessive wealth and gluttony come together in one woman's wallet. It's another list of things to worry about or, as [Edmund Spenser] might have said, more perils to enfold us and to make us daily fall, as if we needed any help. (As a footnote, claiming to be the world's worst Catholic is probably in itself a sin of Pride, sort of like calling yourself the humblest monk in the monastery.)