Ecological Sins

When I read in my church bulletin's “Social Justice” corner an article about the threat to the environment by plastic bags and the suggestion we should give up on K-Cup coffee, I bristled. I'm not confessing something so silly as using plastic cups the next time I go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

The concept of “ecological sins” is political in nature. To add to The Catechism a new classification for sins against the environment seems to be an attempt to add a political ideal to our faith.

A church primarily must be about saving souls. Souls suffer mostly from sins that destroy the image of God in it. Because Christ dwells in us, we may, through sin, disfigure Christ and His call to holiness in which we have His likeness.

Sin is a cut in the body of Jesus. Sin is not compatible with living with God.

We must choose where we will live--with God or with sin.

Of course we know pollution is bad for people, so therefore we don't want to harm them by polluting. We know the earth is good and we know we are to care for it, but we are to control it rather than it controlling us. Only a handful of people run companies that may dump harmful chemicals into drinking water. Very few people need to worry over ecological mortal sins.

It strikes me as odd that we are told our culpability over using vaccines made from a cell line from an aborted fetus is not a good reason to avoid these shots, but now are told The Catechism should include environmental sins.

Our Church's current state of events reminds me of the same battle years ago when some priests, nuns, and bishops wouldn't talk about sexual sins to teens--who were being bombarded with hyper-sexual media depictions each and every day--but these religious people chained themselves to nuclear facilities to call for nuclear disarmament. The media loved it. While the Church focused on the environment, the worldly rulers seduced an entire generation into accepting personal sins as a sexual right. We are still living in a world that revels in the demise of chastity.

We can't control nuclear weapons, but we can control whether we chose to fornicate with someone else. Despite this truth, I've never read an article in my Church bulletin asking me to live a chaste life.

The Church's ongoing silence causes many to stop believing sexual sins are wrong. Instead of helping our Catholic youth learn to be holy in sexual matters, our Church champions social justice issues that made people feel good about themselves without offering an honest look into what sins control them. Look at our present age, which sins abound?

Parents know we must be very candid with our children about sin and temptation. The worst thing a parent can be is to be vague. Will our Church leaders learn a lesson from parents?

We become deliberately evil though the abuse of the dignity of the body, and these sins (if not repented) will deny us a resurrected body in the likeness and image of Jesus' own resurrection.

Ecological issues are used by the world as a distraction from the Church's real work of offering salvation to wounded sinners.

Jesus told us that we are slaves to our own personal hell called sin, and no amount of ecological activism will help us with that problem.

Sinners are being lost in a political Church today. Our Church is taking the easy and popular path again, unlike Jesus.