The Vatican has stepped into the harness of the new millennium and plowed a new row of sins, including wealth, genetic manipulation, drug dealers and anyone caught polluting Mother Earth. Now who sounds New Age??

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

People aren’t going to confession so they pile on even more sins? The mortal sins of the 10 commandments and Beatitudes weren’t enough?

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.”

Are you kidding me? Which drugs do they mean??? Prescription, or the little bit of pot one smokes on the weekends to relax? Does this include alcohol? Many people regard liquor as a drug; it’s certainly as addicting… but aren’t many things?

And now if I don’t recycle, it’s a mortal sin????

The Church mourns the fact that people are falling away so they react like a socialist government and expect us to scurry home like bad children?

I don’t think so.