Capital Offenses

For the next seven posts, patient reader, I shall wax on the seven “capital” or “deadly” sins. Mindful of the famous dictum of my Hebrew patron Qoheleth, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc 1:9), I acknowledge most of this material is not original. For that matter, most sin is unoriginal, too—a dreadfully boring venture. My sources are a presentation I composed years ago for an eighth grade class, and a video/study guide by Bishop Robert Barron and Mark Shea. Someday the parish will air the series since they can express these realities better than I can.

Consideration of virtue must accompany any words about sin; we can’t eat the literal hole of the donut (not the Dunkin’ kind). In philosophy, sin is called a “privation”: a lack of good that ought to be present but is not. Evil parasitically resides within good entities. Recall I described illness in similar terms in my earlier column on Anointing of the Sick, as a deficit in health that nonetheless persists to varying degrees insofar as a person is living.

The Good News isn’t just a response to the Bad News; the two are not on equal footing (except for *the* [daily, “Breaking”] news, where it seems the bad holds sway). Rather, the Bad News comes from people who, at least at some point in their lives, and likely even at present, have contributed to the Good News. By “Good News” I obviously mean the Gospel par excellence, though it extends also to “favorable reports.”

The Good News in our regard is (drumroll, please): we exist! Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI fondly reminds people of the goodness of their existence, thanks to a wise and loving God. God doesn’t need us, yet He chooses to create and sustain human beings and everything else to further manifest His generous goodness, truth, and beauty. Saint John pithily reminds us that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), so everything God does is an act, or as it were an “episode,” of love. 

The good of our existence is a given, but paradoxically not something we ought take for granted. Saint Thomas Aquinas described love as “willing the good of the other as other,” and acting accordingly. “As other” means we choose in ways that promote the good of the other for their own sake and not merely for whatever benefit we might get out of it; otherwise, deep down, we are really just loving ourselves in and through them, practicing veiled egotism.

Our existence is for our good, our flourishing. We can relax and breathe, and go out there and love actively, now that we know that! That’s how the saints operate. Fears can be boldly encountered and dispatched. No more self-justification and self-proving through power, pleasure, wealth, and honor.