[Unfortunately for just every college student everywhere, the Catholic Church just announced that there are seven new ways to gain entry to Hell, one of which involves drug use. Time to retire the Tuesday night sesh? Not so fast, says first-year Noah Baron.]
As you may or may not have heard, the Vatican has released a sequel to the ever-popular Seven Deadly Sins. According to the BBC, amongst them are environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, accumulating excessive wealth, inflicting poverty, drug trafficking and consumption, morally debatable experiments, violation of fundamental rights of human nature. While I don’t particularly disagree that all of these are pretty awful things, I have a number of problems with this change.
First, try as I might, I can’t help but think that drug consumption sticks out from the rest. I’ll buy that pushing drugs is pretty bad, but drug use is something else altogether. Granted, drugs are be illegal, some are addictive, and some will certainly kill you, but something that harms oneself shoul be in a category separate from something that harms thousands.
Second, I find this more than a little ironic coming from the Vatican, and from this pope in particular. I don’t really have a problem with the church, per se, (though it might have a problem with me) but rather with its leadership. Throughout its history the leadership of the Catholic Church has attempted to clamp down on any questioning of the existing social order, even while there have been significant movements amongst the laypeople of the Church to do so.