The priests were right

The Roman Catholic Church, a denomination to which I was a dues paying participant until I lost my membership card a few sins ago, came out with its updated list of official sins/evils/transgressions this year.
It was issued by the Apostolic Penitentiary. That’s really its name. I’m not making it up.
A guy in that office at the Vatican is tasked with coming out with new sins every now and then. I guess it’s on the theory that some old sins go away or retire, and need to replaced, or maybe replated like bad tires. This guy, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, must be a real peach at parties.
But one can accept why the monsignor’s role is necessary or at least understandable.
You can’t be a modern sinner unless you’re committing modern sins.
They don’t condemn many souls for gluttony anymore, or else they have to give up Knights of Columbus chicken dinners. At one of those I ate so many pieces of fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy that I almost blew up into a human/chicken parts fireball.
In fact, had I blown up that afternoon, my human remnants would have looked exactly like the menu for a Knights of Columbus fried chicken dinner.
I would have gone to hell that day for sure.
The Vatican now says causing or benefitting from pollution is a sin, using or dispensing mind-damaging drugs and conducting genetic experiments are all now banned. In previous pronouncements the Vatican banned road rage. And also poverty. And combovers, too.
So many sins; so little time.
That’s because humanity being what it is, sin is a growth industry.
The Church, as I recall from my troubled youth, was always very big on sin, and which ones got you dispatched to the various levels of perdition that were sure to await almost all of us.
But I do not recall we needed too much reminding on what the sins were. First, if you didn’t have a troubled youth, you weren’t trying very hard and certainly were not having very much fun. A youth without trouble is trudging through a sorry excuse for existence.
As for me, I cherish my troubled youth because it explains why I’m the way you find me now, and self reflection is a good thing to have. By troubled youth, I don’t mean to suggest I was a budding criminal or deviant in a beyond-the-what-you’d-expect definition of the term. All 13 year-old boys are deviants both waking and asleep.
But I quibble.
I was a sinner, a fact which the Church made sure I understood with a cosmic clarity. But as I reconsider the experience, the effort to instruct me seems was mostly wasted. I knew I was a sinner without the Church telling me.
Besides, I was sort of bored with the parish priest’s definitions of what could earn you eternal damnation. It seemed to me as though he was a victim of diminished thresholds and low expectations. I dreamed bigger.
In those days, most sins revolved around the nexus of brain, eyes and reproductive organs. Somehow your soul got mixed into that bleating mess, but I was never clear on the connection. It seemed an unnecessary complication.
In a moment of rare honesty , I once told a parish priest that I was bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Hour.
So many legs. All flashing skyward like lovely, vibrant asterisks.
The priest said I was probably going to hell for that.
I didn’t disagree then and still don’t.
But, all things considered, I figured it was worth it.