So according to the secular press, the Vatican has issued seven new deadly sins for the modern age. And while the whole thing smacks of those "Ten Commandments for drivers" that were released last year -- namely, just a cute way to phrase some otherwise routine admonishments -- the papers are taking it as an opportunity to write ledes like this:

Failing to recycle plastic bags could find you spending eternity in Hell, the Vatican said after drawing up a list of seven deadly sins for our times.

Call me crazy, but I doubt that's what "the Vatican" actually said, or anything like what it intended. The Times does no better in the way of clarification:

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

So publishing a list in the Vatican newspaper is the new way to introduce doctrine to the Faith? I had no idea. (Clearly the Times doesn't, either.)

It appears that Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary ("the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences," according to the Times), gave an interview to L'Osservatore Romano in which he mentioned that "new sins . . . have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation." The Telegraph again:

Mgr Girotti said genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs were all mortal sins.

"Becoming obscenely wealthy"? I'm not even sure what that means. And wouldn't it already be covered under "avarice"?

Either way, I think I'll wait until I hear something a little more concrete -- preferably from the pope, rather than the British news media -- before I start confessing my sins of recycling.