Bless me, Father, for I have ism-ed.

For years, the Seven Deadly Sins have been a way to review our shortcomings for the confessional box. But what about those wrongs that we commit as a society?

IT'S LENT AGAIN, A TIME WHEN MOST PARISHES WILL have one of their two annual penance services, inviting all of us to celebrate the sacrament formerly known as Confession. Most baby boomer Catholics (and our parents) still remember a time when Saturday night confessional lines wrapped around the walls of the church and when everybody noticed penitents who spent a particularly long time in the box or on their knees afterwards.

In those days most of us were trained to prepare for the sacrament by checking our conscience against the Ten Commandments (with special emphasis on rules about sex and the Sabbath), or seeing if we had been guilty of any of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride, envy, anger, avarice, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It was hard to get through a week--or to live with other people--and not commit at least a venial sin in one of these categories. And, of course, as a thoroughly indoctrinated Catholic schoolchild, I always suspected that if you didn't accuse yourself of something on the list, you were probably guilty of pride. It was kind of like the Catholic catch-22.

We don't hear much about the Seven Deadly Sins anymore. School kids don't have to memorize their names, and visiting clergy don't give parish missions about them, which may be just fine. But there was some wisdom in this medieval list of deadly faults. They reminded us of the power of bad habits, making us examine our character and not just our acts.

The Seven Deadly Sins focused on our disordered appetites and passions, what today we might call addictions. They helped us see that sin was often the result of an unbalanced attachment to some good, leading us away from the greater good of loving God and our neighbor. Love of self was a fine thing, but pride and envy took it to pathological excess. The God who made strawberries, grapes, and human bodies certainly meant us to enjoy and savor good food, wine, and sex--but not to worship them in gluttony and lust. And there was nothing sinful in righteous indignation at injustice--but there was in rage, cruelty, and revenge. Teachings about the Seven Deadly Sins called us to examine our hearts, honor our God-given passions and appetites, and put them in the service of our love of God.

In the years since Vatican II our language about sin has changed a great deal. We hear a lot less about the Seven Deadly Sins and a good deal more about what you might call the seven deadly isms. From the pulpit and the pope we are warned constantly about "social sins" and "sinful social structures." Theologians, preachers, and encyclicals decry the evils of individualism, consumerism, racism, sexism, classism, and militarism; and more than a few commentators have suggested that our entertainment industry is leading us into an age of voyeurism.

Like the medieval list of capital vices, this focus on deadly isms has its own advantages. Paying attention to social sins reminds us that communities--and not just individuals--can sin, and that societies too need to repent and reform. Since the sins of our communities are also often found in our disordered appetites, conversion doesn't so much mean eliminating these passions as learning to place them at the service of our love of God and neighbor. After all, we are not going to stop consuming goods, and we probably are not going to get rid of all armies or police, but we can learn to admit and curb our excesses in these areas, and to live more justly and peacefully than we do at present.

LET ME SUGGEST, THEN, IN PREPARATION FOR THIS LENT'S penance service, an examination of conscience based on the seven deadly isms.

Individualism. In the 19th century, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville coined the word individualism to describe the American disposition "to withdraw into the circle of family and Friends ... [leaving] the greater society to look after itself." After two centuries of idealizing the rugged individual and the lone frontiersman, we remain the only modern democracy without an adequate welfare system or any national health care program. We give less aid per capita to the poor abroad or at home than most of our European counterparts. And according to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, we are less connected to our neighbors than our parents were. Have we gotten a little too attached to our personal freedom?

Consumerism. The same de Tocqueville also said Americans had "an inordinate love of material gratification." Alexander Hamilton noted that our ancestors had a penchant for "multiplying their acquisitions and enjoyments." Today we go to the mall more often than church, spend more time shopping than caring for our children, and have more malls than high schools. Since 1950 Americans have used more of the earth's resources than everyone who lived before that date. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, we consume 60 percent of the planet's natural gas, 40 percent of its coal, 30 percent of its petroleum--and then complain about an energy crisis. Could we Americans have a problem?

Racism. It's been nearly half a century since the courts began dismantling American "apartheid" by ordering the integration of our schools and lunch counters. Still, in spite of great strides, African Americans continue to be discriminated against in the workplace, in the rental and housing market, and in our wars on crime and drugs. Twenty years ago black families made $605 for every $1,000 received by white households. Today they make $577. And though black criminal behavior has not been getting worse since the mid-1970s, the number of African Americans in prison has more than tripled. How much advancement have African Americans really seen?

Sexism. It's been at least 30 years since the arrival of "women's lib," and women have made strides in nearly every sector. Still, they continue to experience discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, are paid less than men with equal or inferior educations, run into the "glass ceiling" when it comes to promotions and ordination, do a "second shift" of housework and child care when they get home, and suffer over 95 percent of all domestic violence. As Christian ethicist Christine Gudorf notes, "There is little doubt that most women live in fear, to greater or lesser degrees, of male anger and aggression." It seems, baby, that we still have a long way to go.

Classism. America is supposed to be a classless society, with all men and women created equal before the law. But in the past two decades, the number of America's poor jammed into overcrowded and increasingly racially segregated ghettos, barrios, and slums has more than doubled to 8.5 million, with about the same number of middle- and upper-class suburbanites fleeing into gated communities. In the same time the financial divide between America's rich and poor has skyrocketed, leaving us with the greatest such gap in any modern democracy. As the Kerner commission suggested over four decades ago, we seem to be headed for a society that is increasingly "separate and unequal."

Militarism. To quote our Catholic bishops, "No nation on earth, except those in the midst of war, has as much violence as we do--in our homes, on our televisions, and in our streets." Americans own more than 200 million guns and commit about 22,000 homicides a year (mostly with firearms), about 10 times as many as most Europeans. Since 1945 we've spent more than $5 trillion on nuclear weapons, and we continue to spend over $22 billion a year on this single military item. Meanwhile, with 2 million Americans behind bars and an annual prison budget of over $40 billion, we've just passed the Russians as the world's leading jailer. Between the not-so-dead Cold War, and our ongoing wars on crime and drugs, could we be just a bit out of control?

Voyeurism. Increasingly we see an entertainment industry that parades the private, painful, and often tawdry details of people's lives before our wandering eyes. Political reporting is replaced by sensationalist stories about the president's mistresses; the ex-First Lady is offered millions to tell her version of the "inside story." Tabloids and regular newspapers rush to report the latest gossip about celebrities, living and dead. The evening news prefers to shock and titillate, following the motto "if it bleeds, it leads." A depressingly dysfunctional cast of misfits are paraded before us on afternoon talk shows. Are we seeing too much?

Modern life probably exposes us to some other deadly isms, but that should give us something to think about while waiting for our turn in the box.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.