Wilful Murder, Sodomy, Oppression of the Poor, and Defrauding Labourers of Their Wages — The Sins That Reach Heaven Before the Sinner Has Finished Committing Them
"And the Lord said, 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.'" — Genesis 4:10
✠ THE CRY THAT REACHES HEAVEN
There is sin — and there is sin that cries.
The Catholic tradition has always distinguished not only between mortal and venial sin, between the capital vices and their offspring, but between sins in general and those particular sins that the tradition identifies as crying to Heaven for vengeance: sins so grave, so fundamentally contrary to justice and to the dignity of the human person, so violent in their assault on the order that God has established in creation and in community, that Scripture itself presents them as producing a cry — an anguished, insistent, Heaven-directed cry — that reaches the throne of God before the sinner has finished committing them.
The image is precise and disturbing: God does not have to be told about these sins. He hears them. They make noise. They break the silence of Heaven with the sound of the injustice done, the dignity violated, the blood shed, the voice of the oppressed reaching the ear of the God who is their Defender and their Avenger.
The four sins that the tradition identifies are drawn directly from Scripture — each one named or implied in a specific biblical text in which God's response to the sin is described as hearing a cry and acting in judgment:
Wilful murder — the blood of Abel crying from the ground (Genesis 4:10). Sodomy — the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah that reached Heaven (Genesis 18:20–21, 19:13). Oppression of the poor — the cry of the oppressed Israelites in Egypt, and the prophetic tradition's insistence that the groaning of the exploited reaches God (Exodus 3:7–9, Sirach 35:14–19). Defrauding labourers of their wages — the cry of the worker robbed of what they have earned (Deuteronomy 24:14–15, James 5:1–4).
These four are not merely serious sins among others. They occupy a specific category in the moral theology of the Church — not because the tradition invented the category, but because the tradition recognised, in the repeated biblical pattern of the cry that reaches Heaven, a specific theological reality: that God is not neutral toward these sins, that He hears the cry they produce, and that His response to them — in history, and at the Final Judgment — is not the response of a distant observer but of a God whose justice is personal, who has named Himself the Defender of the murdered, the oppressed, the poor, and the defrauded, and who will not ultimately leave any of them without vindication.
This page does not treat these sins to produce guilt or despair. It treats them because the honest Catholic who understands the moral tradition must understand not only the general categories of sin but the specific sins that the tradition has identified as most gravely contrary to justice and most urgently requiring examination in the conscience, the confessional, and the moral life. To know what cries to Heaven is to know what God finds most intolerable. And to know what God finds most intolerable is to know, with corresponding clarity, where the work of conversion is most urgently needed.
"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image."
— Genesis 9:6
✠ I. THE ORIGINAL CRY — CAIN AND ABEL
The first murder in human history produced the first cry that reached Heaven. Cain and Abel — two brothers, the first children of the first human beings — and between them the first human blood shed in hatred and jealousy and the refusal to bear another's flourishing.
"And the Lord said to Cain, 'Where is Abel your brother?' He said, 'I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?' And he said, 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.'" (Genesis 4:9–10)
The blood of Abel cries. Not metaphorically — in the biblical imagination, which is not merely metaphorical, the blood of the unjustly slain carries a voice, an insistent address to God, a claim on divine justice that the murderer cannot silence. The murderer may bury the body, may conceal the evidence, may construct an alibi and a narrative that satisfies human investigation. But the blood cries. It always cries. And God hears it.
The theological foundation of this truth is stated explicitly in Genesis 9:6: human life is of infinite worth because the human person is made in the image of God. To murder a human being is not merely to destroy a useful organism or to eliminate a social problem — it is to assault the image of God in the most direct and most irreversible way available to a human agent. The murderer looks at the image of God in the face of their victim and destroys it. God hears the cry of that desecration.
✠ II. WHAT WILFUL MURDER IS — THE TRADITION'S PRECISION
The tradition is careful to identify wilful murder — occisio hominis innocentis — as the sin that cries to Heaven, not killing in all its forms. The Church has always distinguished between the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being and other forms of killing that may or may not share its moral character.
Wilful murder is the deliberate, premeditated, direct killing of an innocent human being: the act by which a person, with full knowledge and full consent, ends the life of another who has not forfeited their right to life by aggression. It is the paradigm case of the gravest possible assault on human dignity — the complete and irreversible violation of the most fundamental right that the human person possesses.
The tradition has always distinguished wilful murder from:
Killing in justified self-defence — the use of lethal force to repel an unjust aggressor who threatens one's own life or the lives of those one has a duty to protect. The Church has never taught that the taking of life in genuine self-defence is murder — though the tradition insists that even here the minimum necessary force must be used, and that the death of the aggressor, when it occurs, is permitted as a side effect rather than intended as the end.
Capital punishment — historically acknowledged by the tradition as a legitimate exercise of the state's authority to protect the common good, though the Catechism of the Catholic Church (in its revised 2018 text) teaches that it is now inadmissible, because the state has non-lethal means to protect society and because the dignity of the human person must be respected even in the worst offender.
Killing in a just war — the tradition of just war teaching, from Augustine through Aquinas to the modern Catechism, has always acknowledged that soldiers who kill in a genuinely just war, conducted according to the laws of war, do not commit murder — though the tradition insists simultaneously on the horror of war, the requirement that all non-lethal means be exhausted before recourse to it, and the grave moral weight of every decision that sends human beings to kill and to die.
These distinctions matter — but they must not be allowed to obscure the central and devastating reality that the tradition insists on: that the direct, wilful, intentional killing of an innocent human being is among the gravest possible sins, that it strikes at the very foundation of human community (which can only be built on the certainty that human life is inviolable), and that it produces a cry that God hears.
✠ III. MURDER IN ITS CONTEMPORARY FORMS — THE TRADITION APPLIED
The application of the tradition on wilful murder to the contemporary world requires honest engagement with several realities that modern culture has either normalised or refuses to name.
Abortion is the most numerically significant form of wilful murder in the contemporary world — the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings in the womb, at a scale that dwarfs every other form of violence in human history. The Catholic Church's teaching is unequivocal and has never wavered: from the moment of conception, a distinct human life exists, made in the image of God, possessed of the same inviolable dignity as every other human being, and entitled to the same protection of life that every human being is owed. The fact that this life is small, dependent, invisible, and socially inconvenient does not alter its nature or its dignity. The fact that its killing has been legalised does not alter its moral character. The blood of the aborted cries to Heaven with the same voice as the blood of Abel — and God hears it.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide — the deliberate killing of the sick, the elderly, the suffering, and the disabled, whether by their own hand with assistance or by the hand of another — are forms of wilful murder that are being progressively legalised across the Western world with a speed and a casualness that should produce far more alarm than it does. The tradition is clear: the life of every human person, however diminished by illness, however burdened by suffering, however apparently lacking in the qualities that the culture regards as making life worth living, retains its full inviolable dignity from conception to natural death. There is no point on that continuum at which the human person becomes killable.
Genocide — the systematic attempt to destroy a people — is murder extended to its most monstrous possible scale, the logical conclusion of every ideology that denies the universal dignity of the human person and reserves full humanity for a preferred group. The twentieth century produced its testimony in the Holocaust, in the Soviet terror, in the Cambodian killing fields, in the Rwandan massacres. The blood of those millions cries from the ground of those places still.
The cry that all of these produce reaches Heaven before any human justice system hears it, and will be answered — fully and finally — at the Judgment. This is not a counsel of despair or of resignation before injustice. It is the assurance of the God who told Cain what He had heard from the ground that no blood shed unjustly goes unheard, unaccounted for, unanswered.
"Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the Lord out of heaven."
— Genesis 19:24
Of the four sins that cry to Heaven, sodomy is the one the contemporary world most fiercely contests — and the one that most requires the Catholic who treats it to be simultaneously honest about what the tradition teaches and honest about why it teaches it, separating the genuine moral tradition from the contempt, cruelty, and indifference to the dignity of persons that has too often accompanied its assertion.
The Genesis account is stark. Abraham intercedes for the cities — negotiating with God with almost comic audacity, working down from fifty righteous persons to ten, extracting the promise that God will spare the cities for ten. There are not ten. And so:
"Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground." (Genesis 19:24–25)
The sin of Sodom requires careful identification — because the tradition has often been imprecise about it in ways that have caused harm, and because the New Testament itself provides the authoritative interpretation.
The Prophet Ezekiel, as noted in the section on Justice, identifies the sin of Sodom in terms that the comfortable and prosperous should find rather more uncomfortable than they typically do: "This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy." (Ezekiel 16:49) This is not a complete account — the following verse acknowledges the sexual dimension — but it is the prophetic tradition's insistence that Sodom was not destroyed merely for sexual sin but for a comprehensive moral collapse in which sexual disorder was the most extreme expression of a much wider refusal of justice, hospitality, and the dignity of persons.
St. Jude provides the New Testament's specific identification of the sexual sin: "Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire." (Jude 7)
Unnatural desire — sarkos heteras, literally other flesh — is the specific sin identified. The tradition has consistently interpreted this as referring to sexual acts contrary to the natural order — acts that, in the language of the Church's moral theology, are intrinsically disordered because they cannot, by their very nature, serve the twofold purpose for which human sexuality was created: the mutual self-giving of persons and the openness to new life.
✠ II. THE CHURCH'S TEACHING — WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT
The Catholic Church's teaching on this matter can be stated clearly and must be stated in full — both what it affirms and what it does not affirm, since the two are equally part of the tradition.
What the Church teaches:
The Church teaches that sexual acts between persons of the same sex are objectively gravely disordered — that they are contrary to the natural law, which is inscribed in the very constitution of the human person as a sexual being ordered toward the complementarity of male and female, the possibility of new life, and the self-giving love that marriage embodies. This is the constant teaching of the Church, rooted in Scripture, affirmed by the unbroken tradition of the Fathers and the Doctors, and defined with authority by the Magisterium. It has not changed and cannot change, because it flows from the nature of the human person as God made that person, which is not subject to revision by cultural development or majority preference.
The Church also teaches — and this is equally part of the constant tradition — that the homosexual inclination itself (the same-sex attraction that many persons experience without having chosen it) is not sinful and does not make the person who experiences it any less loved by God, any less valuable in the eyes of the Church, or any less called to the fullness of the Christian life and to sanctity. The inclination is described in the Catechism as "objectively disordered" — meaning it is oriented toward something contrary to the natural order — but the person is not disordered, not condemned, and not beyond the reach of the grace and mercy that the Church extends to every human being.
What the Church does not teach:
The Church does not teach — and has never taught — that persons who experience same-sex attraction are to be treated with contempt, with cruelty, with exclusion from the community, or with the kind of violence and hostility that has historically and tragically been directed toward them. The dignity of the human person made in God's image is absolute and unconditional — it does not depend on sexual behaviour or orientation, and it demands treatment with respect, sensitivity, and genuine pastoral care.
The Church does not teach that the sin of Sodom is uniquely or exclusively sexual — as the prophetic tradition's wider indictment makes clear. The person who reads this section and concludes that they are safe because their sins are different in kind is not reading the tradition honestly. The comprehensive moral collapse of Sodom — pride, abundance, indifference to the poor, the violation of the most fundamental obligations of hospitality and the dignity of persons — is a mirror in which every culture and every individual may find something of themselves.
✠ III. PASTORAL GRAVITY — THE TRADITION AND THE PERSON
The sin that cries to Heaven is the sin — the specific act, committed in full knowledge and full consent. It is not the person. It is not the inclination. It is not the struggle. It is not the person who carries a cross they did not choose and who fights with varying success and varying failure the battle for chastity that every Christian, in every form of the sexual appetite, is called to fight.
The confessor who receives a penitent who has fallen in this area receives them as the priest in the parable receives the prodigal — with the joy of a father whose child has returned, not with the suspicion of a magistrate assessing whether the criminal is truly remorseful. The sin is grave. The mercy of God is greater. The sacrament exists precisely because the Church knows that human beings fall in every possible way, including in the ways that carry the most weight in the moral theology, and that the answer to every fall — however grave — is not condemnation but the absolution that Christ gave His Church the authority to pronounce.
The Catholic who is called to preach or to teach this aspect of the tradition bears a particular obligation of charity: to speak what is true without the hardness that has driven people away from the truth, to uphold the teaching without the contempt that has made the Church's voice on this matter sound, to too many who needed to hear love and truth simultaneously, like the voice of an institution that cares about doctrinal correctness and not about the person who is struggling. The truth must be spoken. It must be spoken with the care and the tenderness and the genuine sorrow at human suffering that Christ showed in every encounter with the person whose sin He named and whose dignity He upheld simultaneously.
"You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him... If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry."
— Exodus 22:21–23
The paradigm of God's hearing the cry of the oppressed is the Exodus — the foundational narrative of the Old Testament, the event that defines the character of God more completely than any other in the Hebrew Scriptures.
"Then the Lord said, 'I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.'" (Exodus 3:7–8)
Three verbs: seen, heard, come down. God has seen the affliction. God has heard the cry. And God has descended — personally, directly, in the form of fire and plague and the parting of the sea — to deliver. The God of the Exodus is not a God who watches from a distance and sympathises. He descends. He acts. He delivers.
And the character revealed at the Exodus becomes the lens through which the entire moral tradition of the Old Testament reads the obligation of justice to the poor: because God is like this — because He hears the cry of the oppressed and descends to deliver them — the people of God are obligated to be like this too. "You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 22:21) The memory of oppression is the ground of the obligation not to oppress. The experience of God's hearing is the model for the human community's obligation to hear.
✠ II. THE PROPHETIC TRADITION — THE MOST CONSISTENT BIBLICAL THEME
No theme is more consistently and more urgently present in the preaching of the Old Testament prophets than the obligation of justice to the poor and the condemnation of their oppression. It is not an occasional emphasis or a peripheral concern — it is the primary content of prophetic preaching from Amos through Malachi, the one theme on which the entire prophetic tradition is as close to unanimous as any theme in the Bible.
Amos — the shepherd from Tekoa, the first of the great writing prophets — was sent to the prosperous Northern Kingdom in the eighth century BC to deliver a message so uncomfortable that the priest Amaziah attempted to have him expelled: "They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals — those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted." (Amos 2:6–7) "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:24) The indictment is specific and economic: the exploitation of the poor for material gain, the corruption of the legal system that should protect them, the luxury of the wealthy built on the labour and the suffering of those who have nothing.
Isaiah is equally specific and equally unsparing: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless." (Isaiah 10:1–2) The legislation of injustice — the encoding of oppression in the legal structures of society — is specifically condemned. The prophet does not merely indict individual acts of cruelty; he indicts the systemic arrangements by which the powerful maintain their power at the expense of the vulnerable.
Jeremiah connects the fate of the Kingdom directly to its treatment of the poor: "Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place." (Jeremiah 22:3) This is not merely ethical advice — it is the condition on which the Kingdom's survival depends. The connection is theological: a nation that oppresses its poor has rejected the character of the God who heard the cry of the oppressed in Egypt, and it will face the same divine response.
Sirach, in one of the most direct statements in the entire wisdom literature, identifies the cry of the poor as something that God hears with a specific urgency: "The prayer of the poor man goes up from his lips and reaches the ears of God, and his judgment comes speedily. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against the one who causes them to fall?" (Sirach 35:14–16)
✠ III. THE CHURCH'S SOCIAL TEACHING — THE PROPHETIC TRADITION CONTINUES
The Catholic Church's social teaching — from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) through the entire subsequent body of social encyclicals — is the prophetic tradition continued into the modern world, applying the constant principles of the biblical witness to the specific conditions of industrial and post-industrial society.
The universal destination of goods — the principle that the goods of the earth are intended by God for the benefit of all, that private property is a legitimate and important institution but that it carries a social mortgage — is the theological foundation of the Church's insistence that the accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the many is not merely an economic problem but a moral one, a violation of the order God has established in creation.
The preferential option for the poor — not a preference for the poor over the rich in terms of their human dignity (which is equal) but a preference in terms of the direction of moral attention and social action — is the Church's application of the prophetic tradition's consistent theme: that God hears the cry of the poor with a particular urgency, and that the community of faith must orient itself in the same direction.
The sin that cries to Heaven is not merely the dramatic, individual act of cruelty toward a specific poor person — the robbing of the beggar, the beating of the homeless man. It is also — and the tradition has always insisted on this — the systemic oppression that maintains poverty: the economic arrangements that ensure that the labour of the poor enriches the wealthy beyond any proportion that justice can justify, the legal structures that protect property and prosecute poverty, the political systems that give voice to wealth and silence to the marginalised. These too produce a cry. These too reach Heaven. These too will be answered.
✠ IV. THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS — THE PARABLE OF THE MISSED CRY
Christ's parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) is the New Testament's most direct engagement with the sin of oppression of the poor — and its most devastating indictment of the specific form that oppression takes in the lives of the comfortable and the religious.
The Rich Man is not identified as cruel. He is not identified as violent. He has not beaten Lazarus or thrown him out. He has simply — and this is the indictment — not seen him. Lazarus lay at his gate, covered with sores, longing for the scraps that fell from the rich man's table, and the dogs came to lick his wounds. The Rich Man walked past. Every day. He is not condemned for what he did to Lazarus. He is condemned for what he failed to do — for the looking away, the not-seeing, the comfortable management of the sight of suffering that allows the prosperous to remain prosperous without the disturbance that genuine encounter with poverty would require.
In Hades, the Rich Man appeals to Abraham — and Abraham's response establishes the connection between this life and the next with a directness that neither comfort nor religious sentiment can soften: "Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish." (Luke 16:25)
The cry of Lazarus was not heard in the Rich Man's lifetime — or rather, it was heard by God but not by the Rich Man. In eternity, the Rich Man hears it — from the other side of a great chasm that cannot be crossed.
"Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts."
— James 5:4
✠ I. THE APOSTOLIC THUNDER — JAMES 5
Of the four sins that cry to Heaven, the defrauding of workers is the one accompanied by the most explicitly thunderous New Testament denunciation. The Letter of James — the most prophetic of the New Testament epistles, the document that reads most directly in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets — opens its fifth chapter with an indictment of the wealthy that has lost none of its force in twenty centuries:
"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter." (James 5:1–5)
The wages that are kept back by fraud: they cry. Not the workers only — the wages themselves, the unpaid coin, the withheld compensation, the economic transaction in which the labour was performed and the payment was refused. The cry of the defrauded worker reaches "the ears of the Lord of hosts" — the Lord of armies, the warrior God who in the Exodus descended to deliver His people from those who oppressed their labour and withheld the fruits of it.
The continuity with the Exodus narrative is deliberate. The same God who heard the cry of the Israelites working without fair compensation under Pharaoh's taskmasters is the God who hears the cry of the worker whose wages are withheld by the employer in every subsequent age. The form changes — the slave economy of Egypt becomes the wage economy of the ancient world, the medieval world, the industrial world, the gig economy of the twenty-first century — but the structure of the sin remains the same: the person who has the power to compensate the person who has done the work, withholding that compensation for their own benefit.
✠ II. THE JUST WAGE — THE THEOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE
The Catholic moral tradition has always insisted on the just wage as a fundamental requirement of commutative justice — the most basic and most irrefusable claim that the worker has on the employer. The just wage is not whatever the employer is willing to pay and the worker, in the desperation of need, is willing to accept. It is what the work is worth, calibrated to the worker's legitimate needs: the needs of the worker and their family, the requirements of a dignified human life.
Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, stated the principle with a directness that still cuts: "To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging wrath of Heaven." He is citing not merely the social teaching of the Church but the scriptural tradition that identifies this specific sin as one of the four that cry to Heaven. The wages kept back by fraud are, in the precise language of James 5, evidence that will be used against the employer who kept them back — in the court of Heaven, before the Lord of hosts who heard the cry they produced.
The Deuteronomic legislation is equally specific: "You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy... You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets... lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin." (Deuteronomy 24:14–15) The instruction is specific and urgent: same day, before sunset. The urgency reflects the economic reality of the day labourer who has nothing and who needs the day's wage to buy the day's food. To hold it until tomorrow is to hold his life.
✠ III. WAGES IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD — THE TRADITION APPLIED
The application of this sin to the contemporary world requires honest engagement with the economic realities of the twenty-first century — realities that are not, in their moral structure, as different from the ancient world as modern sophistication tends to assume.
Wage theft — the direct, literal withholding of wages owed to workers who have performed the labour — remains among the most common forms of economic crime in every economy, particularly affecting the most vulnerable workers: the undocumented immigrant who cannot complain without risking deportation, the domestic worker whose workplace is invisible, the agricultural worker who has no union and no legal recourse. The form has changed; the structure of the sin has not. The wages withheld cry to Heaven with the same voice in the fields of contemporary agricultural exploitation as they cried in the wheat fields of ancient Palestine.
The unjust wage — the wage paid that is technically the agreed compensation but that falls below what a dignified human life requires — is a more complex but equally real form of the sin. The Church's social teaching has always insisted that the employment contract is not a simple commercial transaction in which the employer's only obligation is to pay what was agreed and the worker's only protection is the freedom not to accept. The worker's legitimate needs impose a constraint on what can justly be offered, regardless of what the desperation of economic need may compel the worker to accept. The employer who pays a wage that no human being can live on — even if the worker has freely agreed to it — has not thereby satisfied the requirements of justice.
The structures of economic exploitation that maintain the poverty of the global south for the benefit of the consumers of the global north — the supply chains that deliver cheap goods to wealthy consumers at the cost of poverty wages, dangerous conditions, and the destruction of community in the countries of production — are among the most significant contemporary manifestations of this sin. The comfortable Catholic who never directly withholds wages from a worker but whose consumption patterns are built on the systematic exploitation of workers in other countries participates, in a degree that moral honesty must acknowledge, in the structures that produce the cry that reaches Heaven.
This is uncomfortable. It is meant to be uncomfortable. The sins that cry to Heaven are uncomfortable by definition — they are the sins that the tradition has identified as most gravely contrary to the justice that God demands and most urgently requiring examination in the conscience of the person who would take the Catholic moral tradition seriously.
The four sins that cry to Heaven reveal, in the negative — in the description of what God finds most intolerable — the positive character of the God who hears the cry.
The God who hears the blood of the murdered reveals Himself as the Defender of innocent life — the God who made the human person in His own image and will not tolerate the destruction of that image.
The God who heard the cry of Sodom reveals Himself as the God of the natural order — the God who inscribed in the very constitution of the human person the meaning of sexuality, the complementarity of male and female, the openness to life, and the dignity of persons, and who will not leave that order violated without response.
The God who heard the cry of the oppressed Israelites in Egypt reveals Himself as the Liberator — the God who descends, who acts, who parts seas and leads His people through deserts and keeps every promise He makes to those who have no one else to keep promises to them.
The God who hears the cry of the wages kept back by fraud reveals Himself as the Protector of the poor — the God who takes the side of the powerless against the powerful, who makes the withholding of wages a personal offence against Himself, who will be, at the Final Judgment, the judge not only of the individual souls of the unjust employer but of the economic systems and social arrangements that the unjust built and maintained.
This is the God of the Catholic tradition. Not the comfortable deity of a comfortable religion — but the God who hears, who sees, who descends, who acts, who promises that not one cry of injustice will go ultimately unanswered. The God before whom every person who has committed any of these four sins must ultimately stand — and who stands ready, even now, before that final standing, to receive the repentance that turns judgment into mercy and transforms the cry of the accusation into the silence of forgiveness.
"The Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners." — Psalm 69:33
"He who oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honours him." — Proverbs 14:31
The insult and the honour: both reach the same God, by the same route, with the same certainty. What is done to the least is done to Him. (Matthew 25:40) He has said so Himself. And He does not lie.
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