“The game is over. Everyone repeat after me now, the game is over.” I speak with authority in a commanding voice. 40 high school students at the Catholic Leadership Camp in Huntsville repeat after me, “the game is over.” They calm down and we begin to debrief together the chaos of the last hour.

We have just finished a simulation that we call “the orange game.” In the simulation, students live in small families of peasant farmers in a town called “Orangeville,” trying to make a living in a system specifically designed to prevent their success. 

Each family must make paper oranges and sell them at the market to gain the currency they need to survive. They are given the template of the orange to make (seeds), paper (land to ‘grow’ the oranges), scissors and a marker (tools). Extras of these items are available for sale at the same market where they sell their oranges. There is a money lender who will lend money at extremely high interest rates. There is also a “cost of living collector” who comes around to collect “the cost of living” (basic needs). When the collector shows up, she blasts a whistle (stresses of life) and demands payment. Often the amount to pay is more than the family has, and there are consequences. 

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With my colleague leading the game, I play as a participant. In my own “family” we run into trouble right away. Our orange marker to colour our oranges does not work. We go to buy a new marker and find chaos at the market. People are furious because their oranges are rejected due to “low standards.” Others are upset because the price the market was willing to pay for their oranges suddenly dropped.

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The facilitator then shares the news that certain members of certain families had died because they did not have enough money to pay living costs to meet basic needs. Secretly, a few of the “deceased” were turned into robbers. Realizing they could simply rob other families of their money and resources, more “robbers” organically appeared in other families. Meanwhile the chaos continued to grow at the market until several families stormed it and tried to take it over. We were soon in a state of anarchy with no solutions in sight. When I was not sure if people were still having fun or getting genuinely upset, I called it: “The game is over.”

Now, consider that these were all upstanding Catholic students, chosen because they have demonstrated leadership skills in their own school communities. The ease with which we turned them into deceitful, aggressive, and even violent people was because the Orange Game is a demonstration of what Catholic Social Teaching calls “structures of sin.” Catholics are very familiar with personal sin, but less so with the idea of structural sin, an idea that Pope Saint John Paul II did much to develop.

Structures of sin are the “fruit of many sins.” They result when the personal sins of powerful people, “introduce into the world influences and obstacles which go far beyond the actions and brief life span of an individual. This also involves interference in the process of the development of peoples, the delay or slowness of which must be judged also in this light” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 36).

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The very structure of the orange game invites people to participate in its sinfulness. Trying to “play by the rules” means inevitable failure. But rather than trying to find alternatives or overcome the oppressive system through organized cooperation, they begin to harm others who are also caught in the same system. 

Particularly shocking was that just before playing the orange game, we had a whole session with the students to identify the forces of evil in the world that create global poverty and oppression and what we can do to overcome them. How easily they went from talking about the importance of global solidarity to raging thieves and liars! When I questioned the actions of one student I was told, “but we gotta make bank!” This is the power of structural sin. The “fruit of many sins” is a concentrated evil that can only become with an equal force of solidarity. With so many forces in the world that tell our young people to “make bank” at all costs, this task of the Church is of utmost importance. Otherwise, the structures of sin will prevail and “the game is over” for future generations.