The Council of Trent also restated the Church’s traditional teaching on
original sin:
“If anyone does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had
transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost
the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted; and that he
incurred, through the offense of that prevarication, the wrath and
indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had
previously threatened him, and together with death captivity under
his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say the
Devil, and that the entire Adam, through that offense of
prevarication, was changed in body and soul for the worse: let him
be anathema.”
7
“If anyone asserts that the sin of Adam––which in its origin is one,
and is transmitted into all by propagation, not by imitation, is in each
one as his own––is taken away either by the powers of human
nature, or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator,
Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has reconciled us to God in His own
blood, made unto us justice, sanctification, and redemption; or if he
denies that the said merit of Jesus Christ is applied, both to adults
and to infants, by the Sacrament of Baptism rightly administered in
the form of the Church: let him be anathema.”
8
Today, the main opponents of the doctrine of original sin are those who
propagate atheistic evolution theory. For these people, humanity has its
beginnings not in Adam and Eve as our original parents but in a multitude
descended from lower life forms. Pope Pius XII formally condemned this
belief, known otherwise as Polygenism, in 1950:
“Christ’s faithful cannot embrace a theory which involves the
existence, after Adam’s time, of some earthly race of men, truly so
called, who were not descended ultimately from him, or else
supposes that Adam was the name given to some group of our
primordial ancestors. It by no means appears how such views can be
reconciled with what the sources of revealed truth and the statements
of the Magisterium of the Church propound concerning the doctrine
of Original Sin…”
9
7
Decree on Original Sin Session V, 1, (June 17, 1546).
8
Ibid., 3.
9
Humani Generis, 1950.
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