All of us human beings were created in such a way that we can freely choose among the possible paths we have ahead, including the terrible ability to deny our own Creator.

^{Photo: Daniel Mafra / cancaonova.com}

Really, human freedom is amazing . God creates us with it, preferring the risk that the deny it to us forces us to love Him by coercion. He wants us to love freely, as children and not as slaves.

Observing our personal history, it is not hard to see that each of these choices we make we become responsible for their consequences. When prefer sin to God’s will, inevitably we experience its bitter consequences, and we deserve it to be so. But what about when the sin of another person becomes, somehow, also assigned to us? Why do we have to suffer the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve, our first parents?

Indeed, St Paul says: “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death passed upon all mankind, because all sinned” (Rom 5: 12). Our first parents sinned gravely. Abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. Therein was the first sin of man (cf. Rom 5: 19). For this sin lost the state of holiness in which they were created. Sin enters the story, so do not proceed from God, but the misuse of human freedom.

Although this first sin was a personal act of Adam and Eve, there is such solidarity among men, such that sin affects all of us, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. 404.):

“All mankind is in Adam ‘sicut unum corpus unius hominis – as one body of a single man.” Due to this “unity of the human race ‘all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, just as all are implicated in the righteousness of Christ. However, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we can not fully understand. But we know from Revelation that Adam and had received original holiness and justice not only for themselves but for all human nature; consenting to temptation, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they will transmit in a fallen state. “

To distinguish the relationship is between Adam and Eve and every one of us with original sin, theologians use two expressions greatly clarify “the originating original sin” (to refer to the sin of those a sin committed directly by our first parents), and “originated original sin” (to refer to original sin with which we are all born, their own sin of each, but not personally committed by us, but incurred by virtue of our nature). The “originated original sin” – the original sin in us – is called “sin” in a similar way. It is the loss of state with which we are all born of that original holiness with which God had created man. This state is not transmitted by imitation of bad examples of our predecessors, but by propagation, directly affecting our nature. We are born that way.

Now, on the one hand in Adam all have sinned, continues the Apostle, “the obedience of one shall many will be made righteous.” In Christ, the new Adam, we all have access to holiness.
Through the sacrament of baptism, the redemption accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ with his Cross and Resurrection is applied to each of us, and we become free of original sin, driven again to God, although the consequences of sin – not the original sin – persist in us, and will require to the end of our lives an intense spiritual battle to live consistently with this new divine life which comes through baptism.