The difficulty here lies in the misconception of Original Sin.
The Catholic teaching is that the result of Original Sin is that Adam was deprived of his original state of holiness. As one recalls, Catholic teaching is that God called Adam and all his descendents as one body of one man to share in God’s own life through knowledge and love. When Adam freely chose to prefer himself over God, he scorned his Creator and his own well-being. Adam’s deprived state is transmitted by propagation, that is, the transmission of Adam’s human nature to his descendents which are us.
I don’t think there’s any misconception of original sin. Your words, “Adam’s deprived state is transmitted by propagation” seems to make the currently-described doctrine of original sin totally dependent on a lack of polygenism. In
Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII described polygenism as largely incompatible with the doctrine of original sin. As he describes it, evidence that the first humans were only two people would collide with the doctrine, and reverberate through the entire theology of Catholicism.
Vatican II helped fix this problem, acknowledging (as my signature quote says) that elements of truth can come from outside the Church, such as Galileo and Copernicus disproving Ptolomaic geocentrism (the Church previously had erred grievously in persecuting Galileo). This stance, thankfully, stands in stark opposition to previous positions taken by, for instance, Pius X, who railed against “modernism,” unfortunately throwing the baby (science) out with the bathwater (dialectical materialism). Thomism itself relies very heavily on objective truth, bringing reason and faith into union. We must hold all our doctrines up to the light of truth, so that we might better understand our mission as the Church of Christ.
The totality of mainstream objective evidence validates the reasonableness of such once-daffy theories as gravity, the atomic nature of matter, the absolute speed of light, DNA coding of proteins that define our physiology and anatomy, the germ theory of disease, the movement of tectonic plates, meteoric bombardment of the earth, the nature of background radio radiation originating from the beginning of our universe, the generation and extinction of biological species, and so many other theories upon which modern technology is based. Evidence also definitively disproves (as far as we are able to do so using modern biostatistics) the possibility that the amount of genetic variability in the current human population can be explained by all of humanity descending from a single mating couple of
Homo sapiens living within the last 10,000 years.
Allegorically, I can accept that human “fallenness” gives us a
behavioral predisposition to sin, and our neuropsychological makeup leads us to pride and arrogance. However, until such time as I read a paper indicating that current observations of human population genetics can be explained by a literal reading of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis (not the other story, where man and woman are created together), I find it impossible to accept “interngenerational propagation of concupiscence” without some theoretical explanation by scientific evidence. In fact, I would be bearing false witness if I did. In this regard, honesty places a check on my obedient acceptance of doctrine.
As the Church of Christ, we now face a tremendously important choice that, in my view, will determine whether we continue to grow and evangelize or to slowly lose believers and babies to atheism and antirational spiritualism devoid of Tradition (e.g., the growth of Pentecostalism in South America). Unless we can talk totally forthrightly with both, evangelically and forthrightly, we belie a shame of being unable to come to terms with the Enlightenment.
