37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural
opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such
liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either
that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their
origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all or
that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way
apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of
revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church
propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually
committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to
all and is in everyone as his own (Pius XII, “Humani Generis,” August
12, 1950, in The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, 5 vols. [Ypsilanti,
Mich.: The Pierian Press, 1990], 4:181-82)
Alongside Rom 5:12, Pius XII references canons 1-4 of
Session 5 of the Council of Trent from June 1546. These canons read thusly:
1. If any one does not confess
that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in
Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice in which he had been
constituted; and that he incurred, through the offence of such prevarication,
the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, which God had
previously threatened to him, and, together with death, captivity under the
power of him who thenceforth had the
empire of death, that is to say, the devil,y and that the entire
Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed as respects the body
and soul, for the worse; let him be anathema.
2. If any one asserts, that the
prevarication of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity; and that he
lost for himself alone, and not for us also, the holiness and justice, received
of God, which he lost; or that he, defiled by the sin of disobedience, has only
transfused death, and pains of the body, into the whole human race, but not sin
also, which is the death of the soul, let him be anathema; inasmuch as he
contradicts the apostle, who says: By one
man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all
men, in whom all have sinned.
3. If any one asserts that this
sin of Adam, which in its origin is one, and being transfused 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 hath reconciled us to God in his own
blood, made unto us righteousness, sanctification, and redemption; or, if
he denies that the same 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: For there is
no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved. Whence
that voice: Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who taketh away the sins of the world; and that other,—As many of you as have been baptized have
put on Christ.
4. If any one denies that
infants, newly born from their mothers’ wombs, even though they be sprung from
baptized parents, are to be baptized; or says that they are baptized indeed for the remission of sins, but that they draw nought of original
sin from Adam, which has need to be expiated by the laver of regeneration, for the obtaining life everlasting,—whence
it follows, as a consequence, that in them the form of baptism, for the remission of sins, is understood
to be not true, but false,—let him be anathema. For that which the apostle has
said, By one man sin entered into the
world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have
sinned, is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church
spread everywhere hath always understood it. For, by reason of this rule of
faith, from a tradition of the apostles, even infants, who could not as yet in
themselves commit any sin, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that which they
have contracted by generation, may be cleansed away by regeneration. For, unless a man be born again of water and
the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. (Theodore
Alois Buckley, The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent [London:
George Routledge and Co., 1851], 21-23)
As one of the more honest Roman Catholics on the topic of
their Church and science put it:
. . . the Bible explains why the
latest scientific studies of the human genome reveal we are all the product of
a single pair of humans (Gn 1:25-26), which is against the theory of polygenism
that evolution needs. The Bible explains how death originated (Rm 5:11-12). (Robert
A. Sungenis, Scientific Heresies and Their Effect on the Church: A Critique
of “The Realist Guide to Religion and Science” [State Line, Pa.: Catholic
Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2018], 243)
