The Grace of Freedom & Community of Faith
Catholics sometimes focus only on Baptism as freeing the child from original sin. Yet God is at work in the sacrament to fill the child with grace as he/she enters into the community of believers and becomes a living member of Christ’s Body, the Church. That momentous step for the child is also a challenge for the parents and godparents.
Original Sin in Context
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that Original Sin is “an essential truth of the faith” (#388), yet it is not a truth which can or should be understood in isolation, apart from other essential truths. The doctrine of Original Sin is not simply a “divine threat,” a way to scare us into baptizing babies.
When I was a senior in high school I had a brilliant physics teacher. I remember the day he explained vacuum. On a platform, the priest had set up a bell jar with a valve in the top, connected to a pump. After pumping the air out of the jar, Father Brian demonstrated how “nature abhors a vacuum” by allowing smoke and other colored gases and particles to be sucked into the jar through the valve.
He explained how this principle functions in ordinary things around the house, for example, how a vacuum cleaner sucks up dirt by establishing a partial vacuum. After a while I found myself thinking and talking as though a vacuum were a thing in itself. But a vacuum is not something; it is actually the absence of something.
Original Sin is like that: It is the absence of something. The theology of Original Sin was developed as a way to speak about our need for salvation in Christ Jesus. Like the vacuum, Original Sin can best be understood “not by looking at what it is” but by looking at what it is the absence of, or the need for. As the Catechism explains, “The doctrine of Original Sin is, so to speak, the ‘reverse side’ of the Good News that Jesus is the Savior of all” (#389).
Just as you “take away” the vacuum in the bell jar by filling the jar with air, so Original Sin is removed when the per- son is filled with the Holy Spirit, the saving love and grace of Christ. “We must therefore approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on him who alone is its conqueror” (Catechism, #385). I fear that many Catholics have tried to understand Original Sin apart from understanding grace. “We must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin” (#388).
Consequently when we speak of infant Baptism and Original Sin it is important to remember that Catholics baptize infants not primarily for what Baptism takes away but for what it gives! After all, the Church baptized infants long before St. Augustine helped develop the doctrine of Original Sin at the turn of the fifth century. When parents look into the smiling face of their newborn and feel the love they have for it, they know deep in their hearts that God loves this innocent child and has created it for eternal happiness.