It is a
deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and
the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is
called “concupiscence".
Baptism, by imparting the life of
Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the
consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and
summon him to spiritual battle.
The Church's teaching on the transmission of original sin was
articulated more
precisely in the fifth century, especially under the impulse of St. Augustine's reflections against
Pelagius and Pelagianism, and in the sixteenth century, in opposition to the Protestant Reformation.