Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf

The Scourge of Original Sin | October 19, 2025

• Archdiocese of Oklahoma City

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In this episode, Monsignor Wolf explores why original sin remains a clear, useful lens for understanding human rivalry and broken freedom, and how grace in Christ offers a real path of rescue. Along the way, he tests rival answers, from detachment to law to social engineering, and find their limits.

• asking better questions in faith as in science
• defining original sin as foundational disorder
• Genesis reframed through mimetic desire
• the teddy bear image and rivalrous wanting
• freedom’s gift and how desire traps us
• limits of law, detachment, and optimism
• critique of denial and utopian fixes
• Christ reorders desire and heals freedom
• slow growth in grace, steady hope

To learn more, visit okr.org


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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

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This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives, and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm from Senior Don Wolf, pastor of the parish of Sacred Heart and the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother in Oklahoma City. The great Catholic author G.K. Chesterton once opined that the doctrine of original sin was the only theological doctrine you could easily establish simply by looking out the window. He didn't have television available to him, so he couldn't have added that ten minutes of TV, no matter whether you're watching the news or the programming, would also suffice to establish men among anyone who cared to look. Original sin is a cornerstone Catholic teaching. This is partly as a way to describe the situation in which we find ourselves, and partly as a description of all God has done for us. It's important we understand what it is and what we teach about it if we're going to benefit from its truth in our lives. The first thing to note is that while it has taken a while for the Church to be clear about it, and by a while I mean it's taken centuries, this shouldn't be a discouragement. There's a good deal about the life of the faith that has taken a long time to clarify. As the author Gil Bailey puts it, Christianity is a revealed religion, which means it has all the answers before it knows all the questions. This being the case, it takes a while to formulate the right questions, even when the answers are staring us in the face. You might think of science in the same vein. All that there is is here around us. There's nothing more true about the universe now than there was a thousand or ten thousand years ago. And yet our understanding of the scale and age and makeup of the universe has been growing over the last hundred years by leaps and bounds. It's not because the universe has changed, but because we've learned to ask different questions and have sought to answer those questions in more complete ways. All the answers are there, we just have to figure out the best way to ask our questions and then find out what the answers will be from among all the facts of the universe around us. The real adventure begins when we realize that formulating the questions is a perpetual work. It never stops. And anyone from anywhere at any time is equipped to ask a question. Engaging that question is the source of the dynamic of gaining knowledge and coming to know. We look at the great cosmologist and marvel at their insights, but anyone can look at the night sky and begin to ask about what he sees and what explains what we've come to know. Finding the answers is a source of joy and beauty, not of frustration or doubt. In the same way, as we go through our lives, we begin to question the meanings and purposes of revelation and their impacts on us. When we do, the insights of past ages and the experiences of those who have gone before us suddenly become relevant in new ways. I know it took years to penetrate to the level of understanding we now have, making it makes arriving at the new level a source of excitement and relief, not an occasion of doubt or frustration. When we realize the church struggled to understand what it observed about human behavior and how it related to the gift of Christ, we can begin to understand more fully the gift of that understanding. Not only that, we can begin to appreciate where the gift of understanding has brought us. That's why the study of the life of faith and the dynamics of its origins is as satisfying and as informative as chemistry or cosmology or crystallography. In each case, it is to understand what we know. In fact, to grasp what we've been given and appreciate what there is yet to understand. To preface the teaching about the original sin, we should note that the traditional understanding and teaching of it has taken a bit of a hit over the last couple of generations. We shouldn't be too put off by that. What hasn't been suspected or questioned, or what is it that hasn't been suspected or questioned or reinterpreted over the last several generations? Everything for what makes a good meal to what a woman is has been ransacked from every corner. We shouldn't be too surprised that one of the fundamental teachings of the church has come in for a fair bit of interrogation at the bar of academic achievement. It's all part of living in our age. In fact, it's all part of living in every age. I can't think of anything more normal than a new generation arriving in its place and then beginning to find out amid the conclusions and certainties of the previous generation. As it does, it begins to ask itself if those in past years really knew what they were talking about, or even knew what they were seeing as they saw it. Take an example. When I was growing up, there was a great campaign to stop forest fires. Everybody learned of Smoky Bear and how important it was to keep forest fires from happening. Our great, magnificent forests should be, could be destroyed by carelessness. Don't set forests on fire. That seemed pretty simple and easily understandable. What we didn't see was the presumption we had that forests should remain the same as we found them, so don't let them burn. It's now taken a hundred years for us to appreciate that regular fires in the forest are actually good for forest growth. Not letting fires burn at a low, regular level until they start and then burn at great, uncontrollable levels will actually end up destroying the forest we want to preserve. Our predecessors didn't know how to ask the right question, and so they ended up with the wrong answer. Everything depends on what questions need to be answered. We can make a short list of conclusions to remind ourselves that it all depends on the questions the new generation asks as they begin to find themselves among the older generation. Sometimes they find new answers. Of course, sometimes they find the same answers. That's been one of the powerful aspects of the teaching concerning original sin, in my opinion. The more we ask about it, the question what our fathers did, and question what our forefathers did, the more their wisdom and experience seems to shine through. At least I think so. Anytime anyone proposes something different, they're left to explain the plain facts of life as we know it. And facing those challenges, the teaching makes pretty good sense. Original sin is the doctrine that we are born with the fundamental flaw, a defect in our humanness that is impossible for us to overcome on our own. This can be imagined in all manner of descriptions. In the first grade, I learned it was a stain on our souls that kept us from being pure enough to enter heaven. A little later on I heard that it was the result of the sin Adam and Eve committed in the garden. All of us inherit their fall from grace, and all of us are thus not worthy of the grace of God's eternal reward. In more sophisticated circles, it is described as the fundamental tendency to disorder present in the human person, a kind of inevitable entropy, clawing away any achievement of order and goodness by humanity. Whatever picture is drawn of it, original sin is the acknowledgement of a defect, a brokenness at the heart of the human condition that has to be remedied in order for humanity to thrive. Short of this remedy, there's no inherent hope for us. We're broken all the way down to our foundations. Building on such a foundation will cause the cracks to propagate all the way up. We're a human mess, as deep as you can go. The other lobe of the teaching is that it was not always so. We were created in divine goodness. Our human nature was not at first defective. In pure freedom, we were placed in the garden with the potential for happiness and ease. It was the tragically bad use of our freedom that resulted in the effect we know as this sin. Even though we can look around and note the terrible situations of violence and disorder that seemed to mark every aspect of our lives, we were first given the potential to overcome the nature of disorder and live above it. We ended up broken because of our choices. And by we, I mean humanity. We're all in this together, all of us, from the beginning, all the way to now. Unsifted by race, place, history, tendency, gift, talent, blessing, or chance. This is the story of Genesis chapter three and the temptation in the garden. According to the story, the snake, the great anthropological enemy of humankind, led the father and mother of mankind into a false sense of security. This falsity attempted them into a violation of the condition of their freedom, ruining the freedom they were gifted. Those who write about these things will find that snakes were essentially that were especially dangerous to our hominide ancestors, and so there is retained in our brain a special sensitivity to the danger snakes pose to us, from the time in which they could sneak up on us and take us from the trees that we lived in and on the prairies where we developed. I read of one psychologist who claims that our brains have a specialized capacity to detect the camouflage patterns of snake markings, a remnant of our past in which we were prey more than predator. Snakes are thus the ancient enemy of the precursors of men, and have retained the, and we have retained the deepest sense of being the that of their being the most ancient enemy of man himself. In the garden, according to the story, all came to ruin by way of the snake. And once Adam and Eve were in the whirlpool, they were in it, and could not extract themselves or anyone else. From then on, we've all been swept away. Gil Bailey put it this way Eve's eyes are turned to the fruit on the tree because of the snake's description. In Genesis, the snake tells Eve, the fruit is reserved to God because God wants to keep it from them and only for the divine. The temptation is to think of it as ultimately desirable because God desires it and wants to exclude them from it. In the text it says, as a result of the snake's insinuations, Eve looks at the fruit and sees it is desirable to look at and good for gaining wisdom. That is to say, she didn't think any of those thoughts until they were placed there by the snake's description. What he says to her prompts her interest and her appetite, neither of which she had until the snake whispered in her ear. But she ended up desiring it and reaching for it. And when she reached for it, he reached for it in the same way. He wanted it because she wanted it for herself. It's as common an experience to us as falling asleep after a big meal. Her action prompted his. Bailey uses an image we all understand. If you turn a five-year-old child into a room with a hundred identical teddy bears, the child would go in, take a teddy bear, and begin to play with it. Everything's fine until a second five-year-old enters. Which teddy bear will he want? And we all know the answer. He'll want the one the other child has. Why? Because it's the most valuable teddy bear there is. It's the one the other one wants. The desire of the first child imputes value on what is otherwise valueless. The second child registers the desire of the first child and responds to it. Adam registers Eve's desire and he responds to it. The fruit is the least of his concerns. He sees her reaching, and as she does, he does. And once desire is prompted not by the object, but by the desire of another, then they fallen into the whirlpool. And once they're in, they're in. We all know it because we're in it, and we can't get out of it. Adam and Eve set the stage. We don't have to subscribe to the drama of the Garden of Eden, believing in the existence of a primordial couple to come to the conclusions of the difficulty of our situation. This story from the scriptures is just as poignant as a morality play as it is as mythic history. It explains what went wrong and what the outline of our problem is. Human beings and human striving are blighted by this broken aspect of our being in the world. It's a part of ourselves we are not able to overcome. All our striving has shown it to be so. Two elements of this story have had powerful impacts on our understanding of who we are and what's necessary for our lives. The first is the insistence that God did not intend us to suffer this brokenness in our lives. God's first metaphysical concern was for our freedom. Adam and Eve were placed in the primordial experience of humanity completely free. In the concourse of the use of their freedom, they experienced their choices in a way that distanced them from their own potential. Having fallen into the trap of fascination with the desires of others, they were never able to realize the potential entrusted to them. Our striving does not bring us out of this aspect of ourselves. We are forever fixed on our striving with the desires of another. It is as if we are bound up in a spider's web. The more we struggle, the closer we end up bound to one another, and the more tightly we are bound in the web. The second aspect is the corollary of the first. We are not able to get out of this bind on our own. We await some help, some other provision or arrangement. In the course of human endeavoring, there have been other attempts. Buddhism, for example, has as it has, as its core, the struggle to free a person from desiring, to appeal that all is illusion, including all the desires that move our hearts and minds. If we can move to free ourselves from such illusory roadblocks, then our lives may be free. The gifts of the Hebrew Scripture also was to provide the people of Israel with a law and a covenant that directed their striving toward what was good for the whole human race. It invited them to lift their eyes from one another and onto the gift of God to them. Obeying the law and enacting the covenant God offered to them would be a source of freedom from the drowning powers of falling into the whirlpool. These and the other proposals and revelations, they all proved to be insufficient. Buddha was hardly a savior, and his appeal to set others free from the illusion of desire also carried with it the proposal that everything we come to know in value is illusory. That's a mighty high price to pay, to live in a world of value and joy. As G.K. Chesterton so modily opined, the Buddha is most often shown as having his eyes closed, which is appropriate since for a Buddhist, there's nothing to look at anyway. And the Hebrew scriptures themselves contain within them the reminder that the law always seemed inadequate to directing our attention away from each other. Indeed, a great portion of the latter parts of the Hebrew scriptures is the record of the prophets who remind their people of how lightly the law has affected them. Thus, St. Paul reminds everyone of the power of the law to be subverted by the original power of sin at work in the world. In the face of the truths of original sin, we need a savior. Of course, the other alternative has always been to deny such a power is at work among us. All through the development of the Church's doctrine, there were those who insisted that original sin was illusory, a kind of blighted accusation against all of us. They certainly had a lot of ammunition when they criticized some of the proponents who had misstated or exaggerated the power of original sin in their teaching. The most popular target for criticism these days is St. Augustine, who basically described the sin of Adam and Eve as a kind of sexually transmitted disease passed from parents to children. And it's true, Augustine gave original sin and sex a bad name. But you only have to turn on TV to see the arguments about boys in girls' restrooms and the advocacy for abortion up to the final moment of clearing the birth canal, to see that he didn't over-emphasize the potential for deadly disorder in the human person. A disorder that seems to reach its apex in any aspect of sex and sexuality. The most common strategy has been to insist that this doctrine simply doesn't exist at all. This assertion is made over and over in the early literature of the Enlightenment, mostly by insisting that it just isn't true. What's not addressed in these assertions is what we see all around us. Take, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who insisted that we are all good until society makes us bad. He, for example, was always good, he said. Any bad he committed was simply what he had picked up from those around him. The conclusion was that if we could just make the world where people treated one another better, or people had better opportunities, all would be fine. The fact that he fathered five children and sent them all to die and badly run orphanages is a somewhat major argument against his position, and yet his point of view is just as alive today among planners and proponents as it has ever been, with the number of dead and dying babies proportionate to the investment in his philosophy. Mere assertion is a weak form of argumentation. So over the course of years, a great deal of time and energy was invested in finding a place in which there was no original disorder at work. Along with the discoveries and investigations of new civilizations during the era of exploration, people everywhere were hungry to hear of some society, some situation in which the dark disorders we're so familiar with simply weren't at work. Time and again, some report would come back indicating there was a tribe or a people who simply lived in peace and harmony with nature, with none of the broken relationships or tough situations we're long familiar with in our places. But prolonged exposure eventually pulled the curtain back so the inner workings could be seen. The hard truth is that there is no place unaffected by the violence and fear and fascination and frustration of our bedazzlement with the desires of another. We aren't discovering many new tribes hidden away on long-lost islands or ensconced in the Amazonian or the New Guinean jungles, so our anticipation of finding some great peaceful tribe has run out. The search has moved within. Many now claim there is a deep part of ourselves, not touched by this innate crack in our humanness. If we can just get access to this place, we need not be bothered by concerns about waywardness. We'll always be on the right track. But these proposals have been equally disappointing. We find out over and over again, no matter where we locate this primordial human paradise, whether in the South Seas or the collective unconscious or the little creature who lives inside my head and looks out my and looks out my eyes and is the real me, what we find when we get there is a broken, limited, crooked reality that we can't get beyond. We haven't given up our denial. Over the last generations, it has become something of a mania to imagine a world in which the obvious limitations of original sin have been overcome. The elements of this creation are varied, but they generally presume that if we can provide enough resources to keep people from grasping at the same object, as well as to allow them a decent enough environment to prevent them from learning the dynamics of dissolution, then the brokenness of humanity will be healed. It's simple. If people don't desire, since all the desires are met, then they won't grasp. If there's no grasping, then Adam and Eve's offspring won't fall into the whirlpool. Governments have been formed with these goals in mind, as have numerous programs and projects in all manner of situations and environments, and many of them are still ongoing and dynamic. All of them fail to the extent they presume the arrangements they make will be able to heal humanity and its heritage. It would seem that all of them managed to presume that straight walls can be built on crooked foundations and a new garden of Eden can be made to sprout among us. They've failed, some spectacularly. This is the offer of Christ. He comes as the Savior, the one who died for our sins and rescued us from the ancient fall from grace. His life, given to the will of the Father, is the model of the life of rescue offered to us. Our lives, given not to the desire prompted by one another and frustrated by each other, but outlined and inspired by Jesus' gift of Himself to God's will, can be set free from the originating sin. We can live as we were made to live. Of course, we have to pay attention to the word can. Jesus come to save us, but we make progress against the power of this sin slowly. That's what we have to study and what we have to come to know. Back in just a moment. We have a poem today called In the Grand Arc of History. In the Grand Arc of History, the story is never quite done. Oh, sure, it remains dark at nighttime, in the morning there's sun. All the features of what's human operate age after age, the foolishness of men appears and prances on stage after stage. But the story changes after a time, is altered and amended. Little known facts are added, surprise endings are appended. So even the best known and the most honored among us fade. Their accomplishments are criticized, their firm's stances splayed. The bravest man's intolerance comes to be what is known. The wise scholar's diligence transforms him to the dullest drone. Heroes grow into bearded old men or become foolish boys. Business moguls evolve into restless tyrants with expensive toys. And on and on until our stories fade, are but tales on the moor. All held dear evaporates, our lives become empty and poor. That we ascertain again the endless facts of all learning. Truth and its companions are the only accolades worth earning. That's in the grand arc of history. Hope you can join us in the future.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.