Original sin is the state wherewith all those born of Adam And Eve are bereft of sanctifying grace. In popular language, we may say that all those born of Adam and Eve, given the choice between good and evil would most probably choose evil. Or putting it in another way more descriptive of what Adam and Eve did, given a choice between doing their own will and God’s will, they would choose their will.
This is the basis of the dictatorship of relativism the Holy Father mentioned. It was the sin of Adam and Eve and it seems to be the state of the world today… everybody is doing what they want in complete disregard of the will of God. This is a consequence of the lost of a sense of God. If God does not exist why should we do His will?
This had been the burden of mankind. All the evils in the world is because man had been acting as if there is no God. And the world is doing exactly the same thing. The United Nations is doing it, the European Union is doing it.
St. Augustine noticed this when one day he stole some figs which he eventually threw away because he wasn’t crazy about figs anyway. So he asked himself, why did I do that. And he discovered the existence of evil within man, the expression of original sin. Young Ratzinger could only see the same truth when he beheld the cruelty of the German Nazis around him. This and only this explains why the Russians, the British, the Cambodians, and the Africans are so cruel to their own kind. St. Paul complained about this when he noticed the good things he wanted to do he found he could not do; and the evil he was trying to avoid is what he ended up doing.
This original sin, the trademark of man’s fallen nature, is like a raging current towards destruction. To succumb to this tendency is easy. It is like a leaf bending to the direction of the wind or a piece of drift wood floating on a raging current. Going against this tendency is the life of the cross. The cross is the only anti-dote against the dictatorship of relativism; in fact it is the only cure for all the evils in the world.