Both traditions teach that something real went wrong with the whole human race in Adam, and that only Christ repairs it. The dispute is over what exactly we inherit. The East speaks of ancestral sin: from Adam the race inherits mortality, corruption, and a disordered pull toward evil — but not his personal guilt. We die because of Adam; we are guilty only for our own sins. The West speaks of original sin, transmitted “by propagation, not by imitation,” and in its harder Augustinian form has spoken of inheriting a share in Adam’s guilt itself.

The Eastern case is not mere sentiment; it rests on the Greek of Romans 5:12. Where the old Latin read in quo omnes peccaverunt — “in whom all sinned,” that is, all sinned in Adam — the Greek runs eph’ hō pantes hēmarton, which the Greek Fathers read as “because of which [death] all sinned,” each in his own acts. On that reading there is no inherited personal guilt at all; what spreads to all men is death, under whose reign they then sin. Augustine, working from the Latin with little Greek, built the stronger doctrine on a phrase the East never construed his way — and here modern scholarship across the confessions sides with the Greek: eph’ hō does not mean “in whom.” That much the West should simply concede — and conceding it costs the dogma nothing, for the Church never rested original sin on that one clause. It stands on the constant Tradition and the universal practice of baptizing even infants, not on a Latin rendering of Romans 5.

But the popular clash assumes a Catholicism that the Church never actually defined. Trent taught transmission and the need for Christ; it did not teach that infants are personally culpable of Adam’s act the way an adult sinner is. And the modern Catechism is strikingly close to the East: original sin is “contracted” and not “committed,” sin only “in an analogical sense,” “a state and not an act,” with “no character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants” — human nature “wounded,” not “totally corrupted.” Drop the caricature of “inherited personal guilt,” and both sides confess one fallen condition — death, concupiscence, the loss of original holiness — that only Christ heals. For Catholics that condition is something definite, not a mood: a real privation of the original holiness and justice Adam was meant to hand on — the absence of sanctifying grace in the soul, though never a personal crime charged to the newborn — which is why the Church baptizes even infants “for the remission of sins.” That much the Council of Trent defined, and it stands.

So where is the residue? In the West’s lingering juridical language of reatus, inherited liability, which the Greek Fathers never made central — and in the Immaculate Conception, which leans on original sin as a real stain present from conception that Mary was preserved from. The East, lacking that frame, sees no problem for the dogma to solve. That is a genuine difference, and we should not paper over it. But it is a far narrower one than “Rome blames babies for Adam’s sin” — a charge the Catechism itself refutes.