Changes

I think the article should be re-written, but here are my observations. (1) While Fr John Romanides work early work, Ancestral Sin, is clearly relevant to the article, his later work and Vladimir Moss’s attack on him is not particularly relevant. (2) Fr John’s view on ancestral vs. original sin is hardly unique. One finds the same position expressed by Orthodox theologians across the board – Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev. Fr John McGuckin, Fr Andrew Louth, etc. (3) The article should be titled “Ancestral Sin” and any distinctions drawn between the traditional Orthodox viewpoint and those of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism should be secondary. (4) It is simply a fact that the Roman Catholic Church, from shortly after the time of St Augustine through the late 20th century did teach a doctrine of original guilt, i.e., a view of original sin where all humans are born guilty with the guilt of original sin, and that such guilt is sufficient to warrant eternal damnation. In the case of babies who die unbaptized, there was a mitigating doctrine of limbo that was not proclaimed as a dogma of the Roman Church but was nonetheless understood to be official teaching. (5) It is also true that this played a role in the proclamation of the Roman dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1950 – a feast which began in the Orthodox East but which did not include any notion that the Theotokos was conceived without original sin. (6) While one may certainly rejoice that official Roman teaching on original sin has been moderated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is anachronistic to read that teaching back into the last two millennia and to impute error to Orthodox theologians and saints such as St John of Shanghai because their teaching reflected the Roman teaching of their day. St John reposed in 1966, and the Catechism was not promulgated by Pope John Paul II until 1992. Having said all this, I do not want to re-write the article. --[[User:Fr Lev|Fr Lev]] ([[User talk:Fr Lev|talk]]) 21:26, April 9, 2018 (UTC)

:Concerning the history of the doctrine in the Western tradition: I will agree to concede to most of what you say for now. I have been told by Roman Catholics and Anglicans that while Saint Augustine believed this, it was never dogmatized by the Extraordinary Magisterium. As such, even if it was taught by individuals it was never accepted by the entire Church as an irreformable part of the Regula Fidei. The Baltimore Catechism, being a tool of the local hierarchy in the exercise of their teaching office, is not an expression of an infallible dogma, but rather a potentially fallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium and therefore reformable. The examples that you give provide reason enough to doubt the certainty of my previous hypothesis. I will make a serious inquiry into the references you provided.