Baptism, Concupiscence and the Immaculate Conception

The Council of Trent's fifth session, closed on June 17, 1546, did more than answer Pelagius. Its canons defined that baptism truly and properly takes away the guilt of original sin in every person baptized, infant or adult, and that nothing remains afterward that answers to the true and proper definition of sin. What does remain, the council said, is concupiscence, a disordered inclination toward sin that baptism does not erase. Trent insisted this leftover inclination is not itself sin in the strict sense, only fuel for temptation that a baptized person can resist by grace. That distinction carries consequences the doctrine of guilt alone does not explain. Because the guilt is judged real and inherited rather than merely imitated, the church baptizes infants without delay rather than waiting for an age of reason, since an unbaptized infant is held to die still bearing Adam's guilt. The same logic reaches further still: if every human being but one inherits this guilt at conception, Mary's own conception needed a separate exemption to remain sinless from the first moment of her existence, which is exactly the claim Pope Pius IX defined as the Immaculate Conception in 1854, three centuries after Trent had first drawn the line the later dogma depends on.