Excommunication in the Catholic Church
[1] The principal and severest censure, excommunication presupposes guilt; and being the most serious penalty that the Catholic Church can inflict, it supposes a grave offense.
[3] In Latin Catholic canon law, excommunication is a rarely applied[4] censure; it is a "medicinal penalty" intended to invite the person to change behaviour or attitude, repent, and return to full communion.
[7] Pope Leo X's papal bull Exsurge Domine (May 16, 1520) condemned as twenty-third proposition that "excommunications are merely external punishments, nor do they deprive a man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church".
The second is inflicted by an ecclesiastical prelate, either when he issues a serious order under pain of excommunication or imposes this penalty by judicial sentence and after a criminal trial.
Consequently, in the tribunal of conscience he who is reasonably persuaded of his innocence cannot be compelled to treat himself as excommunicated and to seek absolution; this conviction, however, must be prudently established.
It does mean, though, that one is deprived of the benefits of full communion with the Catholic Church.Bishop Thomas Paprocki holds a similar view as that of Krupp and Peters.
[15] The Catholic Church claims that the penalty of excommunication is biblical and that both Paul of Tarsus and John the Apostle make reference to the practice of cutting people off from the community, in order to hasten their repentance.
The Catholic Encyclopedia states that from the earliest days of Christianity, excommunication was the chief (if not the only) ecclesiastical penalty for laymen; for guilty clerics the first punishment was deposition from their office, i.e. reduction to the ranks of the laity.
Mass excommunication was used as a convenient tool to squelch heretics who belonged to groups which professed beliefs radically different than those taught by the Catholic Church.
[18] William the Conqueror separated ecclesiastical cases from the Hundred courts, but allowed the bishops to seek assistance from the secular authorities.
The practice in Normandy provided that if an obdurate excommunicate remained so for a year and a day, his goods were subject to confiscation at the duke's pleasure.
By the fourteenth century, bishops were resorting to excommunication against those who defaulted in making payment of the clerical subsidy demanded by the king of England for his wars against France.
[16] The Council of Trent held that "excommunicated persons are not members of the Church, because they have been cut off by her sentence from the number of her children and belong not to her communion until they repent".
The tenth canon of the Council of York (1195) ordered all priests to publish censures of excommunication against perjurers with bell and lighted candle thrice in the year.
[21] From the middle of the fifteenth century, dueling over questions of honor increased so greatly, that in 1551 the Council of Trent was obliged to enact the severest penalties against it.
Dueling was forbidden; and the prohibition extended to not only the principals, but their seconds, physicians expressly brought to attend upon the scene, and all spectators not accidentally present.
Benedict XIV decreed that duelists should be denied burial by the Church even if they did not die on the dueling ground and had received absolution before death.
[22] When King John of England refused to accept Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, he seized the lands of the archbishopric and other papal possessions.
In 1304, John Dalderby, Bishop of Lincoln, excommunicated all those persons of Newport Pagnell who knew the whereabouts of Sir Gerald Salvayn's wayward falcon and failed to return it.
Owing, however, to many inconveniences arising from this condition of things, especially after excommunications had become so numerous, Martin V, by the constitution Ad evitanda (1418), restricted the aforesaid unlawful intercourse to that held with those who were formally named as persons to be shunned and who were therefore known as vitandi (Latin vitare, to avoid), also with those who were notoriously guilty of striking a cleric.
The principal ones were destined to protect the Catholic faith, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its jurisdiction, and figured in the bull In Coena Domini read publicly each year in Rome, on Holy Thursday.
[7] In the preamble of the 1869 apostolic constitution Apostolicae Sedis, Pius IX stated that during the course of centuries, the number of censures latae sententiae had increased inordinately, that some of them were no longer expedient, that many were doubtful, that they occasioned frequent difficulties of conscience, and finally, that a reform was necessary.
[2] Since 1418, the Catholic Church formally differentiated between excommunicated persons tolerati ("tolerated") and those vitandi ("to be avoided"), when Pope Martin V clearly drew this distinction in his apostolic constitution Ad evitanda scandala.
The second is inflicted by an ecclesiastical prelate, either when he issues a serious order under pain of excommunication or imposes this penalty by judicial sentence and after a trial.
Therefore, whether excommunications be a jure (by the law) or ab homine (under form of sentence or precept), they may come from the pope, from the bishop for his diocese; and from regular prelates for religious orders.
Baptism confers initial jurisdiction, delinquency refers to having committed a wrong, and contumacious indicates the person's willfull persistence in such conduct.
[7] Unless the canon reserves removal of the penalty to the Holy See, the local ordinary can remit the excommunication, or he can delegate that authority to the priests of his diocese (which most bishops do in the case of abortion).
The 1983 code specifies various sins which carry the penalty of automatic excommunication: apostasy, heresy, schism (1983 CIC 1364:1), violating the sacred species (can.
[36] A priest who grants absolution of an accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.
[40] Under current Catholic canon law, excommunicates remain bound by ecclesiastical obligations such as attending Mass, even though they are barred from receiving the Eucharist and from taking an active part in the liturgy (reading, bringing the offerings, etc.).
