Excommunication in the Catholic Church
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, excommunication is a form of censure. In the formal sense of the term, excommunication includes being barred not only from the sacraments but also from the fellowship of Christian baptism. 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. The excommunicated person is considered by Catholic ecclesiastical authority as an exile from the Church, for a time at least.
Excommunication is intended to invite the person to change behaviour or attitude, repent, and return to full communion. It is not an "expiatory penalty" designed to make satisfaction for the wrong done, much less a "vindictive penalty" designed solely to punish. Excommunication, which is the gravest penalty of all, is always "medicinal".
Its object and its effect are loss of communion, i.e. of the spiritual benefits shared by all the members of Catholic society; hence, it can affect only those who by baptism have been admitted to that society. There can and do exist other penal measures which entail the loss of certain fixed rights; among them are other censures, e.g. suspension for clerics, and interdict. Excommunication, however, is distinguished from these penalties in that it is the privation of all rights resulting from the social status of the Catholic as such. A person who has been excommunicated—unless excommunicated for apostasy, heresy or schism—is still considered a Catholic and still has all the duties of that relationship, including attending Mass. Even if considered Catholic, these excommunicated people are to refrain from receiving the Eucharist.
General concepts
In Latin Catholic canon law, excommunication is a rarely applied censure; it is a "medicinal penalty" intended to invite the person to change behaviour or attitude, repent, and return to full communion. It is not an "expiatory penalty" designed to make satisfaction for the wrong done, nor is it "vindictive".The Catholic Church cannot, nor does it wish to, pose any obstacle to the internal relations of the soul with God; it even implores God to give the grace of repentance to the excommunicated. The rites of the church, nevertheless, are the providential and regular channel through which divine grace is conveyed to Christians; exclusion from such rites, especially from the sacraments, entails the privation of this grace, to whose sources the excommunicated person no longer has access.
Pope Leo X's papal bull Exsurge Domine condemned in its twenty-third proposition the view that "excommunications are merely external punishments, nor do they deprive a man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church". Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei condemned the notion which maintained that the effect of excommunication is only exterior because of its own nature it excludes only from exterior communion with the Church, as if, said the pope, excommunication were not a spiritual penalty binding in heaven and affecting souls.
Types of excommunication
The terminology used to qualify the modalities of excommunication may vary depending on the author.The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia distinguishes excommunication from the refusal of ecclesiastical communion, in which one bishop refuses to worship in common with another.
Anathema is a sort of aggravated excommunication, from which, however, it does not differ essentially, but simply in the matter of special solemnities and outward display.
''A jure'' and ''ab homine''
Excommunication is either a jure or ab homine. The first is provided by the law itself, which declares that whosoever shall have been guilty of a definite crime will incur the penalty of excommunication. 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.''Latæ'' ''sententiæ'' and ''ferendæ sententiæ''
Excommunication is either latæ sententiæ or ferendæ sententiæ.Latae sententiae excommunication is incurred as soon as the offence is committed and by reason of the offence itself without intervention of any ecclesiastical judge; it is recognized in the terms used by the legislator, for instance: "the culprit will be excommunicated at once, by the fact itself ".
Ferendae sententiae excommunication is considered by the law as a penalty and is inflicted on the culprit only by a judicial sentence; in other words, the delinquent is rather threatened than visited with the penalty, and incurs it only when the judge has summoned him before his tribunal, declared him guilty, and punished him according to the terms of the law. It is recognized when the law contains these or similar words: "under pain of excommunication"; "the culprit will be excommunicated".
Public and occult
Excommunication ferendæ sententiæ can be public only, as it must be the object of a declaratory sentence pronounced by a judge; but excommunication latæ sententiæ may be either public or occult.- An excommunication is public through the publicity of the law when it is imposed and published by ecclesiastical authority; it is public through notoriety of fact when the offence that has incurred it is known to the majority in the locality, as in the case of those who have publicly done violence to clerics, or of the purchasers of church property. This excommunication is valid in the forum externum and consequently in the forum internum.
- Excommunication is occult when the offence entailing it is known to no one or almost no one. This excommunication is valid in the forum internum only.
- He who has incurred occult excommunication should treat himself as excommunicated and be absolved as soon as possible, submitting to whatever conditions will be imposed upon him, but this only in the tribunal of conscience; he is not obliged to denounce himself to a judge nor to abstain from external acts connected with the exercise of jurisdiction, and he may ask absolution without making himself known either in confession or to the Sacred Penitentiaria. According to the teaching of Benedict XIV, "a sentence declaratory of the offence is always necessary in the forum externum, since in this tribunal no one is presumed to be excommunicated unless convicted of a crime that entails such a penalty".
- Public excommunication, on the other hand, is removed only by a public absolution; when it is question of simple publicity of fact, the absolution, while not judicial, is nevertheless public, inasmuch as it is given to a known person and appears as an act of the forum externum.
Total or partial
Salaverri and Nicolau note:Reserved and non-reserved
Excommunication is either reserved or non-reserved. This division affects the absolution from censure. In the forum internum any confessor can absolve from non-reserved excommunications; but excommunications that are reserved can only be remitted, except through indult or delegation, by those to whom the law reserves the absolution.There is a distinction between excommunications reserved to the pope, and those reserved to bishops or ordinaries. As to excommunications ab homine, absolution from them is reserved by law to the judge who has inflicted them. In a certain sense, excommunications may also be reserved in view of the persons who incur them; thus, absolution from excommunications in foro externo incurred by bishops is reserved to the pope; again, custom reserves to him the excommunication of sovereigns.
Formal and material
There is a difference between formal and material excommunication:Perfect excommunication
An excommunication perfect or a perfect excommunication, is defined as follows:Membership of the Church
Salaverri and Nicolau give the following summary of theological opinions on excommunication and membership:Salaverri and Nicolau's opinion is that only those which have been excommunicated by a "total, formal and perfect excommunication" can be said to be outside of the Catholic Church.
Catholic priest Joseph Krupp states that the person excommunicated is still considered Catholic and still has all the duties of that relationship, including going to Mass and the like. These persons are, however, to refrain from receiving Communion.
Edward N. Peters states:
Bishop Thomas Paprocki holds a similar view as that of Krupp and Peters.
History
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 ecclesiastical penalty for laymen; for guilty clerics the first punishment was deposition from their office, i.e. reduction to the ranks of the laity. The Catholic Encyclopedia adds that during the first centuries of Christianity, excommunication was not regarded as a simple external measure, but also as one which touched the soul and the conscience. It was not merely the severing of the outward bond which holds individual to their place in the Church; it severed also the internal bond, and the sentence pronounced on earth was understood to be ratified in heaven.During the Middle Ages, excommunication was analogous to the secular imperial ban or "outlawry" under common law. The individual was separated to some degree from the communion of the faithful. Formal acts of public excommunication were sometimes accompanied by a ceremony wherein a bell was tolled, the Book of the Gospels was closed, and a candle snuffed out—hence the idiom "to condemn with bell, book, and candle."
File:Laurens excomunication 1875 orsay.jpg|thumb|The Excommunication of Robert the Pious by Jean-Paul Laurens. Robert was able to get his excommunication reversed following the election of the next pope.
Those under excommunication were to be shunned. Pope Gregory VII was the first to mitigate the proscription against communicating with an excommunicated person. At a council in Rome in 1079, he made exceptions for members of the immediate family, servants, and occasions of necessity or utility. In the mid-12th century, Pope Eugene III held a synod in order to deal with the large number of heretical groups. 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.
William the Conqueror separated ecclesiastical cases from the Hundred courts, but allowed the bishops to seek assistance from the secular authorities. Excommunications were intended to be remedial and compel the offender to return to the fold. 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. Later, bishops were authorized to submit a writ to have the individual imprisoned. On the other hand, the bishops held temporalities which the king could seize if the bishop refused to absolve an imprisoned excommunicate. The authority of a bishop to excommunicate someone was restricted to those persons who resided in his see. This often gave rise to jurisdictional disputes on the part of abbeys which claimed to be exempt.
In 1215, the Fourth Council of the Lateran decreed that excommunication may be imposed only after warning in the presence of suitable witnesses and for manifest and reasonable cause; and that they are to be neither imposed nor lifted for payment. In practice, excommunications with subsequent writs appear to have been used to enforce clerical discipline and functioned something like a citation for "contempt of court". 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.
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".