This is a list of some of the more notable people excommunicated by the Catholic Church.It includes only excommunications acknowledged or imposed by a decree of the Pope or a bishop in communion with him. The truly repentant excommunicated person will strive diligently to regain the waters of baptism. All Christian churches and denominations have some method of exclusion. Does the Catholic Church still excommunicate? In Roman Catholic canon law, excommunication is a censure and thus a “medicinal penalty” intended to invite the person to change behavior or attitude that incurred the penalty, repent, and return to full communion. To our modern ears, the very word evokes something dark and foreboding, something out-of-place in contemporary society. This discussion oddly juxtaposes God and legalism. Properly understood in this way as a medicinal penalty, excommunication certainly does not expel the person from the Catholic Church, but simply forbids the excommunicated person from engaging in certain activities (listed in canon 1331) in the life of the Church until the offender reforms and … "A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae," [CIC, can. It actually is a medicinal penalty that is compulsory to help the sinner repent and turn back to God. Under the Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church, canons 751 and 1364, all such Catholics are automatically excommunicated for the sin of heresy. 1398] "by the very commission of the offense," [CIC, can. Once deprived of Church membership, it is interesting to note how vitally important rebaptism becomes. 1314] and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. If an excommunicated Catholic is in danger of death, any confessor is authorized to remit any and all penalties. This … The right to excommunicate is an immediate and necessary consequence of the fact that the Church is a society. Every society has the right to exclude and deprive of their rights and social advantages its unworthy or grievously culpable members, either temporarily or permanently. Excommunication, form of ecclesiastical censure by which a person is excluded from the communion of believers, the rites or sacraments of a church, and the rights of church membership but not necessarily from membership in the church as such. Some look at excommunication as a thorny punishment from the Catholic Church. Right of the Church to Excommunicate . Many associate excommunication with the medieval Church, with the Inquisition and witch-hunts, and think it has no place in our more enlightened, tolerant times. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. This sentence of latae sententiae excommunication applies to any Catholic who denies that abortion is gravely immoral, regardless of whether they keep this denial … Excommunication not only External.—In first Christian centuries it is not always easy to distinguish between excommunication and penitential exclusion; to differentiate them satisfactorily we must await the decline of the institution of public penance and the well-defined separation between those things appertaining to the forum … However unpleasant a reality excommunication may be, it has in the Church's eyes a medicinal quality, and by design it is not intended to be permanent. The Church fervently hopes that the former Catholic changes their ways, and is in “communion” with the rest of the Church. Thus, excommunication is an organizational penalty of the earthly Church. Even excommunication, serious as it is, can have the effect of restoring the proper perspective of the offender. 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