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The proliferation of excommunications in recent years is sapping the energy out of that formerly most-feared weapon in the church’s quiver. Once upon a time, excommunication was seen as a virtual death penalty to the soul of the unfortunate recipient. And in the Middle Ages, it could lead to a literal death sentence for the body as well.
But now the roaring lion appears to be morphing into little more than a mewing kitten.
During the last 50 years of the 20th century, the only excommunications most Catholics were aware of included the one pronounced against Jesuit Fr. Leonard Feeney, who insisted in 1953 that nobody, absolutely nobody, could attain salvation who was not a Catholic, and the one put on Archbishop Marcel Lefevre in 1988 for consecrating four new bishops without Vatican approval and starting his own schismatic church.
Nowadays accounts of new excommunications and their effects appear regularly in the news. The most recent concerns Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada, who participated in a Mass celebrated by a woman priest Nov. 19 at the School of the Americas. Then there are the implications of Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois’ excommunication for assisting at a women’s ordination. And of course, there’s the case of Mercy Sr. Margaret McBride, who was excommunicated for permitting an abortion in order to save the life of a pregnant woman at a hospital in Phoenix. This attracted national attention in both secular and church media.
One of the traditional and expected effects of an excommunication sentence is the repudiation of the affected party by the full Catholic community; the guilty one is supposed to be shunned until he or she repents. But just the opposite is occurring in the three cases cited above.
Continue reading “Is excommunication losing its bite?”
Image source: Reuters
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