Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to end or at least regulate the communion of a member of a congregation with other members of the religious institution who are in normal communion with each other. The purpose of the institutional act is to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it, in particular, those of being in communion with other members of the congregation, and of receiving the sacraments.
The First Council of the Lateran was the 9th ecumenical council recognized by the Catholic Church. It was convoked by Pope Callixtus II in December 1122, immediately after the Concordat of Worms. The council sought to bring an end to the practice of the conferring of ecclesiastical benefices by people who were laymen, free the election of bishops and abbots from secular influence, clarify the separation of spiritual and temporal affairs, re-establish the principle that spiritual authority resides solely in the Church and abolish the claim of the Holy Roman Emperor to influence papal elections.
The Council of Ephesus was a council of Christian bishops convened in Ephesus in AD 431 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius II. This third ecumenical council, an effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom, confirmed the original Nicene Creed, and condemned the teachings of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who held that the Virgin Mary may be called the Christotokos, "Christ-bearer" but not the Theotokos, "God-bearer". It met in June and July 431 at the Church of Mary in Ephesus in Anatolia.
Anathema, in common usage, is something or someone detested or shunned. In its other main usage, it is a formal excommunication. The latter meaning, its ecclesiastical sense, is based on New Testament usage. In the Old Testament, anathema was a creature or object set apart for sacrificial offering and thus removed from ordinary use and destined instead for destruction.
In Catholic canon law, an interdict is an ecclesiastical censure, or ban that prohibits certain persons or groups from participating in particular rites, or that the rites and services of the church are prohibited in certain territories for a limited or extended time.
Emmanuel Milingo is an excommunicated former Roman Catholic archbishop from Zambia. He was ordained in 1958; in 1969, aged 39, Milingo was consecrated by Pope Paul VI as the bishop of the Archdiocese of Lusaka. In 1983, he stepped down from his position as Archbishop of Lusaka after criticism for exorcism and faith healing practices that were not approved by church authorities. In 2001, when Milingo was 71, he received a marriage blessing from Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church, despite the prohibition on marriage for ordained priests. In July 2006, he established Married Priests Now!, an advocacy organization to promote the acceptance of married priests in the Roman Catholic Church.
In the Catholic Church, the Seal of Confession is the absolute duty of priests or anyone who happens to hear a confession not to disclose anything that they learn from penitents during the course of the Sacrament of Penance (confession). Even where the seal of confession does not strictly apply – where there is no specific serious sin confessed for the purpose of receiving absolution – priests have a serious obligation not to cause scandal by the way they speak.
Ecclesia Dei is the document Pope John Paul II issued on 2 July 1988 in reaction to the Ecône consecrations, in which four priests of the Society of Saint Pius X were ordained as bishops despite an express prohibition by the Holy See. The consecrating bishop and the four priests consecrated were excommunicated. John Paul called for unity and established the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei to foster a dialogue with those associated with the consecrations who hoped to maintain both loyalty to the papacy and their attachment to traditional liturgical forms.
Validity and liceity are concepts in the Catholic Church. Validity designates an action which produces the effects intended; an action which does not produces the effects intended is considered "invalid". Liceity designates an action which has been performed legitimately; an action which has not been performed legitimately is considered "illicit". Some actions can be illicit, but still be valid.
Latae sententiae and ferendae sententiae are ways sentences are imposed in the Catholic Church in its canon law. A latae sententiae penalty is a penalty that is inflicted ipso facto, automatically, by force of the law itself, at the very moment a law is contravened. A ferendae sententiae penalty is a penalty that is inflicted on a guilty party only after it has been pronounced by a third party.
The Écône consecrations were a set of episcopal consecrations that took place in Écône, Switzerland, on 30 June 1988. They were performed by Catholic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, and the bishops who were consecrated were four priests of Lefebvre's Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). The consecrations, performed against the explicit orders of Pope John Paul II, represented a milestone in the troubled relationship of Lefebvre and the SSPX with the Church leadership. The Holy See's Congregation for Bishops issued a decree signed by its Prefect Cardinal Bernardin Gantin declaring that Lefebvre had incurred automatic excommunication by consecrating the bishops without papal consent, thus putting himself and his followers in schism.
In the Catholic Church, the Precepts of the Church, sometimes called the Commandments of the Church, are certain laws considered binding on the faithful. As usually understood, they are moral and ecclesiastical, broad in character and limited in number. In modern times there are five. These specifically Catholic commandments flow from and lead to the Ten Commandments which are common to all the Abrahamic religions.
A vitandus was someone affected by a rare and grave form of excommunication, in which the Catholic Church ordered, as a remedial measure, that the faithful were not to associate with an excommunicated individual in any way "except in the case of husband and wife, parents, children, servants, subjects", and in general unless there was some reasonable excusing cause.
Canon 1397 §2 is a paragraph of the canon 1397 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church; the paragraph states: "A person who actually procures an abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication".
Canon 915, one of the canons in the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, forbids the administration of Holy Communion to those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared or who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin:
Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, excommunication. In the formal sense of the term, therefore, excommunication includes being barred not only from the sacraments but also from the fellowship of Christian baptism. The principal and severest censure, it presupposes guilt; and being the most serious penalty that the Catholic Church can inflict, it supposes a grave offense. The excommunicated person is basically considered as an exile from the Church, for a time at least, in the sight of ecclesiastical authority.
A censure, in the canon law of the Catholic Church, is a medicinal and spiritual punishment imposed by the church on a baptized, delinquent, and contumacious person, by which he is deprived, either wholly or in part, of the use of certain spiritual goods, until he recover from his contumacy.
