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James Timothy O'Meara was the first Irish and English-speaking Roman Catholic priest in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. He came to Chicago in 1837 and was brought into the middle of many conflicts involving Catholics of different ethnicities and with the Archdiocese itself. He was threatened with excommunication, but eventually submitted to the bishop's demands.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago was established as a diocese in 1843 and elevated to an archdiocese in 1880. It serves the more than 2.3 million Catholics in Cook and Lake counties in Northeastern Illinois, in the United States, an area of 1,411 square miles (3,650 km2). The archdiocese is divided into six vicariates and 31 deaneries.
Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it, in particular receiving of the sacraments. The term is often historically used to refer specifically to excommunications from the Catholic Church, but it is also used more generally to refer to similar types of institutional religious exclusionary practices and shunning among other religious groups. For instance, many Protestant denominations, such as the Lutheran Churches, have similar practices of excusing congregants from church communities, while Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the Churches of Christ, use the term "disfellowship" to refer to their form of excommunication. The Amish have also been known to excommunicate members that were either seen or known for breaking rules, or questioning the church.
