excommunication

excommunication, formal expulsion from a religious body, the most grave of all ecclesiastical censures. Where religious and social communities are nearly identical it is attended by social ostracism, as in the case of Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jews. In Christianity the Roman Catholic Church especially retains excommunication; the church maintains that the spiritual separation of the offender from the body of the faithful takes place by the nature of the act when the offense is committed, and the decree of excommunication (or anathema) is a warning and formal proclamation of exclusion from Christian society. Those who die excommunicate are not publicly prayed for; but excommunication is not equivalent to damnation. Excommunications vary in gravity, and in grave cases readmission may be possible only by action of the Holy See. Excommunicates are always free to return to the church on repentance. Protestant churches have generally abandoned excommunication.

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excommunication

Form of censure by which a member of a religious body is excluded from the congregation of believers and from the rites of the church. Excommunication has been used in various religions, notably Christianity, as a punishment for grave offenses such as heresy. In Roman Catholicism an excommunicated person is barred from receiving the sacraments and from burial in consecrated ground. The offender may be absolved by a priest (in some cases, only by a bishop or the pope) and received back into the church after confessing his or her sin and doing penance for it. In Protestant denominations other terms, such as “church discipline,” may be attached to essentially the same censure. Although now seldom used, the practice of herem in Judaism was a form of excommunication that excluded people from the community for prescribed times or forbade them from hearing the Torah. The term is also applied to the expulsion of Buddhist monks from the sangha.