Excommunication

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 3, 18 January 1906, Page 2

Excommunication

The Catholic Church sails on an even keel. She has not one law for broadcloth dress-coats and Worth costumes, and another for moleskins and Paisley shawls. She, for example, impartially excommunicates every Catholic divorced person who attempts a second marriage while his or her spouse is living. This was the folly that was recently perpetrated by a millionaire woman in Bishop Scannell's diocese of Omaha, in the United States. The Church's sentence of excommunication ireached her through her rampart of bulging moneybags as easily and as surely as it touches tandem bigamists at the other end of the social scale through their pathetic rags. It fell likewise upon one or two Catholics of paralytic spine who took part as witnesses in , what their faith teaches them is an act of legalised bigamy. A clamor went up from the plutocrats and their friends. Some spaniel journals yapped in tune with them. So far as we can discover an articulate voice amidst the swelling clangor, it seems to be contended that it is time for a bishop who administers an excommunjication to a leader — and especially a millionaire leader— of ' sassiety 'to take lodgings in a tree; that such a /sentence is part of the ancient armory of the Church of Rome only ; and that it is as unknown among the Reformed creeds as are the arquebuse and the blunderbuss upon the modern field of battle. « A North Island contemporary seems to make some such views as these its own. But the views are none the saner, nor the statements as to fact any truer, on that account. 'For some people are born with a gift for riding rough-shod over truth and tumbling headforemost into fallacies— like the top-heavy knight of the wooden sword that was such a tabulation to little Alice in Wonderland. Now, as is well known, every grade of society has its own little code of excommunication. Of course theyi do not call it excommunication. But that is precisely what it comes to, for each petty ' set ' or coterie rigidly ostracises from its social intercourse or inter-communion any of its members whose company has become, from any cause, undesirable. Ervery secret society, every social club, every benefit organisation, every college and school, claims, and on occasion exercises, the right of excommunication— that is, of expelling members from union with it and from, participation in its benefits. In every civilised country the Taw excommunicates, or segregates from the ordinary daily life of the community, many evil-doers whose conduct is deemed to be inimical to its well-being. Some of these are excommunicated from the social life of the community for. a period, during which they are placed under lock and key in gaol. Others are permanently segregated, by life-long imprisonment, or by the hangman's noose, or the guillotine, or the electric chair. Some of the early ' Reformers ' excommunicated each other in language that was painful and frequent and free. T.uther, for instance, excommunicated Osiarcder as ' a devil incarnate.' Osiander retorted in kind. The leaders of one of the two rival Reformed sects in Magdeburg publicly ( excommunicated ' en bloc ' every soul among his opponents. ' I cut them off,' said he, 'as stinking, corrupt members from the community of Christ ; I close the door of heaven against them, and throw open the gates of hell, and I consign them to the devil himself to be plagued and tormented for ever.' The ancient and apostolic weapon of excommunication is by no means obsolete among out separated brethren at the present day. But they use it more rarely and with more dignity and discretion than did their spiritual forbears of the Sixteenth century. The ' Saturday Review 'of May 21, 1898, and ' Reynolds's Newspaper ' of May 22, 1898, record,' for instance, the infliction of the major (or greater) excommunication upon a clergyman who had been found guilty of serious crimes. The sentence was passed with great, solemnity by the Anglican, Bishop of Dichfield in— his^cathedral. ..The o r flender i(kdcording to

the newspaper report of the ceremonial) was excluded not 'alone from the Sacraments, but ' from : tlie of "all "Christians. 1 r The Presbyterian ' Confession ,of Faith ' (chap, xxx., 2-3-4) empowers the officers of the Church 'to shut that Kingdom (Heaven) against the impenitent, both by word and censures » ; 'to proceed by admonition, suspension from the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper for a season, and by excommunication from the Church, according to the nature of the crime and demerit of the person. 1 The) usage is an apostolic one. It is laid down by implication or in set terms by St. Paul— even to the avoidance of the person excommunicated— in 11. Thess., iii., 6, 14, 15 ; I. Cor., v., 4, 5, 13 ; Tit., iii., 10. Sentences of excommunication were frequently resorted to during the Middle Ages. ' They were,' says Lingard, ' the principal weapons with which the clergy sought to protect themselves and their property from the cruelty and rapacity of the banditti in the service of the barons. They were feared by the most powerful and unprincipled, because at the same time that they excluded the culprit from the offices of religion, they also cut him off from the intercourse of society. Men werel compelled to avoid the company of the excommunicated, unless they were willing to participate in punishment.' Nowadays the p'leeceman, the magistrate, and the judge of assize create, for certain Minds of ' banditti, ' a well-guarded seclusion that renders ecclesiastical prohibition of intercourse with them unnecessary. But the spiritual penalty of excommunication still remains needful for certain forms of vice and evildoing of which the criminal law does not take cognisance. And, for Catholics, one of these is the relation that, has received the apt name of ' tandem polygamy.