Does the Pope still excommunicate people? If not, why not? And who was the last person to be excommunicated? Seems to me that even Hitler wasn’t excommunicated… if you can’t excommunicate Hitler these days (loosely speaking), it would seem as though that punishment has probably been taken off of the books.
Hitler wasn’t Catholic.
Haj
Hitler was a lapsed Catholic.
oh, Tomn~
The story is that Hitler somehow “excommunicated himself”. <insert head-scratching emoticon>.
I might as well tell you what I know. We covered things like excommunication briefly in the Catholic high school I went to.
Yes, excommunication does still occur. In fact there are some offenses that are said to incur it latae sententiae–by the very commission of the act, i.e. without even a formal pronouncement of it. Among latae sententiae offenses are attacking the Pope, acts of extreme sacriledge, and–rather humorously, I think–having an abortion, because it is such an grievous offense. But not molesting choir boys of course–a simple Act of Contrition will cure that;).
For a person to incur the latae sententiae penalty, a couple of things must be present in the case. He must know he incurred the penalty of latae sententiae. He must be committing the offense openly and defiantly to church law. And others must know of his offense. So as you can see, even this form of excommunication rarely comes up.
There is of course the formal pronouncement of exommunication too. It occurs when a person is creating a schism in the church and must be brought back to the fold. So as such, the official catechism refers to it as a medicinal (their word) penalty. There is probably alot more I could add. But it has been a while since I took catechism. So I’ll stop here for now.
Cecil talks about this very topic.
Catholic Encyclopedia on Excommunication
A recent case (note the date at the top of the webpage - March-April 1997)
A Sri Lankan Catholic theologian and priest, Tissa Balasuriya, was excommunicated for questioning the tenet of original sin, and some details concerning the conception of Mary.
(While Googling around, I found a suggested letter-writing action in support of Tissa Balasuriya, asking that the excommunication be repealed, for those wishing to plead his case)
Oh! And I forgot the more famous case of French Archbishop Lefebvre, an opponent of some of the reforms enacted by the Vatican II council, who was automatically excommunicated when he ordained four bishops in Econe, Switzerland in 1988.
Read more here:
The Society of St. Pius X
Formal pronouncements of excommunication (ab homine, “from the man” i.e., issued by a person) have been quite rare for the last few hundred years. When it is used, it is, as Jim B. noted, reserved for prominent people in the church who are acting in a way that is divisive.
More common are the excommunications a jure (i.e., by law) that are automatic. When a person crosses the line in breaking with the church he or she automatically invokes the law that recognizes that the person is no longer in communion with the church. To formally excommunicate someone, (ab homine), there are procedures of due process that must be followed to permit them to respond to the charges against them. Given the hassle of trying to get someone who has already rejected the church to show up and defend themselves, it is generally more expeditious to simply note the longstanding rule that provided for their automatic excommunication. The two “biggest” examples of the last 50 years would be Boston’s Fr. Feeney (who declared that only Catholics coud get into heaven and would not back down when it was pointed out that such was not the teaching of the church) and Archheresiarch LeFebvre of France, (who declared that Vatican II was an error and he was not going to go along with any part of it). In each case, the “excommunication” was nothing more than a statement by a member of the Curia that if they continued in their declarations of error, they had obviously removed themselves from the church.
The Hitler case is often brought up, but he had so clearly violated several longstanding a jure pronouncements, that the Vatican decided it was not worthwhile to make a formal issue of it–a decision that draws a fair amount of questions from people who want to paint the Vatican as supporting Hitler.
I am not sure how the Tissa Balasuriya excommunication was handled. I did not see any news of an ab homine excommunication, but I could easily have missed it in the Spring of 1997.
FWIW:
My take on Vatican/Hitler:
The RCC had no compelling reason to object to Hitler, so did not.
(The Pope did issue a rather mealy-mouthed criticism of Hitler in his 1941 Christmas address.)
Unfortunately for the Church, events transpired to indicate that the moral thing to have done would have been to condemn Hitler.
The rest (including the Vatican II revision/denunciation of the “Blood Libel” concerning Jews) has been back-pedalling to “explain” the silence and inaction.
Thus the “we didn’t have to say anything because…” line.
So noted.
Thank you, your Grace.
The Staff Report of the subject of Hitler’s religion: Was Hitler a Christian?.