Excommunication is intended to really drive it home to the excommunicated person that their soul’s in peril. It’s used in the case of abortion because many people disagree that abortion is a grave sin.
Murderers generally don’t deny that murder is a grave sin that places one’s soul in peril of hell.
Zero.
In order to be effective, the latae sententiae excommunication penalty must have been known at the time the abortion was procured. Can. 1323 (2ƒ) provides that no one is liable to a penalty who violates a law or precept but is unaware of the existence of the law or precept. Inadvertence and error are equivalent to ignorance in this instance.
What the priest knows is completely irrelevant: if your sister knew when she had the abortion, then the penalty exists; if she continues to approach the sacraments, she commits the additional sin of sacrilege. If she didn’t know, then no penalty is incurred.
To take these questions out of order: first, there is plenty of chance for repentance and forgiveness in the Church. As I said above, there’s not even an excommunication in the first place unless she was aware of the penalty beforehand. The Church does not have an “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” rule here. And even if she did know it, and thus incurred the penalty, remission may be had through confession.
Typically the murder of an adult would result in clear secular sanctions, and no one would need a penalty to discourage them from committing such a crime.
This is not correct. One of the precepts of the Church is to attend Mass on all Sundays and all Holy Days of Obligation. Your roommate may have been confusingly interpreting another precept of the Church, which is that a Catholic must receive the Eucharist at least once per year, during the Easter season.
In a sense, yes. The Catholic view is that baptism, like confirmation and Holy Orders, imprints an indelible mark on the soul of the recipient. No subsequent action can remove this character.
A confession with no intent to reform invalidates the confession.
Can. 1323 (2ƒ) a person who without negligence was ignorant that he or she violated a law or precept; inadvertence and error are equivalent to ignorance;
I’m not a lawyer, let alone a canon lawyer, but I would think without negligence is a pretty significant clause there. It’s a rare Catholic who doesn’t have a general idea what the Church’s position on abortion is, and could decide, without negligence, that their knowledge of the topic is sufficient to warrant no further inquiry before receiving one.
The church today seems to be fairly lenient about these things.
Before we got married my fiancee and I were living together, and when we went to premarital counseling they gave us a form to fill out that was designed specifically for couples cohabiting.
I guess one could argue that a couple could live under the same roof and not have sexual relations, but let’s be realistic here.
Regardless the priest and church-sanctioned counselor we went to didn’t admonish us or otherwise make a big deal about us living together.
That’s what happened to my soon to be wife (as of tomorrow!) . They knew we were living together but didn’t say anything. He have stopped having relations months ago, for many reasons, and definitely because I had to go to confession.
Of course they wouldn’t, that’s a ridiculous and absurd notion. Why on earth would they copy the GOP agenda?
And this whole thread is really late. Cecil, as always in his omnipotent wisdom, foresaw this thread and wrote about it 12 years ago.
I grew up Catholic, so I have many ideas and values buried deep inside of me from those teachings. However, the majority of Catholics are human. This can cause deviences from living a biblical and all-holy life. This also is the tenet for all of that “forgiveness of sins” mumbo-jumbo you hear about. The flesh is never pure, which is why we needed Jesus Christ in the first place. Embracing a religion or even “belonging” to one does not free you from pain/suffering/sin/conflict/temptation/human-ness. I know many Athiests that seem to have a better moral compass than certain christians I know.
Everyone “creates” their own personal set of rules they live by - judgements about it are just opinions based on YOUR beliefs.
So, basically, nobody is right 
To the contrary, I think most Catholics understand that the Church considers abortion a grave sin, and would know that it created a need to confess the sin. I think most Catholics would not be aware of a latae sententiae excommunication of what that even means, nor would it be negligence that left them in that state, just lack of knowledge that they needed to investigate the question further than “It’s a sin.”
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
She’s a real Catholic, but she is according to Catholic teaching in mortal sin and possibly self-excommunicated. It is a sin to knowingly make a partial confession, and to receive the Eucharist without being fully absolved of mortal sin.
After you have made a good confession and repented, there is no barrier to receiving the Eucharist. Confessing while fully intending to commit the same sin again (and abortion, birth control, etc. are mortal sins according to Catholic teaching) is not making a good confession.
I asked a canon lawyer about the latae sententiae excommunication, and he said it rarely occurs, mostly because of some other mitigating circumstance in Can. 1323 (they were afraid, pressured by parents/spouse, etc.)
In my lifetime, and probably long before that, the Church has usually done a piss-poor job of teaching its members what it stands for.
The result? Millions of Catholics who don’t know what the Church stands for… or who sort of vaguely remember hearing about this-or-that rule ages ago, but respond (as Joe Pesci did in My Cousin Vinny), “You were SERIOUS about that???”
I’m 49, which means I started Catholic school in the mid-Sxties, just as everything was starting to change. I got all the old-school nuns just before they retired. And I still recall nearly everything they taught me of the faith.
Thing is, non-Catholics (especially the liberals) invaraibly assume that the old nuns and the Pre-Vatican 2 priests were constantly lecturing us about sex and impure thoughts and the like. Nothing could be further from the truth! We learned VERY little about Catholic doctrine on ANYTHING, and almost never heard about sex, pro or con!
In all my years in Catholic schools and Catholic churches, have I ever heard any priest or teacher condemn the use of artificial birth control? Nope. Not even once. I KNOW that the Church forbids it, but it’s not at all hard for me to believe that most Catholics my age or younger are unaware (or only vaguely aware) that it’s against Church rules.
Did I grow up hearing rants against abortion? Nope. The subject NEVER came up in 9 years at a Catholic grammar school or 4 years at a Catholic highschool. Was abortion condemned in Sunday sermons? Yes- once a year, right around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the priest would have to read a dry letter from the bishop supporting the right to life. Otherwise, I never heard about it. Again, I KNOW what the Church teaches about abortion, but it’s not hard for me to believe that millions of Catholics grew up thinking the Church didn’t care very much about it.
Do most Catholics know that Communion is supposed to be the actual body of Christ? I’m sure they don’t. If you gave a multiple choice quiz, most would go for an answer like “Communion is a symbolic act that reminds us of Jesus and makes us feel close to him.”
The old nuns were obsessed with the minor traditions and the trappings of Catholicism, but cared little about the substance. They beat into our heads that we HAD to go to Mass on Holy Days of Obligation, and that we HAD to abstain from eating for an hour before Communion, and that we HAD to give our children saints’ names. But the important things? They didn’t know or care much about those, and didn’t bother to teach us much about them. Most old nuns were far more worried about penmanship and sentence diagramming than about the Catechism.
And the secular teachers who now control Catholic schools teach even LESS about the faith.
Sadly (at least in my opinion), most Catholics (like most American Christians) are pretty much Unitarians with a taste for more ornate rituals.
I’m just two years older than you, and I went through Catholic grade school, though I never set foot in a church again after 8th grade.
My experiences are pretty close to you. What I recall about my religious teaching is mostly Jesus stories from the new testament, saving pagan babies by giving money to save their souls (there was a dollar per soul amount that was never really explained), and the dangers of non-Catholics (aka temptation to stray from the true path). It was actually the process of Confirmation that got me first really questioning what was going on here. All the training was a simple rehearsal for the actions and words to be spoken. It all seemed to be about getting through the ceremony without screwing up and embarassing yourself or the nuns.
I don’t believe I ever heard a single word about sex beyond vague warnings of “impure thoughts”. I’m sure I never heard a single word about abortion, but I was basically out of the system by the time of Roe v Wade.
I also don’t recall ever hearing anything at all about Protestantism. There were Catholics and non-Catholics. Period. The only other religion I ever heard actually named was Judaism – because of course they killed Jesus.
But I have no idea how adult Catholics are supposed to continue their religious education. Mass doesn’t (or wasn’t during the time I attended) seem to be the place – because it was all about what we should know about Jesus and moral behavior, and not about the workings of the church itself.
Per my dad (lapsed Catholic), many years ago it was indeed hard to find “CE for adult Catholics”. But now even he admits it is different. Many parishes have established adult classes and have even different offerings. I know the three parishes I’ve lived in the past three years have extensive religious education. Granted, two of those were the main ones servicing the big public university. And the third one is the main one of the town and also servicing a big Hispanic community. And I should know about the last one, as I’ve… erm… been dragging my feet about attending adult confirmation classes.
So for lapsed people that do not go to church, it may be hard to find. But for those who do go to church at least semi-regularly, the classes are being offered. I did have a friend in undergrad who attended the “youth night”.
Pretty much in exactly the same boat as you. Raised Catholic, agnatheist these days.
The think about being a Catholic is that sins are forgiven. If she goes to confession and confesses these sins, she can be giving absolution and forgiveness for her sins. None of those sins are of the show stopper variety (venial vs mortal, if memory serves).
Naw…none of those sins warrant excommunication, which is a pretty serious thing. Now, if she was a priest or church leader (‘she’ wouldn’t be a ‘she’ in that case, obviously), THEN it would be more serious. But the church is all about forgiveness after all, and Catholics regularly ‘sin’ and simply ask forgiveness, which is granted unless their sin is a lot more serious than birth control, and abortion or sex outside of marriage (which, if they came down hard on this one would probably mean the death of the church ;)).
AFAICT, the church really NEVER acted as an honest arbiter, at least not in recent history (oh, say the last thousand years or so). The child abuse thing is certainly disgusting and abhorrent, and I wish there WAS a god so these people could burn in the hottest hells for their acts, but it’s really not anything new or shocking, if you consider the history of the church. What’s different these days is that church clergy don’t have any other outlet at all, sexually speaking (in the past they could have mistresses, go to whore houses or even own them, or even have defacto wives), and also the church doesn’t have the power it once had to completely suppress these things like they used to be able to do.
-XT
Sins are forgiven IF the penitent is actually penitent. If the sinner doesn’t regret his sins, then he can say Hail Marys until the holy cows come home and it won’t do a thing for him.
Catholicism, much like Judaism, is a very strong cultural anchor in society and a very large number of former Catholics still consider themselves to be "Catholic,"even when not practicing.
It is unlikely that she has gone to confession in a very long time–based not on any information that I clearly lack regarding her personal life, but simply based on the fact that so few Catholics–even still practicing Catholics–ever choose to go to Confession these days.
Depending on the specific act, the church may very well consider a person to have excommunicated himself or herself. Some actions, (participation in an abortion), currently do incur excommunication while others, (lack of adherence to the letter of the law regarding the Church’s stand on contraception), may or may not incur excommunication, depending on the mindset of the individual, the individual’s understanding of the encyclical Humanae Vitae and how close the individual perceives that his or her intent is to follow that document.
Actually, that statement is a bit too broad. There are definitely diocese where abusers have been sheltered, but one aspect of the church that most folks do not understand is that a diocese is pretty much a small kingdom unto itself, with no governing authority to which it reports short of the pope. In many diocese, there has never been a tradition of shielding abusers. Tragically, in too many diocese, abusers have been shielded.
The church teaches that only Jesus is the intercessor for humans. However, there are roles in the overall ministry of the church that are carried out by specific persons, ordained to those roles.
To the extent that priests have been permitted to harm other people without being held accountable, the church, (whether viewed as the local diocese or as the overall institution), has failed in its duties.
However, we are still talking about a relatively small number of priests, (that corresponds, roughly, to the numbers of ministers in other denominations), that have betrayed their people. I do not know what percent of bishops have been involved in these situations, but it would not rise to the level of “the church.”
It should also be noted that “the church” (meaning the majority of the people in it as well as the majority of priests), have reacted to the information regarding the cover-ups with anger and demands that there be genuine changes in practice and policy.
Nothing happens quickly in the church and, with over a billion members, there are already many different fights going on regarding the appropriate responses, so it will take a while for it all to settle out.
From the perspective of people inside the church, however, (with views ranging from “let’s kill all the bishops and most of the priests and start over” to “let’s pray for those few men who have done wrong and then pretend nothing more needs to happen”), the church is still continuing to play its spiritual role in the world and, just like the thieving, fornicating, indulgence peddling popes of the Renaissance, the church will survive this tragedy, as well.
Another thing to consider is that the average Catholic only goes to Confession a handful of times in their life. I myself have only been once. And this isn’t all that different from the fire and brimstone days of the 50s and before.
Ok, maybe this is is an issue of ignorance. Many Catholics don’t understand that their church’s creed dooms them to eternal damnation or expulsion or both because of their beliefs or actions.
So this leads me to a few more questions. Does the Church prefer this state of affairs? Would it rather have a smaller but more devout membership? I don;t know exactly why this is reminding me of comic routines, but one that come to mind is “You know you might be a redneck if…” Does the church ever put out anything that says, “Did you know that you’re no longer a Catholic if…”
So let us say that the church became much more agressive in “enforcement” in the sense of toe the line or get out. Would this result in more people trying to behave better, or more people who go shopping for a new religion, or more people who give up religion all together. I know there is not a right answer to this, I’m just looking for some opinion of what the outcome would be.
And for those cafeteria Catholics, it seems like they are living a parody of Groucho Marx’s most famous line, to wit, “I insist on only joining clubs that won’t have people like me as members.”