Crossword clues for excommunication
excommunication
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Excommunication \Ex`com*mu`ni*ca"tion\, n. [L. excommunicatio: cf. F. excommunication.] The act of communicating or ejecting; esp., an ecclesiastical censure whereby the person against whom it is pronounced is, for the time, cast out of the communication of the church; exclusion from fellowship in things spiritual.
Note: excommunication is of two kinds, the lesser and the greater; the lesser excommunication is a separation or suspension from partaking of the Eucharist; the greater is an absolute execution of the offender from the church and all its rights and advantages, even from social intercourse with the faithful.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. The act of excommunicate or eject; especially an ecclesiastical censure whereby the person against whom it is pronounced is, for the time, cast out of the communication of the church; exclusion from fellowship in things spiritual.
WordNet
Wikipedia
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. Some Protestants practice an alternate form of excusing congregants from the church. Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the churches of Christ, use the term disfellowship instead.
The word excommunication means putting a specific individual or group out of communion. In some religions, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group. Excommunication may involve banishment, shunning, and shaming, depending on the religion, the offense that caused excommunication, or the rules or norms of the religious community. The grave act is often revoked in response to sincere penance, which may be manifested through public recantation, sometimes through the Sacrament of Confession, piety, and/or through mortification of the flesh.
For the canonical penalty of excommunication as regulated by the Code of Canon Law of 1917 and the present Code, see excommunication#Catholic Church. This article reflects the state of before 1917.
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, excommunication (Lat. ex, out of, and communio or communicatio, communion exclusion from the communion), the principal and severest censure, is a medicinal, spiritual penalty that deprives the guilty Christian of all participation in the common blessings of ecclesiastical society. Being a penalty, it supposes guilt; and being the most serious penalty that the Catholic Church can inflict, it naturally supposes a very grave offense. It is also a medicinal rather than a vindictive penalty, being intended, not so much to punish the culprit, as to correct him and bring him back to the path of righteousness. It necessarily, therefore, contemplates the future, either to prevent the recurrence of certain culpable acts that have grievous external consequences, or, more especially, to induce the delinquent to satisfy the obligations incurred by their offense. Its object and its effect are loss of communion, i, e. of the spiritual benefits shared by all the members of Christian society; hence, it can affect only those who by baptism have been admitted to that society. Undoubtedly there can and do exist other penal measures which entail the loss of certain fixed rights; among them are other censures, e.g. suspension for clerics, interdict for clerics and laymen, irregularity ex delicto, etc. Excommunication, however, is clearly distinguished from these penalties in that it is the privation of all rights resulting from the social status of the Christian as such. Excommunicated persons do not cease to be Christians, since their baptism can never be effaced; they can, however, be considered as an exile from Christian society and as non-existent, for a time at least, in the sight of ecclesiastical authority. But such exile can have an end (and the Church desires it), as soon as the offender has given suitable satisfaction. Meanwhile, their status before the church is that of a stranger. They may not participate in public worship nor receive any of the sacraments. Moreover, if a cleric, he is forbidden to administer a sacred rite or to exercise an act of spiritual authority.
Usage examples of "excommunication".
Savonarola, to remind the Domenican that it was he, not Ragoczy, who was under the pain of excommunication, and that as a result he had no right to serve Mass, let alone question the state of the souls of those seeking Communion, which would not be valid in any case, being, as it was, Savonarola, the excommunicant, who had performed the consecration.
When even excommunication failed to make him yield and church bells had been silenced in important sees, the clergy in extremity had summoned Bernard from Clairvaux to bring the culprit to submission.
Guillaume, worn down by the inconveniences of excommunication, determined, since he was afraid of no one, to himself accost the man of God boldly with threats of reprisal.
Innocent found himself obliged to launch upon the household of the king the edict of excommunication and interdict.
It smote the bishops who had executed the royal plans, widowed the newly wed sister of the queen, and adjured the Count of Vermandois to return to his lawful wife on pain of excommunication and interdict on all his lands.
He could only recommend excommunication for the mimes and histrions who were corrupting the public taste.
There he read that the king checked appeals to Rome, made excommunication conditional, exercised control over vacant sees and ecclesiastical preferments.
Sick kings were not subject to excommunication, and the chronicle says that Henry was sick in his stronghold above the Vienne.
The Bishops of London and Salisbury appealed to the Pope for absolution from the excommunication visited upon them from Clairvaux on the previous Palm Sunday.
Becket might reclaim his see and lead his exiles home, if, when, and after the bishops of England were freed from excommunication and his lands from the menaces of interdict.
Bishops of London and Salisbury from the excommunication that Thomas had launched on the Palm Sunday of the previous year.
Bishop of Worcester, to get passage to England in time to visit proscription and excommunication upon all the ecclesiastics upon whom Henry depended for the coronation.
He suspended the Archbishop of York and renewed the excommunication of the Bishops of London and Salisbury, who had been relieved of his censures all out of season by the Archbishop of Rouen to make way for the coronation.
He confessed that he had been exceedingly angry upon hearing of the excommunication of his bishops, and that it was possible that the discomposure of his face, the flashing of his eyes, and certain choleric words that had slipped from his lips in that moment of passion, had put it into the heads of the assassins to avenge his indignation.
Bernard, John of Agnani charged Philip and Richard, on pain of excommunication, to abate their demands upon the King of England.