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Article: The most severe penalty has a long history. (excommunication)
- Article from:
- National Catholic Reporter
- Article date:
- April 5, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 National Catholic Reporter. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Excommunication, a penalty that excludes a person from the church's sacraments, has a long history in Catholicism, although it has been used rarely in recent years.
References to excommunication appear in documents of the Council of Nicea, held in 325. Mutual excommunications by church leaders in East and West were among precipitating events in a formal. split between Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic church in 1054. (Those excommunications were lifted nine centuries later, in 1965.)
Under the church's Code of Canon Law, revised in 1983, the penalty can be incurred automatically, declared publicly after a formal process or both. Excommunication ...