The abortioner has to go to her Bishop to have the excommunication lifted. This provides him with the opportunity to instruct her in her faith, and provide her with healing resources.
I still don’t see why murderers should not be given the same wake up call. But thanks for the explanation.
If murderers don’t wake up to the fact that they did something bad when they see the body and all that blood, then perhaps they are not culpable, anyway, due to insanity.
)You’re right. So many people think of excommunication as the “ultimate punishment” on earth and that the person is rejected and left for hell. On the contrary, excommunication is a form of “turning out” of the community in the hope that the person will see their error and have a desire to repent so as to return to the community.
That logic conflicts with the fact that one can be excommunicated for the murder of a clergyman under certian circumstances. A person who did such a thing would also know of the monstrosity of their sin. They would not need to be ex-communicated as a wake up call.
Perhaps one gets excommunicated out of the high respect due to their office.
I believe the key here are the “certian circumstances” under which such an offender *may *incur excommunication, and which you conveniently do not elaborate.
why would that be the key. Are you suggesting that the circumstances are such that the person being excommunicated is not aware of the consequences of the murder? The reason I don’t elaborate on the circumstances is because I don’t know them. Another poster has mentioned it earlier and said that excommunciation could happen under certain circumstances.
Murder of a member of the clergy is more serious than murder of any other person not because the clergy member is more valuable as a person than anyone else. It’s the consequences that are more serious. Because a priest brings the sacraments to hundreds or thousands of people, killing that person is not only a sin against God and against that person, but it is a sin against all those who might be deprived of the sacraments and whose souls might be in danger through the absence of a minister at a key point in their lives. It’s hard to see this in places where there are many priests, but in places where there might only be one place to go to Mass within hundreds of miles, the murder of that priest deprives the faithful of the life-giving grace of the sacraments. And, it’s hard for those who aren’t Catholic (as well as for many Catholics) to understand the importance of the sacraments to one’s spiritual life.
good points.Murder of a member of the clergy is more serious than murder of any other person not because the clergy member is more valuable as a person than anyone else. It’s the consequences that are more serious. Because a priest brings the sacraments to hundreds or thousands of people, killing that person is not only a sin against God and against that person, but it is a sin against all those who might be deprived of the sacraments and whose souls might be in danger through the absence of a minister at a key point in their lives. It’s hard to see this in places where there are many priests, but in places where there might only be one place to go to Mass within hundreds of miles, the murder of that priest deprives the faithful of the life-giving grace of the sacraments. And, it’s hard for those who aren’t Catholic (as well as for many Catholics) to understand the importance of the sacraments to one’s spiritual life.
The only analogy I can come up with is why in the west it was considered far more than simply stealing to take a man’s horse. By taking his horse, you were potentially killing him and it was punishable in many places by hanging - which hardly seems to fit the crime unless you understand how important a horse was to a western man in the late 1800s.
Forgive the analogy - comparing a priest to a horse is a bit crude, but I’ve been reading a lot of Louis L’Amour lately.
That might have been me – [post=1614968]I quoted the circumstances and referred to the canon[/post], but let me quote the canon in full:
Now, if we presume a murder involving physical force, a plain reading of the law indicates that an offender incurs an automatic excommunication only if the victim is the pope. In the case of some other cleric, and if the act is committed out of contempt for the faith, or the Church, or ecclesiastical authority or the ministry, and if a competent tribunal or other authority then judges it a matter of justice, excommunication may be incurred.
It sounds like it does not have to be murder, but only battery (physical force)