Question About Excommunication

[Bashful]

Are Catholics required by the church to shun those who are excommunicated Ferendae sententiae or excommunicated Latae sententiae given that they have knowledge that the person is excommunicted?

 

[Oren]

No, I’ve never heard of that. If you know they are excommunicated then you should be careful of something bad they would want to say to you, like a heretical teaching or making a sin seem like it’s not a sin or something like that. But we don’t have ‘shunning’.

 

[JerryZ]

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding on what “excommunication” means/entails.

The excommunicated does NOT cease to be Catholic.

Excomunication does NOT necessarily affect someone salvation either. (If it was unjustly applied, God is NOT “forced” to acknowledge it)

If I may use a sports analogy excomunication is like a “yellow card” issued by the referee in a soccer game.
It is a warning to let know that whatever actions/teaching/behaviours the person took/is taking are dangerous to his/her and perhaps also other Catholic’s salvation.

Remedial action can be from simply repent and confess the sins that caused the sentence to be issued to his/her priest or the Bishop or even the Pope in some rare cases.

Peace

 

[Elizium23]

The OP is referring to the difference between tolerati and vitandi, an obsolete concept. The status of vitandi, and implicitly, tolerati, was abolished in the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Catholic Encyclopedia: Excommunication
Catholic Encyclopedia:

Public excommunication in foro externo has two degrees according as it has or has not been formally published, or, in other words, according as excommunicated persons are to be shunned (vitandi) or tolerated (tolerati). A formally published or nominative excommunication occurs when the sentence has been brought to the knowledge of the public by a notification from the judge, indicating by name the person thus punished. No special method is required for this publication; according to the Council of Constance (1414-18), it suffices that “the sentence have been published or made known by the judge in a special and express manner”. Persons thus excommunicated are to be shunned (vitandi), i.e. the faithful must have no intercourse with them either in regard to sacred things or (to a certain extent) profane matters, as we shall see farther on. All other excommunicated persons, even though known, are tolerati, i.e. the law no longer obliges the faithful to abstain from intercourse with them, even in religious matters.

 

[thistle]

Are Catholics required by the church to shun those who are excommunicated Ferendae sententiae or excommunicated Latae sententiae given that they have knowledge that the person is excommunicted?

NO!