297. Excommunication
297. EXCOMMUNICATION
How could the Church that claims to be the Body of Christ, Who is divine love incarnate, be so cruel as to approve excommunication of anyone? Isn’t the Church supposed to show God’s love and mercy? Doesn’t excommunication show a God of hatred and wrath instead?
Whether the Church should excommunicate anyone?
Objection 1: It would seem that the Church ought not to excommunicate anyone, because excommunication is a kind of curse, and we are forbidden to curse (Rom 12:14). . . .
On the contrary, The Apostle (1 Cor 5:5) ordered a man to be excommunicated.
Further, it is written (Mt 18:17) about the man who refuses to hear the Church: Let him be to thee as the heathen or publican. . . .
I answer that, The judgment of the Church should be conformed to the judgment of God. Now God punishes the sinner in many ways in order to draw him to good. . . . [T]he Church . . . imitates the judgment of God in leaving him to himself in order that by humility he may learn to know himself and return to God.
Reply to Objection 1: A curse may be pronounced in two ways: first, so that the intention of the one who curses is fixed on the evil which he invokes or pronounces—and cursing in this way is altogether forbidden. Secondly, so that the evil which a man invokes in cursing is intended for the good of the one who is cursed, and thus cursing is sometimes lawful and salutary; thus a surgeon makes a sick man undergo pain by cutting him, for instance, in order to deliver him from his sickness (S21,2).
Excommunication is a punishment. Punishments, in the Christian “big picture”, are not merely for justice (they are that too) but also always for love and mercy. People are rightly punished for one and only one ultimate reason: because they are loved. A father punishes his children more than a grandfather does because a father loves his children more passionately and intimately. Jesus’ favorite name for God is “Father”. But throughout the whole Bible God is never called a grandfather.
The principle St. Thomas appeals to is that “the judgment of the Church should be conformed to the judgment of God.” God punishes the sinner out of love—“to draw him to good”—and that is why the Church does the same. The Church, after all, is the Body of Christ, and Christ is the Son of God. God—Christ—Church: there is no possible space into which a wedge can be inserted there. The Son is authorized by the Father and the Church is authorized by the Son.
In one sense a punishment is a curse and in another sense it is not. Insofar as a curse wills harm to the one cursed, a punishment is not a curse; but insofar as a curse warns the one cursed away from harm (by fear and terror, since gentler and wiser persuasions have failed), a punishment is the opposite of a curse, as a prophetic warning against imminent enemies wills the opposite of the will of the enemies. Pain may be necessary to accomplish this loving purpose, for fools learn only by experience, and all of us have often been fools.
Of course, excommunication from the Church “works” only on Catholics who believe in and value the Church. To the unbeliever, the Church-hater, or the apostate, it is a decree of freedom, not bondage.
Excommunication is a warning of imminent damnation, for as St. Thomas says in the first line of the next excerpt (#298), only for mortal sin is one excommunicated. It is like a loving mother’s shrill cry to her children who are running near the edge of a cliff.