thumb|Fanciful 16th-century fresco in the [[Sala Regia (Vatican)|Sala Regia, by Giorgio Vasari, depicting Pope Gregory IX excommunicating Frederick II. Since few details were provided to the artist, Vasari chose to paint an excommunication scene generically. In the traditional excommunication procedure, the pope and his priests would hurl burning candles on the ground and stamp them out. The painter however here chose to show the pope personally stepping on the emperor.]]
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 those of being in communion with other members of the congregation, and of receiving the sacraments.
It is practiced by all of the ancient churches (such as the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodox churches and the Eastern Orthodox churches) as well as by other Christian denominations; however, it is also used more generally to refer to similar types of institutional religious exclusionary practices and shunning among other religious groups. The Amish have also been known to excommunicate members that were either seen or known for breaking rules, or questioning the church, a practice known as shunning. Jehovah's Witnesses use the term disfellowship to refer to their form of excommunication.
The word excommunication means putting a specific individual or group out of communion. In some denominations, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group. Excommunication may involve banishment, shunning, and shaming, depending on the group, the offense that caused excommunication, or the rules or norms of the religious community. The grave act is often revoked in response to manifest repentance.
Bahá'í Faith
thumb|upright=0.9|[[Mírzá Muhammad ʻAlí, son of Bahá'u'lláh was excommunicated by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.]]
Excommunication among Bahá'ís is rare and generally not used for transgressions of community standards, intellectual dissent, or conversion to other religions. Instead, it is the most severe punishment, reserved for suppressing organized dissent that threatens the unity of believers. Covenant-breaker is a term used by Bahá'ís to refer to a person who has been excommunicated from the Bahá'í community for breaking the 'Covenant': actively promoting schism in the religion or otherwise opposing the legitimacy of the chain of succession of leadership.
Currently, the Universal House of Justice has the sole authority to declare a person a Covenant-breaker, and once identified, all Bahá'ís are expected to shun them, even if they are family members. The Bahá'í writings forbid association with Covenant-breakers and Bahá'ís are urged to avoid their literature, thus providing an exception to the Bahá'í principle of independent investigation of truth. Most Bahá'ís are unaware of the small Bahá'í divisions that exist.
Christianity
The purpose of excommunication is to exclude from the church those members who have behaviors or teachings contrary to the beliefs of a Christian community (heresy). It aims to protect members of the church from abuses and allow the offender to recognize their error and repent.
Catholic Church
thumb|upright|Plaque on exterior of the [[Chiesa della Pietà, Venice|Chiesa della Pietà in Venice, the church of the orphanage. This is where the foundling wheel once stood. The inscription declares, citing a 12 November 1548 papal bull of Pope Paul III, that God inflicts "maledictions and excommunications" on all who abandon a child of theirs whom they have the means to rear, and that they cannot be absolved unless they first refund all expenses incurred.]]
Within the Catholic Church, there are differences between the discipline of the majority Latin Church regarding excommunication and that of the Eastern Catholic Churches.
Latin Church
thumb|upright|left|[[Martin Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521.]]
Excommunication can be either (automatic, incurred at the moment of committing the offense for which canon law imposes that penalty) or (incurred only when imposed by a legitimate superior or declared as the sentence of an ecclesiastical court).
thumb|left|Threat of excommunication for stealing books from the [[Salamanca University library]]
The Catholic Church teaches in the Council of Trent that "excommunicated persons are not members of the Church, because they have been cut off by her sentence from the number of her children and belong not to her communion until they repent".
In the papal bull (May 16, 1520), Pope Leo X condemned Luther's twenty-third proposition according to which "excommunications are merely external punishments, nor do they deprive a man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church". Pope Pius VI in (August 28, 1794) condemned the notion which maintained that the effect of excommunication is only exterior because of its own nature it excludes only from exterior communion with the Church, as if, said the pope, excommunication were not a spiritual penalty binding in heaven and affecting souls. The excommunicated person, being excluded from the society of the Church, still bears the indelible mark of Baptism and is subject to the jurisdiction of the Church. They are excluded from engaging in certain activities. These activities are listed in Canon 1331 §1, and prohibit the individual from any ministerial participation in celebrating the sacrifice of the Eucharist or any other ceremonies of worship; celebrating or receiving the sacraments; or exercising any ecclesiastical offices, ministries, or functions.
right|thumb|upright|[[Isabelo de los Reyes, founder of the Aglipayan Church, was excommunicated by Pope Leo XIII in 1903 as a schismatic apostate.]]
Under current Catholic canon law, excommunicates remain bound by ecclesiastical obligations such as attending Mass, even though they are barred from receiving the Eucharist and from taking an active part in the liturgy (reading, bringing the offerings, etc.). "Excommunicates lose rights, such as the right to the sacraments, but they are still bound to the obligations of the law; their rights are restored when they are reconciled through the remission of the penalty."
These are the only effects for those who have incurred a excommunication. For instance, a priest may not refuse Communion publicly to those who are under an automatic excommunication, as long as it has not been officially declared to have been incurred by them, even if the priest knows that they have incurred it—although if the person's offence was a "manifest grave sin", then the priest is obliged to refuse their communion by canon 915. On the other hand, if the priest knows that excommunication has been imposed on someone or that an automatic excommunication has been declared (and is no longer merely an undeclared automatic excommunication), he is forbidden to administer Holy Communion to that person.
In the Catholic Church, excommunication is normally resolved by a declaration of repentance, profession of the Creed (if the offense involved heresy) and an Act of Faith, or renewal of obedience (if that was a relevant part of the offending act, i.e., an act of schism) by the excommunicated person and the lifting of the censure (absolution) by a priest or bishop empowered to do this. "The absolution can be in the internal (private) forum only, or also in the external (public) forum, depending on whether scandal would be given if a person were privately absolved and yet publicly considered unrepentant."
Eastern Catholic Churches
In the Eastern Catholic Churches, excommunication is imposed only by decree, never incurred automatically by excommunication. A distinction is made between minor and major excommunication. Those on whom minor excommunication has been imposed are excluded from receiving the Eucharist and can also be excluded from participating in the Divine Liturgy. They can even be excluded from entering a church when divine worship is being celebrated there. The decree of excommunication must indicate the precise effect of the excommunication and, if required, its duration.
Those under major excommunication are in addition forbidden to receive not only the Eucharist but also the other sacraments, to administer sacraments or sacramentals, to exercise any ecclesiastical offices, ministries, or functions whatsoever, and any such exercise by them is null and void. They are to be removed from participation in the Divine Liturgy and any public celebrations of divine worship. They are forbidden to make use of any privileges granted to them and cannot be given any dignity, office, ministry, or function in the church, they cannot receive any pension or emoluments associated with these dignities etc., and they are deprived of the right to vote or to be elected.
Eastern Orthodox Church
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, excommunication is the exclusion of a member from the Eucharist. It is not expulsion from the churches. This can happen for such reasons as not having confessed within that year; excommunication can also be imposed as part of a penitential period. It is generally done with the goal of restoring the member to full communion. Before an excommunication of significant duration is imposed, the bishop is usually consulted. The Eastern Orthodox do have a means of expulsion, by pronouncing anathema, but this is reserved only for acts of serious and unrepentant heresy. As an example of this, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, in its eleventh capitula, declared: "If anyone does not anathematize Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinaris, Nestorius, Eutyches and Origen, as well as their impious writings, as also all other heretics already condemned and anathematized by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and by the aforesaid four Holy Synods and [if anyone does not equally anathematize] all those who have held and hold or who in their impiety persist in holding to the end the same opinion as those heretics just mentioned: let him be anathema."
Lutheran churches
Although Lutheranism technically has an excommunication process, some denominations and congregations do not use it. In the Smalcald Articles Luther differentiates between the "great" and "small" excommunication. The "small" excommunication is simply barring an individual from the Lord's Supper and "other fellowship in the church". While the "great" excommunication excluded a person from both the church and political communities which he considered to be outside the authority of the church and only for civil leaders. A modern Lutheran practice is laid out in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod's 1986 explanation to the Small Catechism, defined beginning at Questions No. 277–284, in "The Office of Keys".
Many Lutheran denominations operate under the premise that the entire congregation (as opposed to the pastor alone) must take appropriate steps for excommunication, and there are not always precise rules, to the point where individual congregations often set out rules for excommunicating laymen (as opposed to clergy). For example, churches may sometimes require that a vote must be taken at Sunday services; some congregations require that this vote be unanimous.
In the Church of Sweden and the Church of Denmark, excommunicated individuals are turned out from their parish in front of their congregation.
The Lutheran process, though rarely used, has created unusual situations in recent years due to its somewhat democratic excommunication process. One example was an effort to get serial killer Dennis Rader excommunicated from his denomination (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) by individuals who tried to "lobby" Rader's fellow church members into voting for his excommunication.
Anglican Communion
Church of England
The Church of England does not have any specific canons regarding how or why a member can be excommunicated, although it has a canon according to which ecclesiastical burial may be refused to someone "declared excommunicate for some grievous and notorious crime and no man to testify to his repentance".
The punishment of imprisonment for being excommunicated from the Church of England was removed from English law in 1963.
Historian Christopher Hill found that, in pre-revolutionary England, excommunication was common but fell into disrepute because it was applied unevenly and could be avoided on payment of fines.
Episcopal Church of the United States of America
The ECUSA is in the Anglican Communion, and shares many canons with the Church of England, which would determine its policy on excommunication.
Reformed churches
In the Reformed Churches, excommunication has generally been seen as the culmination of church discipline, which is one of the three marks of the Church. The Westminster Confession of Faith sees it as the third step after "admonition" and "suspension from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper for a season." Yet, John Calvin argues in his Institutes of the Christian Religion that church censures do not "consign those who are excommunicated to perpetual ruin and damnation", but are designed to induce repentance, reconciliation and restoration to communion. Calvin notes, "though ecclesiastical discipline does not allow us to be on familiar and intimate terms with excommunicated persons, still we ought to strive by all possible means to bring them to a better mind, and recover them to the fellowship and unity of the Church."
At least one modern Reformed theologian argues that excommunication is not the final step in the disciplinary process. Jay E. Adams argues that in excommunication, the offender is still seen as a brother, but in the final step they become "as the heathen and tax collector" (Matthew 18:17). Adams writes, "Nowhere in the Bible is excommunication (removal from the fellowship of the Lord's Table, according to Adams) equated with what happens in step 5; rather, step 5 is called 'removing from the midst, handing over to Satan,' and the like."
Former Princeton president and theologian, Jonathan Edwards, addresses the notion of excommunication as "removal from the fellowship of the Lord's Table" in his treatise entitled "The Nature and End of Excommunication". Edwards argues:
<blockquote>"Particularly, we are forbidden such a degree of associating ourselves with (excommunicants), as there is in making them our guests at our tables, or in being their guests at their tables; as is manifest in the text, where we are commanded to have no company with them, no not to eat [...] That this respects not eating with them at the Lord's supper, but a common eating, is evident by the words, that the eating here forbidden, is one of the lowest degrees of keeping company, which are forbidden. Keep no company with such a one, saith the apostle, no not to eat – as much as to say, no not in so low a degree as to eat with him. But eating with him at the Lord's supper, is the very highest degree of visible Christian communion. Who can suppose that the apostle meant this: Take heed and have no company with a man, no not so much as in the highest degree of communion that you can have? Besides, the apostle mentions this eating as a way of keeping company which, however, they might hold with the heathen. He tells them not to keep company with fornicators. Then he informs them, he means not with fornicators of this world, that is, the heathens; but, saith he, 'if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, etc. with such a one keep no company, no not to eat.' This makes it most apparent, that the apostle doth not mean eating at the Lord's table; for so, they might not keep company with the heathens, any more than with an excommunicated person".</blockquote>
Methodism
In the Methodist Episcopal Church, individuals were able to be excommunicated following "trial before a jury of his peers, and after having had the privilege of an appeal to a higher court".
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Churches, excommunicated sixty-four members from the Newcastle Methodist society alone for the following reasons: