Musket asks about "excommunication." The Wikipedia article gives a pretty good definition: Excommunication is a religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or (as in the case of the Catholic Church) to restrict certain rights within it.

Excommunication is most usually used in matters over which there is disagreement, to attempt to compel the individual to comply with church policy. Women who receive abortions and practitioners who perform abortions are automatically excommunicated. One of our Mercy sisters was vice president of a Catholic hospital and a member of the hospital ethics committee, and she was excommunicated by her bishop when she voted to allow an abortion when the mother's life was endangered. The nun had to go through a humiliating process of confession and repentance in order to be readmitted. I wish she hadn't submitted to that, but that's what she chose to do.

Excommunication is also used in cases of heresy, when a theologian refuses to retract something that has been deemed contrary to Catholic teaching. Another sanction used on theologians, is the withdrawal of the theologian's license to teach in a Catholic university.

Now, please take note that I tend to agree or at least sympathize with most Catholics who are being excommunicated these days, so please don't ask me to defend excommunication. I'm hoping Pope Francis cuts way back on excommunications. Remember that I'm an associate member of the Sisters of Mercy, and these frickin' bishops have been excommunicating nuns lately.

While it might seem appropriate to excommunicate a child molester, especially if the molester is a priest; that isn't done. There's no controversy, no room for retraction - in most situations nowadays where complaints are substantiated, the priest is simply removed from ministry and never allowed to practice as a priest again - and referred for criminal prosecution. There's still lots of noise about what happened before 2000, but there is now very little tolerance for priests who engage in any sort of sexual misconduct with children.

Many of you won't believe this, but the Catholic Church has been out of the business of punishing people for wrongdoing for a long, long time. By the end of the 16th century, the excesses of the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition had been done away with. Sanctions issued after that time were to ensure compliance, not to punish wrongdoers for sin. Even the Spanish Inquisition referred wrongdoers to civil authorities for punishment - although it's clear that blame for the torture and punishments of the Inquisition, rests squarely on the shoulders of the Inquisitors.

So, the general idea nowadays is that the Catholic Church may issue sanctions to force compliance, but any punishment is meted out in the Hereafter - by a Judge known to be "gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" (Psalms 86, 103, and 145).

-Joe-