Excommunication: What is it?

The Pope doing his Excommunication Stance. (kidding)

Excommunication is a religious censure used to deprive, suspend or limit membership in a religious community. The word means putting [someone] out of communion. In some religions, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group. Excommunication may involve banishment, shunning, and shaming, depending on the religion, the offense that caused excommunication, or the rules or norms of the religious community.

Noynoy Aquino received a threat from the church for supporting the RH Bill.
“Being the President of all, you must consider the position of the Catholic Church because we are approaching this issue from the moral aspect,” the CBCP president, Bishop Nereo Odchimar, said on Church-run Radio Veritas. Source: Here

Okay, not kidding.

 

The Catholic Church

In Roman Catholic canon law, excommunication is a censure and thus a "medicinal penalty" intended to invite the person to change behaviour or attitude, to repent and return to full communion.It is not an "expiatory penalty", designed to make satisfaction for the wrong done, still less a merely "vindictive penalty", designed solely to punish.

Excommunication can be either latae sententiae (automatic, incurred at the moment of committing the offence for which canon law imposes that penalty); or it can ferendae sententiae (incurred only when imposed by a legitimate superior or declared as the sentence of an ecclesiastical court).
Excommunicated Catholics are still Catholics and remain bound by 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.). However, their communion with the Church is considered gravely impaired. In spite of that, they are urged to retain a relationship with the Church, as the goal is to encourage them to repent and return to active participation in its life.

Excommunicated persons are barred from participating in the liturgy in a ministerial capacity (for instance, as a reader if a lay person, or as a deacon or priest if a clergyman) and from receiving the Eucharist or the other Sacraments, but are not barred from attending these (for instance, an excommunicated person may not receive the Eucharist, but is not barred from attending Mass). They are also forbidden to exercise any ecclesiastical office or the like. If the excommunication has been imposed or declared, stricter effects follow, such as the obligation on others to prevent the excommunicated person from acting in a ministerial capacity in the liturgy or, if this proves impossible, to suspend the liturgical service, and the invalidity of acts of ecclesiastical governance by the excommunicated person.

In the Catholic Church, excommunication is normally resolved by a declaration of repentance, profession of the Creed (if the offence involved heresy), or a renewal of obedience (if that was a relevant part of the offending act) 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." Since excommunication excludes from reception of the sacraments, absolution from excommunication is required before absolution can be given from the sin that led to the censure. In many cases, the whole process takes place on a single occasion in the privacy of the confessional. For some more serious wrong-doings, absolution from excommunication is reserved to a bishop or other ordinary or even to the Pope. These can delegate a priest to act on their behalf.

Before the 1983 Code of Canon Law, there were two degrees of excommunication: the excommunicate was either a vitandus (shunned, literally "to be avoided", by other Catholics), or a toleratus (tolerated, allowing Catholics to continue to have business and social relationships with the excommunicated person). This distinction no longer applies.

In the Middle Ages, formal acts of public excommunication were sometimes accompanied by a ceremony wherein a bell was tolled (as for the dead), the Book of the Gospels was closed, and a candle snuffed out — hence the idiom "to condemn with bell, book and candle". Such ceremonies are not held today, but the effect is the same.

Interdict is a censure similar to excommunication. It too excludes from ministerial functions in public worship and from reception of the sacraments, but not from the exercise of governance.

Source: Here

All RH Bill followers just relax. The church got no balls on doing this or we will all shift to Buddhism.