EXCOMMUNICATION. To excommunicate means "to cut off from communion" or "to exclude from fellowship in a community." In a Christian setting, the term excommunication also applies to exclusion from Holy Communion, or the...

Excommunication is a religious censure used to deprive or suspend membership in a religious community. The word literally means putting [someone] out of communion. In some churches, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the member or group....

Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, after extensive consulting over many months, has warned church members who retain membership in abortion-rights, right-to-die, and various other groups, that they will be excommunicated. They have until May 15 to resign from them. "Membership in these...

NEW YORK - Cardinal John J. O'Connor said yesterday that he intended last week to prevent, rather than advocate, the excommunication of Roman Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. The reverse interpretation was widely held after an article by Cardinal O'Connor appeared in...

A Vatican official has upheld the 1996 mass excommunication of perhaps hundreds of people in the Lincoln Diocese affiliated with a church reform group and 10 other organizations the diocese considers anti-Catholic.A Nov. 24 letter to Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz in Lincoln from Cardinal Giovanni Battista...

An excommunicated Roman Catholic archbishop continued to defy the Vatican when he installed two married priests as bishops on Sunday.In front of a sea of reporters and photographers and several dozen congregants, Raymond A. Grosswirth of Rochester, N.Y., and Dominic Riccio, of the Newark Archdiocese,...