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....

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,...

Six Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to give up membership in a Canadian sect whose founder claims to be possessed by the Virgin Mary, the Diocese of Little Rock announced Wednesday.The Rev. J. Gaston Hebert, the diocese administrator, said he notified...

Pope Benedict XVI began his first papal trip to Latin America stressing church opposition to abortion Wednesday, suggesting that Catholic politicians in Mexico had excommunicated themselves by legalizing abortion in that nation's capital.Benedict, who will inaugurate an important regional bishops' conference during his trip, also...