before or after their corpse is displayed on a pike?

I doubt anyone would get anywhere near close enough to do such a thing unless they had a lot of contacts in high places in the organisation known as roman catholocism.

...excommunication is *not* expulsion from the Catholic Church.  It is expulsion from the reception of the sacraments, which, at least in principle,  is a different thing.  That's right: an excommunicated Catholic is considered, by Rome, to still be a Catholic.  In fact, once you are baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, there is basically nothing that I know of, that you can do, in order to get Rome to stop thinking of you as a Catholic.

 

Excommunication is basically an official form of extreme disapproval.  It no longer carries with it the civil penalties which it used to have (...thank goodness for human advancement, and for the Enlightenment...) but it does not make one an ex-Catholic.  It doesn't even send a person to Hell (which is a common misconception, but no, because the Catholic Church thinks that God is the only one who can do that.)  It just basically says that you can't receive Communion or Reconciliation or Anointing of the Sick, or any other Sacrament until you shape up and get the absolution from the proper source (which in certain instances, can be the Holy See--the Pope--himself.  More commonly, the Bishop of the local diocese is competent to grant such absolution.)

 

Sorry to spoil the party.

 

Conor

_________________________________________________________________________

"Faith does not fear reason."--Pope Pius XII

"But it should!"--Me

It would be great to go to get communion and then spit it out and start shouting "it burns! it burns!"

"

I'm a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They'll take you as soon as you're warm.

You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on. You're
A Catholic the moment Dad came"

 

     In grade Two at St. Theresa's catholic school, in South Brewer Maine U.S. of A.  we were instructed on how to baptise a non-catholic if they were near death, or a very recently dead person,  and this baptisim would be accepted by the Vatican and  God  even if we were only seven-years-old.   God and the Pope (John XXIII) would thank and bless us.

  Talk about B.S. abuse against a small child.

 

I read about this happening - I believe in "God is not Great" as late as the 19th century in Italy. In this case it was wealthy Jews would hire Catholics to do housework/take care of the kids on the Sabbath. They would do this and the kid would actually be taken and raised by the church - some as old as 6 or 7. Imagine the poor kid taken from his family because some teen hoe dripped water on his head and then taken and raised in a horific envioronment! The practice was criticized in US and British newspapers, and the Church defended the practice in a Catholic paper at the time.