Thursday, 3 December 2015

Excommunication: a rant

The Catholic Church has a system for containing and excluding unwanted opinions, behaviour and beliefs. It's called excommunication.

Excommunication. Now there's an interesting word.

I'm not a Catholic, myself, but it seems reasonable to me that Catholics should have a system for discouraging mission-creep in their vast organisation.

But can it really be true that the public announcement of someone's wrong-doing or wrong-thinking is made in Latin? (I've been researching this for some time, but haven't managed to find an official source to confirm this. The titles, at least, of the announcements seem to be in Latin.)

Can it also be true that this announcement doesn't contain a reason for the censure?

Because in that case the fact that it's in a language almost nobody understands probably doesn't matter all that much.

Does it?

Word To Consider Today: excommunicate. This word comes from the Latin excommūnicāre, to exclude from the community, from commūnis, universal.
 



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