How to Get Excommunicated
If you've decided that it's time to lose your religion, and you happen to be a Roman Catholic, you're going to find the task more difficult than you might think. To get out of the Catholic Church, you need to be excommunicated. Though the church threatens excommunication regularly, few people are ever excommunicated even if they've more than met the "requirements." If you'd like to get excommunicated, here's how.
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Instructions
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Write a long letter to your parish detailing your denouncement of faith. Other than physically attacking the pope, desecrating a consecrated host, or getting an abortion, none of which is recommended, writing angry letters denouncing all faiths will eventually get you excommunicated from the church if you're pushy enough.
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Find another mainstream, well-recognized religion to join. Conversion is a decent way to get excommunicated, though you'll still have to push the church to kick you out. This is called apostasy, which is one of the canonically official ways to get excommunicated.
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Pull the heretic card. This one is difficult, unless you plan on renouncing certain canons of the church and generating pamphlets and a reasonable following. For example, you could decide that the bible proves that Jesus was green and from Pluto and then you could get excommunicated as a heretic.
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Create a schism. Take heresy to the next level and form a splinter sect of Catholicism that worships the green Plutonian Jesus and denounces transubstantiation and then write a letter to your parish inviting them to join the new church. This will most definitely get you formally excommunicated, although you may still have to formally request excommunication from the church to get the ball rolling.
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Comments
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Only one problem with excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church - you still remain a Catholic. You simply lose rights such as the right to the sacraments, but you are still bound by the obligations of Roman Catholic law. See "New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law" (2000) for more information on this. It seems there is no real way of leaving the Church altogether. The best one can do is be excommunicated!
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vardlokkur
Sep 21, 2009
So if you have an abortion, and the church doesn't find out, you're still excommunicated even though they'll likely give you communion anyway... it's just an invalid communion according to church doctrine. Formal excommunications are usually done for high profile cases... such as "schismatic" sects that ordain women... in order to strengthen their position that women can't be priests. Still, they're not "excommunicating" so much as they are confirming that they are schismatics and already excommunicated. -
vardlokkur
Sep 21, 2009
This article is misleading. Excommunication doesn't mean you're "not Catholic" according to the church. If you've been baptized, they're always going to consider you Catholic. Excommunication is more like a penalty for a grave sin... you aren't eligible for sacraments anymore, such as communion, which for a devout Catholic is meant to be incentive to REPENT and get the excommunication lifted. In fact, a Catholic who is excommunicated is still obligated to go to mass (it used to be some crimes were considered bad enough that an excommunicate was kicked out... but that's not the case anymore). Furthermore, if you've committed the sins you reference (apostasy/schismatism/heresy, abortion, desecration of a host, beating up the pope, betraying certain clerical duties), you're ALREADY excommunicated regardless of the church's official statement or even knowledge. So if you have an ab...
