Excommunication code revised

Press, 21 January 1983, Page 6

Excommunication code revised

NZPA Vatican City The number of offences leading to excommunication have been greatly reduced and the role of women in the Catholic Church is improved in a long-awaited revision of Canon Law to be published in the Vatican next week. Archbishop Rosalio Jose Castillo Lara, president of the Vatican’s Canon Law Reform Commission, said yesterday that 20 years of effort were involved in the reform

of the Church's 1917 code, which will take effect on January 25. From an original 42 acts leading to excommunication, the new code retains fewer than a quarter: physical aggression against the Pope, profanation of the Eucharist, apostasy (quitting a religious order or renouncing vows without legal dispensation), heresy, and schism, ordination of a bishop without authorisation of the Pope, violation of the secret of

confession, absolution of an accomplice in cardinal sin, and an act of abortion. Archbishop Castillo Lara said that Canon Law reformers had at first considered “forbidding" abortion rather than punishing it with excommunication, a distinction which would have deprived the “accused” of their right to the sacraments but not have excluded them from the Church. Among the excommunicable sins dropped by the

revised code are membership in an organisation defined as opposing the Church (such as the Free Masons) and Anathema (excommunication pronounced by the Pope himself). Although the code continues to offer no hope that women may be ordained Catholic priests, woman’s dignity and her role in the Church are treated in a new “spirit of respect towards laymen" in general. Archbishop Castillo Lara said.