WRONG TO CHURCH

Evening Post, Issue 12, 14 July 1936, Page 9

WRONG TO CHURCH

FILM WRITER PUNISHED

EXCOMMUNICATION ORDERED

CALLOUS TO PARENTS

CuiicU I'ross Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.

(Received July 1.-, 10.10 a.m.) '

LONDON, July 13. As a result of a jury's rider censuring a film writer, James Bunting; for callousness in not helping his parents, the Rev. Henry and Mrs. Bunting, in their desperate financial straits, culminating in their suicide together, the Bishop of Chichester has excommunicated him.

The Bishop, in a letter to Bunting, says: "The rider appears to be fully justified. In view of the grave wrong you have done your neighbours and the Church, which demands great i-e----pentance, I forbid you Holy Communion." ■

"The excommunication is the first imposed by the Church of England for more than a century," said Bunting. "I am treated worse than a mur- | derer. It is true that my. parents gave me between £3000 and £4000, but my father left a letter addressed to the Coroner stating that he did not blame me as I was making good in my career and was starting to help him. I have given my parents £600 in the past few months. I am taking counsel's opinion and am going to court if necessary. I have received over 200 letters of sympathy." ANOTHER BISHOPS CRITICISM. "I wish to dissociate myself decisively from the Bishop.of Chichester's action," declares Dr. Barnes, Bishop .of Birmingham. "It is taken under a rule dealing with an open and notorious evil liver or with one who has wronged his neighbours, but which happily is obsolete, although some bishops have wished to revive it in connection with divorced people. I consider that disciplinary excommunication is wrong. Moreover, I would not condemn a man on a rider by a Coroner's jury, which is not set to inquire into a man's conduct. Even if a man is worthy of censure, why should a bishop prevent him obtaining moral strength from the Sacraments? It is sometimes implied that others might be scandalised by seeing a man whose conduct is not good receive Communion, but such Pharisaism is shocking and un-Christian."

Excommunication, the judicial exclusion of offenders from the rights and privileges of the religious community to which they belong, niay be traced back to pagan times and the exclusion from purification with, holy water of an offender whose hands were defiled with bloodshed. The use of excommunication as a form of Christian discipline is based on the teaching of Jesus and on apostolic practice. Matthew" (xviii 15-17) described a threefold method of admonition, first privately; then before witnesses, then before the. Church. The passages involved here and elsewhere have been argued to imply an exclusion from church fellowship rather than a final cutting-off from salvation. In the medieval church two forms were in use, one involving exclusion from the .Eucharist, the other exclusion from all church privileges. For some sins, such as adultery, the sentence was regarded as irrevocable. Other sjns were the subject of important controversies, the stricter church party holding that there was to be no restoration of .church fellowship even in the hour of death. With the issue of edicts against heresy excommunication exposed a man to serious temporal risks. The Magistrate then became the excommunicating official. At the Reformation the Anglican Church gave the "bishops the right of sentence (subject to appeal to the Sovereign, the head of the Church) and their sentence, if sustained,, might carry civil consequences. The right is never exercised, for legally the sentence, if certified by the bishop, is followed by a writ de excommunicato for the arrest of the offender.