Excommunicated

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines "excommunication" as being excluded from the communion. This act must be one of the most mysterious acts of the Church. The same encyclopedia describes excommunication as "the principal and severest censure, is a medicinal, spiritual penalty that deprives the guilty Christian of all participation in the common blessings of ecclesiastical society.

We do not really know much about "excommunication" as we know much about "exorcism." Our surplus of knowledge about exorcism though does not presuppose correct knowledge. From cinema and from our own obsession about the darker sides of the spirit and the more physical forms of evil, exorcism has entered into our regular and day-to-day language. When someone acts so strangely without any reason at all or when we feel someone is possessed by beings other than those we categorize as part of the enchanted world, we say "tibaad na-exorcist." The act of driving the evil being becomes in that appropriation of the language itself the possession.

We can play with the word, do a reckless pun, because in our culture evil is part of the quotidian. Evil can be told about in a tale, and evil can be made fun of. But the act of excommunication is just too much for us to have a word-game about it.

There is a perceived finality in the act of excommunication. We see the punitive and, without the orientation, it is easy to miss what the Catholic Encyclopedia, labels as the "medicinal" aspect of the act. Excommunication, if we rely on this source, is not final in the sense that the repentant Christian can be readmitted back into the Christian community.

In my generation, there is one person we link to the act of excommunication. That woman was the popular Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The former First Lady to the assassinated John F. Kennedy was said to have been threatened with excommunication when she married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. It was big news then. I checked an extant list of excommunicated persons but her name does not appear. Other names do appear in the 20^th century: Fidel Castro of Cuba excommunicated by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and Juan Peron in 1955. There are data also on the excommunication of Communist supporters.

The list is long, as lengthy as the shifts and gaps in our histories. There were the royalties: Frederick, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; Henry VIII; Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. There was Joan of Arc, excommunicated and later that sentence nullified. She then was made a Saint, after being immolated or burned a heretic at the stake by the same institutional Church that would uphold her vision and voice (or voices).

Dogmas are, in a sense, historical. When the Church was waging war and the Pope was an Emperor with a magnificent crown, the rules were different. The rules now are also different.

The act of excommunication, however, remains formidable. In the late 60s and early 70s, there was a group of women in a Bikol town who got into the habit of consulting what they called an "Ouija board." It was not strictly speaking that: the device was closer to the Spirit of the Glass. But instead of letters, the board - actually a cartolina - carried the names of the Holy Triune, Jesus Christ, Blessed Virgin Mary and Holy Spirit. Instead of the planchette, a heart-shaped wooden pointer, the group used the regular glass. Before the session, there was the praying of the Rosary.

After each session, some members confided how they were not afraid to go home even if it was dark in the town. They were also called "mga di-araw-awon." This referred to their experience of not being barked at by dogs at night.