Does Excommunication Send You To Hell?

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

11 thoughts on “Does Excommunication Send You To Hell?”

  3. “Galileo was excommunicated for holding that the sun is the center of the universe, not just the solar system but the whole universe.”
    Well, when you put it like that …
    🙂

  4. I thought Galileo was excommunicated for his theological nonsense, like his demand that we change the Bible to accommodate his interpretation of scripture.

  5. I just love it when people with absolutely no knowledge of the “Galileo Affair” use it to attack the Catholic Church. I actually had a conversation with a coworker that went exactly like this (abridged version) :
    Coworker : You are Catholic. Therefore, you are stupid and ignorant. The proof that all Catholics are stupid is that the Church burned Galileo down because he said that the Earth was not flat.
    Me : Galileo was not executed and his controversial (unproved) opinion was not that the Earth was not flat but that the Earth circled the Sun rather than the other way around.
    Coworker : The Earth circles the sun ?!?

  6. Pertaining to the last part of Mr Akins segment:
    I had a priest deny me absolution when I confessed the grave sin of masturbation.
    He told me that the Church no longer believes that masturbation is a serious sin. or a sin at all.
    I told him nothing of the circumstances surrounding the act neither did Father ask.
    He just flat out told me that it is not a sin.
    I actually started choking up and I begged him to absolve me and he said I will not.
    This actually happened with two different priests, before I went to a very orthodox priest 87 miles from my parish, who absolved me straight up.
    I do not think that this situation is all that rare.

  7. He just flat out told me that it is not a sin.
    I actually started choking up and I begged him to absolve me and he said I will not.
    I don’t like to get involved in these sorts of sensitive issues without knowing the parties involved, but these sorts of things, in my observation, seem to be a bit more common than one might think.
    I once went to a priest and after confessing my sins, he said something like, “I don’t see any sins, here, so, I’ll give you a blessing.” I confronted him after Mass and read him the Riot Act. I had confessed these habits of sin to many different confessors over the years (including my spiritual director) who recognized them as sins. I concluded that the priest’s formation may have been defective or he did not understand English too well (he had an accent).
    I have also had at least two priests use invalid forms of absolution. In one case, my, then, spiritual director (to whom I had to repeat the confession) made the comment, “What, am I living in the time of St. Dominic?” He was very disgusted with the idea that the priest did not use the correct form.
    Priests are human. They can be in error in what they believe. Some are not well trained. Some have their own interpretations of the regulations. I would send a note to the bishop to ask him to look into the training of his priests (you can be circumlocusitive in describing your circumstances, perhaps). My spiritual director asked my permission to tell his superior (he was an Order priest) what had happened about the invalid confession and said he would ask his superior’s permission to tell the bishop.
    I suspect the priest, in your case, might be confused by the wording in the CCC (especially the last paragraph):
    2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”137 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.”138
    To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability.
    Now, if the priest does not know you (as in recognizing you in a face-to-face confession) or does not ask questions well enough to determine your moral responsibility, he ought to assume sin rather than deny it and absolve, in my opinion.
    You are right in that nowhere in the text, above, does it say that the Church no longer believes that it is a serious sin. It does say that subjective imputability may be mitigated by several factors, in the same way that anger caused by habitual drinking or other so-called habits of sin might be mitigated in their severity.
    I suspect this is the issue that confused the priest. This seems to be pastoral psychology run amok.
    In any case, pray for the priest and try to forgive him. Confession is the most sensitive of the sacraments and sometimes mismatches happen. One can hope that the topic can be made clearer to the priest at some time in the future. On the other hand, there are legitimate mitigating circumstances for some sins. I know of some people who are prone to anger who have brain tumors. How is one to assign guilt?
    Try to find a good spiritual director who can really get to know you so that he can properly assess your state. That would probably be the best way to deal with the situation. I would also avoid that priest when possible in the confessional, since it seems as though this wound could be re-opened.
    Jimmy is correct that a perfect act of contrition does forgive sins, but it is harder to make a perfect act of contrition than approaching the confessional which allows for imperfect contrition (I assume you are aware of the difference).
    The Chicken

  8. “…but it is harder to make a perfect act of contrition than approaching the confessional which allows for imperfect contrition (I assume you are aware of the difference).”
    Agreed, is it harder for me to make the perfect act since I really think that I am sorry for the sin purely out of love of Almighty God and offending His perfect justice, yet I am not humanely sure that my sorrow, out of justice sake is sincere and complete.
    That is of course why all men need sacramental confession.

  9. For some reason I thought Galileo was excommunicated for disobedience. That is, he was told to stop disseminating his views until they could be reviewed and checked for scientific accuracy, and he failed to do that.
    As an aside, you bear a remarkable resemblance to a close, very religious friend of mine. I’ll have to check and see where he is during the period of times you’ve been doing these shows. . .

  10. Galileo? Let me introduce you to my friend Copernicus who about 200 years before presents a Heliocentric model of the universe, which was used an taught in schools. What was Galileo’s problem?
    “Prove it.”
    “Here look. See how the moons move around Jupiter.”
    “Prove it.”
    “… it moves.”
    “Prove it.”
    His problem was although he could observe a certain phenomena, he couldn’t prove it. It is the same situation with Global Warming/Climate Change.
    “The Earth’s temperature is rising.”
    “Prove the hypothesis of Global Warming.”
    “We have the highest hurricane records this year.”
    “Prove the hypothesis of Global Warming.”
    “Our undersea robots are malfunction. We need to conduct more research.”
    “Prove the hypothesis of Global Warming.”
    And people say you can’t use anything you learn in highschool.

Comments are closed.