How to excommunicate someone without being a priest.

Condemning someone to eternity in hell, accompanied by countless reprobate and demons, is within the reach of any pious Catholic.

Excommunication – basically the exclusion of the religious community from the Catholic Church – represents a condemnation of spiritual darkness. The excommunicated, on the other hand, becomes an outlaw in both the religious and secular life of his community.

We can think of excommunication as the institutional equivalent of the curse.

Now, the ways of excommunicating someone have changed over time. Currently it is enough with the approval of a bishop and a written declaration for the church to consider that a member of its flock has been excommunicated.

This bureaucratic ruling, however, does not nullify the old traditions; for example, the strange medieval rite of excommunication, which is still in force today, although it is no longer in use.

During the Middle Ages the excommunication ritual was a public ceremony, and the public, at that time, was what happened on the altars of churches.

The priest pronounced the name of the person to be excommunicated, closed the Gospels, rang a small bell and extinguished a candle.

Simple ritual but loaded with dire symbols.

The chimes represented the bells of the dead, that is, the ringing that announces the death of a member of the community; and the candle, on the other hand, symbolized the spiritual darkness to which the excommunicated was condemned.

Hence the old ritual of excommunication was known simply as the bell, book, and candle.

In certain places, when the condition of the excommunicated required some other subtlety, the priest might pronounce aloud a short but devastating sentence.

One might suppose that the rite of excommunication was something used only in cases of dire necessity, for example, in spiritually exiling Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I of England, and a long list of kings, emperors, and antipopes; however, we would be making a wrong assumption.

The excommunication was divided right and left, often without evidence; although later, with the same ease, it was revoked.

Joan of Arc, for example, was excommunicated in 1431 by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, the same one who allowed her to receive Communion just before she immolated herself, and whose testimony was decisive for the posthumous nullity of her own sentence in 1456.

Even the Discalced Carmelites were excommunicated during a political brawl.

Filippo Sega, the Pope’s representative in Spain, excommunicated them in 1578. The curious thing is that the good sisters refused to accept the legality of the sentence; in other words, they ignored her and continued in their duties as if nothing had happened. Faced with such heresy, the Vatican had only one alternative: to formally revoke the excommunication in 1579.

Napoleón, Fidel Castro, Juan Perón, among other prominent military and politicians, were excommunicated by the church.

Although at present the approval of a bishop is necessary to formalize an excommunication, the old medieval rite was only substituted, never annulled. This is evidenced by the thousands and thousands of excommunicated people in the Middle Ages who did not require an update in their sentences.

If the excommunication through the old ritual is still in force, that is, the penalty, the same can be thought of the ritual itself.

In turbulent times like medieval times, not many scrolls were required to officiate excommunication. In fact, you didn’t even have to be a priest. It was enough for him to be a man and to have taken the sacrament of baptism.

To justify the title of this article, it must be said that anyone who meets these requirements can excommunicate someone, although this would only constitute a sentence in the first instance. The second, decisive for the sulphur penalty to be effective in terms of eternity, must be signed by a bishop, at least.