De convenientia institutorum Romanae Ecclesiae cum Evangelica libertate

1. There is another objection by which heretics seem to undermine Christian liberty: the censure of excommunication, by which someone is barred from the sacraments and from all human company, and¹ consigned into Satan’s hands.

For what graver, harsher, or more servile thing can befall a person than to be cast out of the company of Christians² and handed over to the most savage enemy? Yet we are also admonished by the blessed Paul³ not to curse anyone.⁴ Moreover, what greater, graver, or more detestable curse can befall a Christian than to be barred from all human fellowship, all the sacraments, and all suffrages? And what is most miserable of all: to be delivered captive to a most bitter⁵ enemy?

2. In this matter, however, it must be considered with the greatest care that the judgment of the Pontiffs is just to the extent that it is like and conforms to the judgment of God, whose ministers they are. The Most High God is accustomed to recall a person from vice to virtue in two ways. At times he afflicts him with some loss or hardship, such as illness, loss of wealth, loss of power, or the death of relatives and friends.⁶ At other times, by his own power he allows the person to rely on himself and withdraws his aid, so that, having perceived the weakness of his own strength, he may return more humbly to God, from whom he had turned away through pride. Therefore the supreme Pontiff of our Church brings about both in excommunicating a person: to make him eventually return to a better way of life through shame⁷, he casts him shamefully out of the company of the faithful; and to make him, recognizing himself unworthy of spiritual things,⁸ seek divine aid as a suppliant, he bars him from spiritual helps—that is, from the sacraments—which could greatly help him to live well. There is therefore no loss to evangelical liberty if someone who refuses to obey the commands of his superiors⁹ is marked with the censure of excommunication so that he may return to a better way of life.

3. For our Savior Christ, prescribing the manner and form of fraternal correction, decrees that one who will not hear the Church—that is, its prelate—is to be treated as a gentile and a publican. Paul too, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter V,¹⁰ pronouncing a sentence of excommunication against an incestuous man, says: Though absent in body, I am present in spirit; I have already judged, as though present, the one who has acted in this way: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are assembled and my spirit is with you, with the power of our Lord Jesus, to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. He also writes to the Thessalonians, in the last chapter, in these words: If anyone does not obey our word in this letter, mark that person, and do not associate with him, so that he may be put to shame.¹¹ He also tells Timothy¹² that he handed Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan, so that they might learn not to blaspheme. If, then, the divine Apostle, the greatest champion of evangelical liberty, thinks that lost and wicked people must at times be kept from the common company of men, what reason is there that a contumacious and rebellious person should not be condemned by the Christian censure of excommunication by the Roman Pontiff or other Pontiffs,¹³ without any such loss of liberty? For one who scorns to obey the commands of his superiors is not led by the Holy Spirit, so as to enjoy that liberty of which the Apostle says: Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.¹⁴ And therefore, if he must be compelled by this penalty of excommunication to a better and holier life, it is indeed very harsh and grievous to be excluded from human society; yet it is not unjust, nor foreign to evangelical teaching, that one who by his obstinacy has cast off Christian liberty and does not seek to obey his shepherd and ruler,¹⁵ should be pressed by such a burden and bound by such a chain, so that, brought to his senses through shame and loss, he may be led back to the path of true liberty.

4. The statement that he is handed over to Satan is not to be understood as though, condemned as in a court of judgment, he were delivered into the demons’ hands to suffer the final punishment. Rather, because through his stubbornness and recklessness he is deprived of the Church’s sacraments and suffrages, by which he could indeed protect himself against Satan’s assaults,¹⁶ he is cast away, as it were unarmed, to be tested by the demon,¹⁷ and so falls into sins more easily and more disastrously. For just as he raises his horn against Christ’s vicar, so¹⁸ he too is brought low without any loss of evangelical liberty, cast down from every ecclesiastical advantage and benefit.

The Apostle warns us to beware of that curse by which we wish and pray for evil to befall a person for this sole purpose: that he be afflicted, grieve, and suffer torment.¹⁹ But he does not in any way deter us from the other kind, by which²⁰ we wish some harm to befall a person who recklessly departs from the commands of his superiors—or rather, from the law of God Most Good,²¹ so that he himself, having come to his senses, may return to virtue’s embrace, and the rest, taught by his misfortune, may walk the right path.²² For doctors too, very often, when they find a putrid limb,²³ cut it off for the health of the whole body.