SOA Watch Founder Threatened with Excommunication

Written by Arnold Karr

Friday, 14 November 2008 14:10

Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, Vietnam veteran and founder of SOA Watch, which sponsors the annual Vigil to Close the School of the Americas has been threatened with excommonication from the Roman Catholic Church for his public condemnation and defiance of the Vatican's refusal to ordain women to the priesthood. Fr. Bourgeois's response to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency that notified him of his impending excommunication, appears in the online edition of National Catholic Reporter .

Excommunication is defined by the Catholic Encyclopedia as "a medicinal, spiritual penalty that deprives the guilty Christian of all participation in the common blessings of ecclesiastical society." It is the most severe punishment available to the modern Catholic hierarchy for clergy and laity who openly defy church teaching or law.

Fr. Bourgeois is not the first Catholic priest to fall from grace with the Vatican over his social activism or disagreements with church teaching, but he will, if excommunicated, be subjected to a much more severe punishment than most, in the eyes of believing Catholics. Many Catholic priests and theologians have been silenced: forbidden to teach, write, or speak publicly on matters concerning Catholic doctrine, because of their variance from the Vatican's official position. Some priests have even been stripped of their faculties, the authority granted by the Catholic church to administer sacraments in all but extreme circumstances. But exommunication is a complete severing of the relationship between the individual and the faith community.

The Catholic Encyclopedia goes on: "[t]he immediate effects of excommunication... are summed up in the two well known verses:

"Res sacræ, ritus, communio, crypta, potestas,
"prædia sacra, forum, civilia jura vetantur,

"i.e. loss of the sacraments, public services and prayers of the Church, ecclesiastical burial, jurisdiction, benefices, canonical rights, and social intercourse." Without explicitly stating that unrepentant excommunicants are denied peace and happiness in any supposed afterlife, it is implied in that, "the sentence pronounced on earth is ratified in heaven." Thus, according to Catholic belief, God is bound by the Vatican's decree that a person, once excommunicated, is no longer one of the Faithful.

I do not contest the right of any pope, bishop, council, or agency of the Roman Catholic Church to say what they like concerning their beliefs. I do, however, object in the strongest terms possible, to their attempt to exploit the superstition of Catholic friends of Fr. Bourgeois, or of Fr. Bourgeois himself (which I doubt is one of his weaknesses), to deny him the ability to exercise his fundamental right of free expressiion fully and effectively. I should hope that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will come to Fr. Bourgeois's defence and I call on all Catholics who believe their church should be above such bullying to demand no less of their spiritual leaders.

To Fr. Bourgeois, I offer my heartfelt gratitude for your struggle on behalf of all the oppressed. I hope you will take comfort and encouragement from the words of Shakespeare, here amplified:
"This above all: to thine own self be true/ and it must follow, as the night the day,/ thou canst not then be false to any man" or woman, nor excommunicated from any god or goddess. I shall be proud to stand with you at Ft. Benning next week.

Francis Cardinal George, President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has no published e-mail address. His postal address and telephone number are:

His Eminence Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archdiocese of Chicago
P.O. Box 1979
Chicago, IL 60690-1979
Ph: 312-751- 8200

N.B. Fr. Bourgeois is not alone. Members of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, S.C. have also been subjected to threats by a priest based on their political activities. Read here .