as a punishment that deprives the guilty of all participation in the common spiritual benefits enjoyed by all the members of the Christian society. There are certainly other corrective measures which entail the loss of certain particular rights; and among these are such censures as suspension for clerics, interdict for clerics and laymen and whole communities, irregularity ex delicto, and others. The excommunicated person does not cease to be a Christian, for his baptism can never be effaced but he is considered as an exile, and even, one may say, as non-existing, for a time at any rate, in the sight of ecclesiastical authority. But such exile comes to an end, and this the Church most ardently desires, so soon as the offender has given adequate satisfaction, yet meantime his status is that of an alien and a stranger.
Since excommunication is the forfeiture of the spiritual privileges of a certain society, it follows that those only can be excommunicated who by any right whatsoever belong to this society. Moreover, strictly speaking, excommunication can only be declared against baptized and living people, a point to be considered in detail later. Moreover, in order to fall within the jurisdiction of the forum externum, which alone can inflict excommunication, the offence incurring this penalty must be public and external. For there is a well-defined separation between those things appertaining to the forum externum, or public ecclesiastical tribunal, and the forum internum, or tribunal of conscience. At the same rime, in the Bull “Exsurge Domine,” 16th May, 1520, Leo X, rightly condemned the twenty-third proposition of Luther according to which “excommunications are merely external punishments, nor do they deprive a man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church.” Pius VI, “Auctorem Fidei,” 28th August, 1794, also condemned the forty-sixth proposition of the pseudo-synod of Pistoia, which maintained that the effect of excommunication is exterior only, because of its own nature it excludes only from exterior communion with the Church, as if, said the Pope, excommunication were not essentially also a spiritual penalty binding in heaven and affecting souls. The aforesaid proposition was therefore condemned as “falsa et perniciosa,” false and pernicious, already reprobated and condemned in the twenty-third proposition of Luther, and, to say the very least, it incurs the technical mark
