can rescind excommunications of the third class; whilst the fourth kind, nemini reseruatae, can be revoked by any priest having authority without the need of a particular delegation. Over and above this, there exist in practice certain concessions since bishops enjoy very liberal faculties and indults, which are moreover, most widely communicable whereby they are empowered to absolve in foro interno from all cases except those which are most definitely and nominatim reserved to the Supreme Pontiff. There are also the circumstances technically known as “Urgent Cases,” when the power granted is valid for all cases, without exception, legally reserved though they may be to the highest authorities, even to the Pope himself, and even for the absolution of an accomplice (Holy Office, 7th June, 1899). Finally canon law lays down that at the point of death or in danger of death, all reservations cease and all necessary jurisdiction is supplied by the Church. “At the point of death,” says the Council of Trent (Session XIV, c. vii), “in danger of death,” says the Rituale Romanum, any priest can absolve from all sins and censures, even if he be without the ordinary faculty of confessor or if he himself be excommunicated. He may even do this in the presence of another priest who is duly and canonically authorized, enjoying jurisdiction (Holy Office, 29th July, 1891).
It has been said by a modem historian: “The awful import of Excommunication barely can be realized at the present time. People idly wonder why the excommunicated take their case so seriously—why they do not turn to find amusement, or satisfaction, in another channel,—why they persist in lying prone in the mire where the fulmination struck them. And, indeed, in modern times the formal sentence rarely is promulgated, and only against persons of distinction like the German Dr. Dollinger or the Sabaudo King Vittoremanuele II di Savoja, whose very circumstances provided them with the means to allay the temporal irritation of the blow.”[11] The immediate effects of excommunication are summed up in the two famous verses:
Res sacrae, ritus, communio, crypta, potestas,
praedia sacra, forum, ciuilia iura uetantur.
It may be well now to glance very briefly at the history of the actual practice of excommunication. Among the Jews
