excommunication.net

The Saint Stanislaus Committee was an ad hoc group of Catholics formed in 1989 and consisted of the people listed to the left, who endorsed the document below. The thesis of the document, which was circulated to various Catholic publications with the intent of attracting favorable notice from bishops, is that bishops should admonish Catholics who are public promoters of abortion; those who refuse to recant should be publicly excommunicated.

The committee takes its name from an 11^th century bishop in Poland who excommunicated the king for the killing of innocents, when other prelates refused to act. He was executed for his faithfulness.

Let us say immediately that there may be a reluctance in treating of such a distasteful matter and there may even be a kind of inertia in the implementation of Church laws regarding these cases, but let no one imagine that anyone supporting the cause of abortion can remain within the membership of the Catholic Church once the elements of the case are clearly defined. Complicity by Catholics in the crime of abortion is, in fact, what this committee has girded itself to lay bare.

"The Church, like any other society, has the right to protect itself by laying down the conditions under which one may become and remain a member and enjoy the benefits of that society." Now, "a member of the Church cannot without fault deny or repudiate Catholic Truth . . ., and the Church," as Pope Pius XII explains. He further states that, "excluding such a member from the Communion of the faithful, remains strictly within its competency and acts for the protection, so to speak, of its domestic right." A cancer spreading through the body must be removed before the whole body is endangered.

The censures of Canon Law are penalties imposed by the Church on members guilty of grave offenses. The Church makes use of these censures for the sanctity and purity of her membership and to maintain her integrity as an organization.

Crimes embracing immoral laws against human life are expressly treated in Ecclesiastical Law, and these crimes are punishable under that Law. So while civil law has withdrawn its protection from the unborn and has, in a word, abandoned them, Sacred Law has not. And though the Church cannot protect them with arms or police, it does reserve its most severe censures for both deterring their eventual aggressors and expelling from its membership their actual ones. Excommunication, as a final and extreme censure, is employed by the Church in instances of grievous offenses when the normal means of admonition have failed and especially where serious scandal and grave damage are involved, as indeed they both patently are in the present case. Prescinding from all individual judgments upon these cases, Canon Law specifically decrees the censure of excommunication to be automatically incurred (latae sententiae) by all those without whose participation the fulfilled act of abortion would not be possible.

It is helpful here to distinguish between those who create, through the media and the government, the climate and the conditions necessary for the practice of abortion, and those who actually perform and undergo the medical and surgical procedures of abortion. Pius XII enunciates a relevant principle: "We certainly do not intend to excuse the true offenders, but the greater responsibility falls on the prophets, on the supporters, on the creators of a culture, of a state power, of a legislation, which does not recognize God and His sovereign rights."

Even before abortion is a sin against justice in the moral order it is already a sin against truth in the cognitive order, that is to say, an error against the Church’s teaching that the child in the womb is an inviolable human life created by God. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has stated: "The fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence . . . demands the unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being in his bodily and spiritual totality. The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception." The legalization of abortion and then the practice of abortion were both preceded by the defense of abortion by various written and vocal organs of communication. It is already at this stage of formal heresy that its theoreticians and supporters lose all rights to the sacramental benefits of the Church and as public figures should receive formal notification to that effect from Church authorities. The confusion of the faithful occasioned by the unchallenged propagation of doctrinal and moral error is further aggravated by the scandal of sacrilegious Communions by unrepentant public sinners.

There appears to be a hesitancy in enforcing these Canons because of what is mistakenly seen to be a conflict between the right to life and right to privacy of conscience. "To be a Christian," writes Pius XII, "means, in practice, to accept the Will and the commandments of Christ and to conform one’s single internal and external acts to these, that is to say, to this life which the free human will has chosen. The conscience is the spiritual faculty that in particular cases points out to the human will so that it may choose and decide those acts which conform to the divine will. The conscience is therefore the faithful echo, a reflection of the Divine Norm of human actions; so that the expression 'judging according to a Christian conscience' means that the ultimate and personal norm of decision for a moral action is, therefore, taken from the Word and the Will of Christ. He is, in fact, 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life.' From this it follows that forming the Christian conscience consists above all in the illumination of the mind regarding the Will of Christ: His Law, His Way. Conscience, being a pupil, not a teacher, can and must be educated." In a word, a conscience is formed by learning moral truth, not by constituting itself as an absolute arbiter of moral right and wrong. An aberrant conscience is healed by instruction, not by silence. "The liberty of conscience," the same Pope writes, "has its inherent limits if, in fact, truth is not the same as error, and if, in fact, the healthy conscience of man is the Voice of God. The liberty of conscience and even the liberty of thought have their inherent limits in the Truthfulness of God the Revealer."

Now certainly no one can possibly have a "right" to do what Almighty God has forbidden and what the natural light of reason itself prohibits. The physical or legal ability to do moral wrong as seen as a "right" is only the mindless right of damnation. We should not teach mothers that they have a right or a "choice" to kill their children any more than we should teach children that they have a right to kill their mothers.

"The simple fact," the Pope writes, "of being declared by the legislative power an obligatory norm in the State, taken alone and in itself, is not sufficient to create a true right. The "criterion of simple fact" is valid only for the One who is the Author and sovereign ruler of every right: God. Applying it indistinctly and definitively to the human legislator, as if his law might be the supreme norm of law, is an error and an error that equals a deifying of the State itself." The liberty of killing one’s own child is an illegitimate and false right and the real significance of this fictitious right is nothing but the "right" of the stronger, that is the right of the tyrants, of the bullies, and of the violent. There is a dangerous consequence about declaring rights which we do not really have, namely, we not only do not gain a right, we actually lose one, and perhaps even the principal one.

The permission to act criminally presented as an enlargement of liberty or as an increase in "choices" only changes the words but not the reality. Allowing an evil and allowing to one "choose" an evil are, of course, one and the same thing.

A presumed right to take the life of an innocent person, moreover, intrinsically contradicts itself, in that it lacks that mutual co-relativeness of true rights. The defense of the right to life of every individual, regardless of his stage of development, is an obligation that should never be obstructed, intimidated, or placed in doubt by any presumed right of an erroneous conscience. "Error, whether in the mind or in the conscience, has, objectively speaking, no right; neither to exist, nor to be heard, nor to propagate."

Many ostensibly Catholic legislators are, moreover, bringing about involuntary cooperation in abortion by the entire populace through laws which reimburse or pay for these crimes with public money. This legislation, though it may be deceptively presented as aid to poor people, is nonetheless collusive participation in the actual crime, employing funds, stolen as it were, from people horrified at even unintentional complicity. The just levying of taxes for purposes about which individual citizens may disagree is totally unlike the unjust levying of taxes for purposes which are criminal, such as abortion. This grave principle is not invalidated through its abusive misapplication to politically rather than morally objectionable government spending. Superficial parallels with certain other issues find no basis in the Church’s moral or social teaching and only demonstrate a crude ethical discernment.

There is, in any case, a logical gap in the original legal authorization of acts so secret and uncontrollable that they are protected by a constitutional right to privacy, then becoming so much a part of the common good that the public must pay for them. That is to say, it does not seem that everyone should have to take financial responsibility for something that no one has a right to even know is happening. The crime’s initial legal justification leads one to believe that it is happening in the privacy of bedrooms, when in fact it is happening in public hospitals and often at public expense.

A yet more dishonorable and immoral involvement in this wrongdoing is the present effort by some public representatives to pressure into participation, by means of government policies and regulations, even the hospitals which have, until now, opposed such unethical and sinful practices. With this legislative maneuver we are moving into a whole new disturbing stage in the nightmare of abortion; that is to say, here we are talking not about people doing crimes which they choose to do, but about people being pressured into doing crimes which they choose not to do. Those seeking respectability for the depraved cause of abortion frequently appeal to watchwords such as "liberty" and "choice", but, as Pius XII points out, "too often, they themselves, as soon as they have acquired power, have had nothing more urgent to do than violate consciences and impose on the Catholic part of the population an oppressing yoke."

We cannot deal with the tragedy of abortion without dealing with "abortionists"; specifically, with all those who, while hypothetically dissembling Catholic membership are, in the practice and propagation of abortion, defying God, nature, and the Church. If a flagrant sinner, even in respect to his private life, is not exempt from public Church censure, how can we ever accept or even explain how members of the Church are being allowed, with an almost sacred impunity, to carry on a program of moral evils that exceed in gravity anything that the Church has experienced even at the hands of the most obdurate heretics?

How proud the faithful can feel when they hear of the courageous cardinals in the various countries of the world defending the Faith against stern dictators! Should we expect any less of our prelates, who enjoy the blessings of liberty? There is the possibility that when civil and caring persons have returned once again to their true human sentiments and come to realize the horror of a world where mothers are killing off their own children, they are going to ask a very disturbing question: "Why did not our spiritual leaders respect the Church’s law on excommunication?"

Once a penal censure forms a part of the promulgated law, the question, from that moment, is no longer, "Should that censure be enacted?", but rather, "Why is that censure not being enacted?" Personal initiatives, however laudable they may be, do not usually carry with them the same accountability as a strict juridical obligation. As Pius XII states: "a bishop is not above the law, he is under the law. In truth, he is much more: he is the sacred guardian of the Law." The implementation then, of Canon Law in this situation is neither arbitrary nor innovative, but a question of episcopal trust, which cannot be passed over without damage to the Church and its members.

The Church’s canonical code is particularly sensitive to the demands of Christian mercy. The sanctions of the Church do not aim at punishing but at emending and ultimately restoring a soul to God’s grace. Unlike civil penal law, where usually the guilty must submit to their full sentence, the penalties of Church Law can be suspended just as soon as there is "moral certainty of a conversion of the heart." The implementation of Canon Law works for the true good of the offender as well. Negligence in this duty frustrates the code’s curative function and fails to place sin and conversion in their eternal dimensions.

The Church’s law considers the spiritual welfare and salvation of all her members including the violators of her teachings. Fraternal correction first and, that failing, excommunication are both taught by Christ Himself: "Appeal to the Church, but if he refuses to hear even the Church, let him be to you as the heathen and the publican. Amen I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven," (Mt. 18:17-18).

The Ecclesiastic law is aimed at the common good of the Ecclesiastical society, namely, the Church. It must above all consider, as indeed law should, the rights of the weakest in society and especially the defenseless. Now, as we know, beyond the loss of life, infants being aborted suffer agonizing pain. Considering this excruciating torment and the ultimate loss of the infant’s life, any exaggerated focusing on the presumed needs of the blameworthy to the exclusion of the true victims and their real rights would be improper. Who would doubt that all possible censures at the Church’s disposition should be employed in the interest of saving unborn children?

There are, too, thousands of honorable doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who, refusing to participate in abortion procedures, will now find their job positions and job opportunities threatened by new laws aimed at forcing them into collaboration. Many courageous politicians and political candidates as well have stood for the legal protection of all life. Both these groups have a right to expect the firm enforcement of Church law in the upholding of these ethical standards.

This Committee is not interested in any punitive aspect of excommunication but only in its deterrent aspect. And it is toward the goal of ending the killing that the members of this Committee call for the urgent and scrupulous enforcement of Canon Law regarding all those who promote abortion either through the written and spoken media or through the various branches of the legal system.

In presenting this case in its juridical aspects we do not wish to imply that the impossibility of abortion-sponsors remaining in the Church derives only from a number of codified laws. The moral sensibility of the faithful, rooted in the commandments of God, in the teaching of the Church, and in their own hearts, which is so gravely violated by the reality of abortion, prohibits anyone from banalizing the tragedy into a question of legal technicalities. Foremost in this regard is the misunderstanding or the misrepresentation of the ipso facto, or automatic, character of some canonical penalties. This self-inflicting nature of certain censures is applicable particularly in cases where the offense and the proof of the offense are, we might say, one and the same, such as, for example, a public statement supporting the cause of abortion.

Before the public enforcement of the penalties of excommunication the Committee recommends a private and fatherly warning followed by a discreet period for reflection, so as to afford the offender the opportunity of turning back from his wrongdoing; but it must be emphasized that the gravity of the crime with its ongoing toll of victims precludes any disproportionate attention to subtle or evasive procedural points. It should be noted, moreover, that there are no particularly obligatory procedures "where both the crime and the contumacy of the violator are notorious and therefore sufficiently proved."

The Church status of Catholic accomplices in abortion is not an irreversible path leading to excommunication. There is one alternative, but only one: the honest withdrawal from all patronage of the abortion cause. And it is for this that the members of the Saint Stanislas Committee sincerely pray.

From the very moment of conception, as Saint Anselm teaches, a child has a Guardian Angel, and his soul is in the hands of God. We shall say the Rosary for those who try not to see in this tiny infant the image of an Almighty God, and we ask the "Little Flower," Saint Therese, "to let fall upon them from heaven a shower of roses" to touch their hearts.

Until every woman "with child" perceives in the fruit of her womb a living life, may Mary, the Mother of all the living, accept in a special way, these little orphans and may Saint Joseph be their foster father. We ask this of God our Father through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

THE SAINT STANISLAUS COMMITTEE

Executive Committee Chairman:
Willi>THE SAINT STANISLAUS COMMITTEE

Executive Committee Chairman:
William Cotter
P.O. Box 870037
Milton Village, MA 02187
 

Spiritual Advisor: Father Thomas Carleton