CHURCH IN MASS ENDING.Byline: Maurice Fitzmaurice IN years gone by being excommunicated from the church was like, well there isn't really a good enough simile simile (sĭm`əlē) [Lat.,=likeness], in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which an object is explicitly compared to another object. Robert Burns's poem "A Red Red Rose" contains two straightforward similes: these days for what it was like. Such was the crushing humiliation of being formally thrown out of the Catholic Church that it became a powerful sanction in the political power struggles that went on between Rome and various political/royal figures centuries ago. How things have changed. Now a website has been set up down South allowing people to sign a Declaration Of Defection, or, you might say, excommunicate ex·com·mu·ni·cate tr.v. ex·com·mu·ni·cat·ed, ex·com·mu·ni·cat·ing, ex·com·mu·ni·cates 1. To deprive of the right of church membership by ecclesiastical authority. 2. themselves. Almost 1,500 people have put pen to paper, at least so far as you can online, at countmeout.ie since it was set up just a few weeks ago in the wake of the Ryan report into clerical abuse. The site's creators say it is for people who want to go beyond being "lapsed Catholics" and formally sever their ties with the Church. If someone doesn't start remembering any of this institution's redeeming factors, extinction will be the end game never mind excommunication excommunication, formal expulsion from a religious body, the most grave of all ecclesiastical censures. Where religious and social communities are nearly identical it is attended by social ostracism, as in the case of Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jews. . |
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