EXCOVIVIUNICATION. A term used to denote exclu sion from the ecclesiastical community. According to Ezra x. 8, those who had taken " strange " wives and refused to give them up were separated from the Jewish community. In Luke vi. 22 reference seems to be made to three different grades of Jewish excommunication. These apparently were (1) viddiii, a short term of thirty days; (2) cherem, a much longer period; and (3) sham complete exclusion. In St. Paul's epistles some kind of excommunication seems to be referred to in I. Cor. v. 3-5, II. Cor. ii. 6-Ll. In the Pastoral Epistles the rules of exclusion have become more precise (I. Tim. i. 20, v. 19 f.). In recent times several early Christian documents of excommunication have been discovered (Camden M. Cobern). The Roman Catholic Church dis tinguishes two kinds of excommunication, the major and the minor. " The minor kind is an ecclesiastical cen
sure, by which a Christian is deprived of the right to participation in sacraments, and indirectly, as a conse quence, of the right of receiving a benefice " (Cath. Diet.). The major excommunication " deprives of all ecclesiastical communion, and is equivalent in substance to anathema, from which it only differs in regard to the formalities by which the latter is surrounded." Article xxxiii. of the Church of England states that persons who are rightly cut off from the unity of the Church by open denunciation of it ought to be avoided by the faith ful. " The rubric prefixed to the Communion Service provides that for notorious moral offences offenders may be denied the Lord's Supper, but the offence must obviously be proved by the judgment of some competent court " (Prot. Diet.).