Hi! I’m not sure that I’m using the right terms to refer to myself and my relationship to Catholicism. I grew up Catholic and was confirmed (voluntarily—that ought to be a given, but if you’ve met Catholic teenagers then you know what I mean). My experience with the Church was positive, but over time, I realized that I do not have a sincere belief in the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus. Since I was missing a couple crucial elements of Catholic faith (and I wouldn’t feel right faking them), I left Catholicism.
From what I understand, the word for my beliefs is apostasy (rejection of Christianity as a whole) and professing these beliefs confers a state of excommunication upon me. Am I correct in thinking that “excommunicated Catholic” is an accurate term to use for myself? To be clear, the idea of being excommunicated is not distressing to me—I am fine with my current spiritual status. I just want to be accurate with my language.
Thank you for your lovely and informative blog!
It is considered latae sententiae excommunication which is when it does not go through a bishop or other canon authority.
As long as you’re of age, you are knowingly taking actions to publicly go against the church, and you are not under threat or coercion then yes, you are excommunicated.
However, people will assume that you were excommunicated in the traditional sense (like through canon court). So if you want to avoid that, I would say that you are no longer Catholic. Because it was not public and there were no Church authorities involved you can kind of reneg at any moment and become Catholic again whereas if this was imposed on you, that would be a different story.
