Quite awhile back I got involved in the Fatima Center. If I had known that they truly were a schismatic group then I would have steered clear of it from the beginning. It's just that they convinced me that they really were in line with church teaching. I signed a petition to the holy father for the "true consecration of Russia" and the full revelation of the third secret. What's worse and (really embarassing to say on phatmass) was that I even went as far as to write a letter to the pope about it and emails requesting these things. I didn't have a nasty tone when going about it and I was respectful in my writing as well. (Just so everyone knows I apologized for requesting these things of him by way of email.)

I did some research on the traditional latin mass and from what I found, the new mass looked invalid so I refused to receive communion there and then eventually stopped attending the new mass, and unfortunately there was no traditional mass around so I wasn't attending any mass for a time.

After a time I turned away from these errors and confessed these sins. On a previous Q and A it said that apostacy and heresy are sins in which one can get excommunicated. Should I be? I was in ignorance of it all.

Dr. Edward Peters has doctoral degrees in canon and civil law, and operates the Canon Law Info website and the "In The Light of the Law" web log. He has authored or edited several books, including Annulments and the Catholic Church (Ascension Press), and is the translator of the English edition of The 1917 Pio Benedictine Code of Canon Law, published by Ignatius Press. His most recent book is Excommunication and the Catholic Church, published by Ascension Press. IgnatiusInsight.com editor Carl E. Olson, who had the pleasure of studying canon law under Dr. Peters, recently interviewed the canon lawyer about excommunication and his new book.

Basically, the third misconception is this: many people think that, because a given Catholic committed an action for which automatic excommunication is the penalty (for example, heresy, schism, abortion), the penalty was actually incurred in that case. That's not necessarily true, but the reasons behind my claim require us getting into Canons 18, 1323, and 1324, among others, canons that contain a startling list of factors that mitigate or even remove liability for canonical crimes. Now taken individually, these exceptions to penal liability make sense, but when read as a whole, as we have to do, they make it much more difficult to determine whether an automatic excommunication was actually incurred in a specific case.

So what happens in cases where canon law seems to impose automatic excommunication? Invariably, the discussion in such cases turns to the technicalities of canon law, instead of staying focused on the offensive behavior that gave rise to the discussion. Many canonists believe that the automatic aspect of excommunicable offenses is actually hindering the effectiveness of the law today, and they would prefer to see the automatic aspect of the penalty shelved. They note that no modern legal system has what amounts to an "automatic conviction" upon the commission of a crime, that the long list of exceptions to automatic penalties substantially lessens the chances that such penalties are really incurred in most cases, and that the Eastern Code of Canon Law (which came out a few years after the 1983 Code for the Roman Church) has dropped automatic penalties entirely.

For all that, though, the 1983 Code says what it says. Our task is to apply the law as it is written as faithfully as we can. I treat all these issues in the book.

For the whole interview