If They'd Made Me Pope: Three-and-a-Half Spicy Reforms to Canon Law

Owning the libs. Also the cons. Own them all; God will know His own.

Several years ago, I visited a Dominican friend of mine who was being ordained to the transitional diaconate in Washington, D.C.. When I jokingly mentioned that either one of us could be elected pope, he laughed right in my face and said I would be a terrible pope. (He added that so would he.) My friend was right, of course, but it still got me thinking harder: what makes a good pope? What should a pope actually do?

Now we have a new pope, so, on the off chance Pope Leo XIV is browsing De Civ looking for ideas, this ongoing series says what I’d do If They’d Made Me Pope.

Pope St. Pius X: Thomist, catechist, liturgical reformer, crusader against Modernism, namesake of the Society of St. Pius X, and all-around swell guy.

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In the last installment, I veered well away from the Church’s many internal culture wars and focused on boring, “bipartisan” canon law reforms. Indeed, throughout this series, I have avoided all the “hot button” issues identified by the College of Cardinals Report, except maybe you could squint at my hierarchical reforms and see a meta-commentary on synodality. Well, get hype! Canon law is secretly a Church culture-war battleground, and it’s time for me to show more than my ankle!

Reinstate Summorum Pontificum

I don’t have any personal affection for the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).

After hearing for years and years, from friends and other sympathetic characters, about how the TLM’s higher and more divine liturgy would save the Church, I finally took my daughter to a TLM on Sunday once.

I left feeling… very relieved that the Mass had been reformed in the 1960s.

As it turns out, I agree with most of the critiques I’d ever heard of the TLM: it is not so much mysterious as alienating, it discourages lay people from participating in the Mass in the way Jesus would prefer, and—outside rare contexts where you’re saying Mass with a mixed-language audience—the vernacular is far superior to the Latin. You don’t need a missal or Fr. Z to tell you what the prayer “really says” if you can just hear what the prayer says in your mother’s tongue.

Someone told me later, “Well, that was a low mass; you need to try a TLM high Mass,” but there are two problems with this. First, TLM advocates frequently compare their high Masses to the modern equivalent of the low Mass (the 5pm vigil Mass with the guitars, or the children’s Mass in the basement), which is comparing apples to oranges. Second, I think Masses are best judged by how they are celebrated in the spiritual (and liturgical) doldrums. They are never the best Masses, but they are the Masses that test the real mettle of a liturgy. In my view, the TLM failed this test. Even a relatively bad, listless, acapella daily Mass in some eldery, dying, rural parish led by Fr. Smith still still strikes me as richer and more spiritually nourishing than the (packed) TLM I attended.

However, just as I think that different people are more readily drawn toward Jesus by different forms of worship music (and that’s okay), I also think that different people are more easily drawn into the Mass and up toward Jesus by different liturgical practices. That’s okay, too. Every archangel has his own song to sing in the Great Song of Creation, and I see little evidence that God designed human beings all that differently. Indeed, the Church embraces many liturgies and is stronger for that diversity. There are many good people who attest that the TLM pulls them up and out of themselves into the Sacrifice of the Mass. That is good! They are often willing to travel hours for the TLM. That is also good! Heck, I might do the same for the ordinary form of the Mass if we were the ones being persecuted.

“Persecuted” is the only word I can come up with after the Vatican’s published the vindictive legislation Traditionis Custodes in 2021. This new law simply and straightforwardly bulldozed the burgeoning TLM movement. It abolished the TLM from parishes, segregated TLM’ers in makeshift second-rate chapels (if they’re lucky), prevents any new groups from forming, and denies newly ordained priests participation in the ancient liturgy. Despite Pope Francis’s regular claims that he was building a more “synodal” and more “local” Church, he used T.C. to tear away the ordinary rights of bishops and imposed a one-size-fits-all approach worldwide. This ensured the gradual suffocation and suppression of the entire TLM. T.C., if it remains in force, will make it impossible for children born into families that practice the TLM to grow old with it.

Coming from a papacy that was generous and open-minded (sometimes to a fault) with everybody else, Catholic or not, this crackdown was impossible for me to read as anything other than the malicious fulfillment of a personal agenda. I’ve never been polarized so suddenly and completely in favor of a movement I don’t even support.

T.C. was a sharp reversal from Summorum Pontificum, the previous 2007 legislation governing the Latin Mass.¹ Under Summorum Pontificum, priests were given the right to say the TLM and laity were given significant rights toward participating in it. By crushing the TLM under his heel, Pope Francis pulled a complete 180 on Pope Benedict.

At the time, Pope Francis justified this reversal by claiming that TLM-goers were spreading dissent against the Second Vatican Council and the heresies of disgraced, properly excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. +Francis further claimed that his Vatican had consulted the bishops of the world and that they had asked him to please restrict the Traditional Latin Mass—in a secret questionnaire and, no, of course you’re not allowed to see the actual results, not even anonymized. Earlier this summer, the official Vatican summary of the questionnaire results leaked online. It provides strong evidence that Pope Francis’s justification was, regrettably, a premeditated lie.

Now, Pope Francis was correct that some heresies circulate widely in TLM communities. In the United States, TLM’ers also tend dangerously toward explicitly Republican politics, and I imagine something similar is true elsewhere in the world. However, that is not unusual! In ordinary-form parishes, we see plenty of advocacy for heresy, too: the end of Church teaching on sexuality, the abandonment of all doctrine except the Second Vatican Council (and often just its “spirit,” not its actual texts), and a dangerous tendency toward explicitly Democratic politics. Just open the weekly bulletin for St. Joan of Arc down the road and get hyped for their Pride Month activities and their July hosting of rabidly pro-abortion, anti-Catholic state Sen. Erin Maye Quade in a discussion about the dangers of “Christian Nationalism”!

This stuff happens. Nobody suggests that taking our liturgical rite away from all of us, for the sins of some of us, would do anyone any good.

That’s because it would be stupid! If your goal is to heal divisions and head off dangerous tendencies in a community, the solution is pretty much never to smash the entire community with a hammer! The pope who spoke so movingly of “powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” in so many other contexts should have known this, and probably did. Yet he released Traditionis Custodes, whose clear message to every TLM supporter was that all of them—not just the malcontents, but every faithful man, woman, and child—was now an enemy of Rome.

Pope Francis was actually the only pope elected this century who did not look like Emperor Palpatine,. Ironic.

In reality, then, Traditionis Custodes didn’t weaken the Lefebrivists. It strengthened them! Obviously!

There’s no way for a new pope to extract himself from this quagmire without embarrassing the Magisterium. Pope Francis so completely rejected Pope Benedict’s approach to the Tridentine movement, on such transparently flimsy grounds, that any new pope must choose between Francis and Benedict. I think the least damaging way to proceed is to tear off the band-aid, choose Benedict, and reinstate Summorum Pontificum without further ado. Of course, the papacy must save face, so I would simultaneously issue an accompanying pastoral letter that uses very flowery and complimentary language about Francis and his “synodal vision” or whatever in order to obscure the perfect dog’s breakfast he made of this.²

That is not to say that the heretical elements of the TLM community should be let off the hook. By no means!

The Dual Oaths

In 1910, Pope Pius X issued an official profession of faith known as the Oath Against Modernism. In accompanying legislation, Pope Pius decreed that, before any cleric was ordained, or took any new office within the Church, had to first swear this oath.³

It’s a pretty good oath. Read it yourself, but it condemns, in sequence, a collection of heresies that came to be known collectively in the Church as “the modernist heresies”:

• that the Church was not actually founded by the historical Jesus;

• that the historical-critical method of Biblical exegesis is the single supreme rule;

• that faith is a blind sentiment of the subconscious rather than an intellectual assent to truth;

• that the Church’s fundamental doctrines change and contradict themselves over time;

• that the actual heart of the Church is not Christ but a collective “human conscience” that develops over time;

• …and various other nonsense and woo that was very hot in 1910—much of which remains deeply embedded in our culture today.

I would amend canon law to restore this oath, in its original form. There’s absolutely nothing doctrinally wrong with the current 1989 Profession of Faith; I just think it’s rather vague and therefore not very helpful.

However, I would also add a second oath, a new oath: the Oath Against Traditionalism.⁴ Without writing out a full draft here, this oath would require each and every cleric to swear, out loud, in public, that they accept and proclaim all that was definitively taught by the Second Vatican Council and subsequent popes, including:

• The validity, liceity, and perpetual legitimacy of the Mass of Pope Paul VI (aka the ordinary form of the Mass);

• The legitimacy of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and II, Benedict XVI, Francis I, and Leo XIV;

• The sinfulness of episcopal consecrations made in defiance of Rome’s inviolable veto;

• The legitimacy of the development and deepening of doctrine, as articulated by St. Newman;

• The supreme power of the College of Bishops, which in no wise detracts from the supreme power of the Holy Father (in other words: Vatican II’s collegiality);

• That “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using” “the separated Christian Churches” (Protestants and Orthodox) “as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from… the Church” (in other words: Vatican II’s ecumenism);

• The complete and uninterrupted continuity between the Church before Vatican II and the Church after it (in other words: Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity);

• The inherent human right to religious freedom, as infallibly taught by the Second Vatican Council.⁵

This doesn’t require anyone to accept the entire “Spirit of Vatican II” farrago that followed the Council (as indeed they shouldn’t!), just as affirming the Oath Against Modernism didn’t require anyone to agree to young-earth creationism. It is a modest oath that unites its swearers only in what is necessary to fully participate in the Catholic Faith.

If a cleric can publicly swear he affirms all those things, in both oaths, then I don’t give a darn what rite he celebrates. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I will hope then that my liturgy is strong enough to compete and co-exist with the TLM perpetually. (I expect it is!)

If, on the other hand, a cleric can’t publicly swear all these things, let him be investigated for heresy and schism and dealt with according to the provisions of canon law.⁶

This is how you try to heal division with marginalized communities. You don’t smash the entire community with a generational banhammer. You identify and cut off the infected tissue, while giving the healthy tissue all the room it needs to thrive.

Since the major popular heresy of our time is not Modernism nor even Traditionalism but Sexual Liberation, I am tempted to add a third oath, an Oath on Sexuality. However, I don’t want to bury everyone in oaths! Let’s see what the dual oaths accomplish before we consider a third.

Reform Canon 915

Canon 915 is the most troublesome and politically explosive canon in the Code, because of the text which I have highlighted in bold:

Canon 915: Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

This requires some explanation for non-Catholics in the audience.

The Eucharist, our most sacred rite, the “source and summit of Christian life”, is for Catholics who are properly disposed to receiving it: they’re in the right relationship with Jesus, they’re in the right relationship with the Church, and they’ve appropriately prepared themselves for the plunge into immediate physical and spiritual union with Christ and His mystical body, which is the Church. I can think of no human experience like communion except sex (which also, famously, requires both right relationship and appropriate preparation), but even the best sex is only a pale shadow of the Eucharist, and even this strains analogy to its limits.

One hundred years ago, it was clear to everyone that you could not receive the Lord without extensive preparations. There was, at the absolute minimum, a considerable period of fasting before Mass, from midnight forward,⁷ plus a required confession of all mortal sins before reception. The practical reality was even stricter. My grandmother related to me that it was also “unthinkable” for a young girl in 1927 to receive communion on Sunday without having gone to confession on the preceding Saturday—even though seven-year-old girls commit very few mortal sins! The Bible confirms these ancient Christian customs:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. (1 Cor 11:27-32)

In the closely disciplined context of Catholicism in the early Twentieth Century, it was just obvious that those who had broken away from the Church privately should not receive communion, and those who had broken away publicly should be refused communion if, for some insane reason, they presented themselves to receive. Of course excommunicants can’t receive communion! Communion is the thing from which they’ve been ex’ed!

We will discuss the collapse of these disciplines in a future installment of this series. Suffice to say, however, that the disciplines have collapsed. There is effectively no fasting requirement.⁸ There is widespread expectation of weekly reception, while almost nobody maintains the habit of weekly confession. (In America, we don’t have enough priests to supply weekly confession anyway.) There is a lot of cross-denominational woo about how the Eucharist is really just a symbol of our unity or something, so lots of honest, decent people don’t take it seriously in the first place. There is therefore, quite often, genuine shock at the idea that somebody might need to refrain from communion lest they “eat and drink judgment against themselves.”

As a result, a lot of people present themselves for communion who haven’t been formally excommunicated (because we don’t do that anymore), but who nevertheless have absolutely no business being there. They are public and notorious sinners and everyone in the parish knows it. That guy abandoned his wife and three kids after twenty years to shack up with an 18-year-old student he taught last semester. That landlady’s neglect of her tenets, while squeezing them for all they’re worth, verges on criminal, and is legendary in the parish, but her tenants are all illegal immigrants too scared of retaliation to testify against her.

Canon 915 says that, after giving due warning to these wayward parishoners, priests and extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion have a positive legal duty to refuse communion to people like this.

This is politically explosive. You probably already realize why.

Every single time President Joe Biden received communion,⁹ he did so as a very public, very powerful, horrifyingly effective advocate for stripping the human rights of unborn children. (The dude even backed taxpayer funding of abortions through all nine months.) This is not just an evil policy. The Church teaches unambiguously that it is a mortal sin, just like it would be a mortal sin for a Catholic politician to support the re-enslavement of Black people (even if he never personally owned a single slave).

That turns out to be a problem for a lot of Catholic Democratic politicians (and even the occasional Catholic Republican politician), and there’s really no canonical ambiguity about it. Canon 915 says they can’t be given communion, ever, anywhere, until they repent. Even Pope Francis affirmed this. Yet it is almost never enforced. President Biden was never refused communion. The Pope (pleading ignorance of the details of the case) gave Nancy Pelosi communion!

This is typical. Canon 915 imposes a positive legal duty on all ministers of Eucharist, but almost no one actually carries out this duty against anyone.

You can call them cowards if you want. Antinomians, even. There are certain cases where I have done so. (Others not.) I have nothing but praise for those rare prelates who do, in fact, make a good-faith effort to obey this law. However, fundamentally, Canon 915 is not a well-designed statute.

First, and crucially, Canon 915 provides no due process of law. It sort of vaguely implies a process, but basically it comes down to Father’s judgment.

Second, the process sort of vaguely implied by Canon 915 depends on the priest admonishing the sinner to repent in some context outside the communion line (in order to establish obstinancy), then following up on the admonition, then making a judgment that the sinner may not receive the Eucharist in the parish (on what standard of evidence? under what process?), and finally communicating that judgment to the sinner and to all ministers of communion in the parish. Aside from the vagueness, doing all this is not necessarily easy. (Have you seen the size of our parishes? Father’s busy!)

Third, because there is no due process, priests are required to err on the side of caution on every point. Maybe the landlady repented yesterday! Maybe the cheater’s original marriage was invalid and he has a sex addiction that reduces the gravity of his fornication sin!¹⁰

Fourth, Canon 915 is, for most practical purposes, ineffective. A sinner who gets Canon 915’d out of the communion line at one parish is free to move to a different parish, where the same process starts all over again. This discourages pastors from starting the process in the first place.

Fifth (and least), Canon 915 depends on the priest or minister correctly recognizing a face in a crowd. This is not actually a big problem (and, to the extent that it is a problem, all excommunication has the same problem). However, it makes the faceblind part of me panic!

I don’t think this canon is fit for purpose. I would delete the words “and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” from Canon 915.¹¹

This should not be interpreted as laxity. Quite the opposite: I’m all for excommunication! I just think excommunication needs to be done right. It needs due process of law, transparency, and enforceability at each level.

President Biden should not have been excluded from the Eucharist by the haphazard application of an obscure canon by random priests, bishops, and lay ministers. President Biden should have been excluded from the Eucharist by a good, clean excommunication proceeding timely initiated by his local bishop, decades before he became President.¹² If his local bishop failed to do so (which wouldn’t be surprising, since his bishop for much of this time was the sex pest Teddy McCarrick), then the bishop’s superiors should have held that bishop accountable, deposing him from office if necessary.

Everything I wrote about restoring the rule of law, all my proposed reforms to the hierarchy, were designed to make it easier for the Church to live what it preaches. Canon 915 is not a good tool for the job. As long as it remains on the books in its current, unworkable state, the clergy’s ongoing (and largely inevitable) failure to obey it will continue to breed scandal and confusion among the faithful.

Beyond Defrocking

Speaking of ol’ Teddy McCarrick…

Back in the days of the Papal States, the Church had an executioner. His name was Giovanni Bugatti, and, between 1796 and 1865, he executed 516 people in the name of his sovereign lord, the Pope. Most of these executions were for murder. He retired, with pension, when the Papal States collapsed. Bugatti was only the last in a line that put many serious criminals to death.

Of course, the Catholic Church insisted that it was not, strictly speaking, the entity carrying out those executions. The Church has maintained for at least many centuries that the Church itself must not shed man’s blood. Therefore, the Papal States maintained separate ecclesiastical courts (which tried “spiritual” crimes like heresy) and civil courts (which tried “secular” crimes like murder). Bugatti technically worked at the behest of the civil courts. If someone were convicted in the ecclesiastical courts of a capital crime, the ecclesiastical court would not impose sentence (because it couldn’t shed man’s blood), but would instead hand the prisoner over to the civil courts for sentencing. The civil courts would then sentence him to death.

This system had its virtues. All sophistry aside, it allowed the Church to depend on local secular government to handle most or all criminal punishment (something the secular government was already very good at), without requiring the ecclesiastical courts to spin up their own separate, duplicative penal infrastructure. The Church’s courts issued spiritual sentences like excommunications and penances, but left physical punishments to others.

However, the system collapsed in the nineteenth century, as the Church’s relationship with secular powers imploded, both within the Papal States (which were conquered and erased from the map) and without (as the new concept of “separation of Church and State” took root in revolutionary governments across Europe). Since that time, the Catholic Church’s law has largely limited itself to “spiritual” penalties like excommunication, which is the very worst thing you can do to someone under current canon law. The worst thing you can do to a priest, short of excommunication, is “defrock” him, barring him from the future exercise of priestly ministry.

This is just my opinion, but it seems to me that, when faced with a priest who has molested children (or helped cover it up), “We’re not going to let you be a priest anymore” does not come close to fitting the crime. When I think in any detail of what child sex abuse entails, my first instinct is that the pope should immediately bring back the papal executioner, fly some convicted and defrocked abusers out to Rome, and chop their heads off.

However, following this instinct would be a mistake, for several reasons. First, this whole “the Church does not kill” thing is still on the books, with roots deep enough that I am loathe to mess around with it. That rule gives me big “Chesterton’s Fence” vibes. Second, the teachings of Popes John Paul II and Francis strongly discouraged capital punishment, at least in the modern world. Although there are legitimate questions about how those teachings should be interpreted in light of the Church’s millennia-long approval of the practice, it would be unhelpful and confusing to the Catholic world to abruptly and dramatically reverse course on this question, especially in such a prominent way. Third, the death penalty is rejected by a large portion of the civilized world outside Rome (not for nothing, either), and would be viewed in many quarters as barbaric, even against pedopriests. Executing them would therefore undermine the Church’s witness to those quarters, even creating sympathy for the condemned.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, nothing prevents the Church from remembering how to carry out lesser penalties. For example: initially, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the great molester of adult seminarians, did not appear to have committed major violations of U.S. civil law, which protects sexual relationships between consenting adults and makes it difficult to prove an abusive power dynamic.¹³ Church law, however, correctly recognizes that having sex with your seminarians is always a crime without exception. Therefore, I would have ordered McCarrick imprisoned in a monastery, kept on a bread-and-water diet six days a week (one must make exception for the Sunday feast, since Jesus died for Theodore McCarrick, too), and flogged publicly in St. Peter’s Square¹⁴ once a year, on February 21, the feast of Saint Peter Damian. This regime would provide valuable remedial moral instruction to the wicked men thus imprisoned, and it would serve as an important witness to the world.

Since all Catholics fall under the jurisdiction of canon law, this need not be limited to abusive clergy.

Next: What Pope Me could and would do about the disciplines of the Church.

1. Summorum Pontificorum was a further liberalization from the 1984 indult. If you’re unfamiliar with the indult and the culture to which it gave rise, Charlotte Law described it memorably in a 1987 Crisis article. Traditionis Custodes deliberately revives that era (and its many pathologies).

2. To be fair to Pope Francis, Rorate Caeli’s sources (so take them with some salt) report that Pope Francis was inclined to tolerate the TLM until he found out that the dumping of Pachamama had been orchestrated and funded by radtrad YouTube personality Dr. Taylor Marshall. This is supported by earlier reporting from @thecatholicman.

When Pachamama first went into the Tiber, it felt like a kind of revolt by the anonymous majority. (I remain open to, but unpersuaded by, arguments that there was really nothing wrong with the Pachamama idol.) When we found out a YouTuber organized it, then broke the story about it, and made some money off of the attention, that starts to feel like less of a pious revolt and more like a publicity stunt. You can certainly imagine how Francis felt, especially since he didn’t think there was anything wrong with Pachamama.

At that point, any half-witted anti-TLM’er in the Vatican would only need to show Pope Francis a couple of videos by Dr. Marshall, throw in a few notes about Apb. Vigano, and it’s no surprise that Francis—humiliated by the whole affair, whether justly or not—would react with cold fury at the entire movement.

3. Seminary professors, too, who might be laypersons.

4. I am still workshopping the name. Since there are many forms of Traditionalism that are quite healthy, and since I even subscribe to several forms of Traditionalism, I’ve toyed with calling it the “Oath Against Radical Traditionalism,” so as to draw a distinction between healthy and unhealthy Traditionalism. However, there are also healthy forms of Modernism—the historical-critical method is good! Pope Benedict wrote a whole series of books about Jesus built on it!—and nobody ever calls it the “Oath Against Radical Modernism,” so it seems a little uneven.

5. The Church also teaches that there are limits on religious freedom, and that religious freedom does not equate to secularism. This is, for example, one of the clear takeaways from certain infallible definitions in Quanta Cura. Vatican II’s declaration of religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, did not pretend to reform these irreformable definitions.

Dignitatis Humanae did, however, refute and reject some of the most expansive interpretations of Quanta Cura, which had been popular (and remain popular in heretical trad circles). These refutations were not new. St. John Henry Newman had been arguing against sweeping interpretations of QC practically since the day it came out, and he is just literally correct about what the text says, and therefore what the Church teaches.

I’ve probably got a whole article bottled up in me on the correct interpretation of Quanta Cura, but, on its own, that seems too esoteric even for me, and Newman covers the ground well.

6. One might react, “But James! If you do this, you will end up declaring that many clergy of the Society of Saint Pius X are schismatic heretics!”

I sincerely hope this is not the case. However, it is unfortunately the case that the rule-of-law crisis in the Church has often shielded conservatives as well as liberals from the legal consequences of their actions. The SSPX is a case in point.

Still, the choice to accept the doctrines of the Church or reject them will be theirs alone. The Church can clarify, and it can accommodate, but, in the final analysis, the truth is the truth, Rome has it, and error has no right to silence it. Anyone in the SSPX who will not assent to the firm teaching of the Church has abandoned the barque of Peter and must face the consequences. Harsh clarity about this is better than muddled confusion.

7. When you read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you can see hints of how even the midnight-forward fast was a relaxation compared to some of the more devout practices that emerged in various places over the centuries. His characters, who are all Eastern Orthodox, routinely fast for days before partaking of the Eucharist. It’s a big deal!

8. Legally speaking, there is an hour-long fast before receiving communion. However, since communion is typically received about 45-50 minutes into a Sunday Mass, what this boils down to is, “No snacks during Mass or on the drive to Mass.” It’s a mockery of fasting.

9. This was also true throughout Biden’s vice-presidency, and, indeed, through most of his time as a senator, but Biden’s gradual conversion from a pro-life Catholic to a pro-choice absolutist hellbent-for-leather on, say, military abortions, was slow, and didn’t come to full flower until his presidency.

10. You may think this sounds silly, but the Canon Law Society of America published a thousand-page Commentary on the Code of Canon Law in 1986, and it pretty much says exactly this, in technical language:

Clearly, those who are excommunicated or interdicted… are excluded from the sacraments… Other categories of manifest and grave sins are not so neatly discernible. The minister cannot assume, for example, that the sin of public concubinage arising from divorce and remarriage is always grave in the internal forum. Any prudent doubt about either the gravity or the public nature of the sin should be resolved in favor of the person who approaches the sacrament.

In other news, I just noticed that my copy of the Commentary (which I picked up for a dollar at a parish used book sale) has several inscriptions in the front cover, and I have just now deduced from these inscriptions that my copy of the Commentary was originally a gift to Father Harry Flynn by old friends in Troy, New York, on the occasion of his appointment as bishop of Lafayette, LA. Given my antagonistic relationship with this man, who later became Archbishop Flynn, it comes as a surprise that I have his book! But it humanizes him for me, which is always good, and I guess I owe him one for a good deal on the text.

11. In fact, I would probably repeal it altogether. Once the language about “obstinate grave sinners” is stripped out, Canon 915 appears to be redundant with Canons 1331 and 1332.

12. Without getting into the weeds of whether any particular cases are likely to succeed, I’m certainly open to excommunication cases against Catholic Republican politicians who commit obstinate manifest grave sins, too.

13. It soon came out that Cardinal McCarrick had also probably abused a number of 16-year-old boys, possibly even as young as 14. The conspiracy of silence McCarrick’s defenders had erected around him—on the grounds that his abuse of seminarians was between consenting adults and therefore not worth persecuting him over—of course made it much easier for McCarrick to cover up these other, even worse crimes.

14. It is at least arguable that the old “ecclesiastical courts must not spill blood” rule forbids not only executions, but any sort of intense corporal punishment, such as removal of limbs, scourging, or flogging. Aquinas seems to think this way in Summa II-II Q64 A4: “it becomes not clerics to strike or kill”

If this is so, then, instead of flogging, put the abusers in the stockade. There’s no doubt, to my knowledge, that ecclesiastical courts can inflict bloodless discomfort and shame.