Excommunication: A tool for fighting corruption, organised crime?

A Vatican consultation group will consider initiatives to fight corruption and organised crime, including the excommunication of members of the Mafia and other criminal organisations.

The Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development published an outcome document highlighting anti-corruption proposals that came out of the Vatican’s first “International Debate on Corruption.”

The Church Acts: Excommunicate Mafia

Among the proposals made by the consultation group is the “development of a global response – through bishops’ conferences and local churches – to the excommunication of the Mafia and other similar criminal organisations and to the prospect of excommunication for corruption.”

Popes and local bishops, especially in Italy, have long warned members of the Mafia that by committing such grave sins, they, in effect, have excommunicated themselves from the church.

In a June 2014 visit to Sibari, in Italy’s Calabria region, Pope Francis said that “those who follow the path of evil, like the mafiosi do, are not in communion with God; they are excommunicated.”

The June 15 meeting on corruption, sponsored by the dicastery and the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, looked at corruption as a global problem and at its connections to organised crime and the Mafia.

Fighting corruption “will not be a simple road to follow,” the outcome document said. Coming up with appropriate concrete action will require listening to the church in various parts of the world and entering into dialogue with people of other faiths.

Corruption as a Global Problem

Among the participants at the June meeting were 50 anti-Mafia and anti-corruption magistrates, as well as bishops and Vatican officials, heads of movements, victims, journalists, scholars, intellectuals and several ambassadors.

Corruption, the document said, is not just an act but a “condition,” so the new consultation group will need to address the many forms of corruption through “culture, education, training, institutional action, and citizen participation.”

“The consultation group will not just come up with virtuous exhortations, because concrete gestures are needed,” the document said. “In fact, a commitment to education requires credible teachers, even in the church.”

“Corruption, which is in fact a weapon, is the most common language especially of the Mafia and criminal organisations in the world,” Pope Francis wrote in the preface of the document

Corruption, he added, is “a process of death that lends itself to the culture of death” espoused and promoted by the Mafia.