A gentle look at the saints who bore the weight of a mistaken excommunication — and what their patience teaches us about trusting God even when His shepherds stumble.
It can be startling to learn that a small handful of canonized saints once carried the sentence of excommunication. It's worth saying plainly, at the outset, why this isn't a scandal but actually a quiet comfort: not one of these was a case of the Church's teaching authority failing. In every instance, it was a local judgment — a bishop, a synod, a regional council — that erred, and in every instance, the wider Church, often another shepherd entirely, corrected it in time. These are stories about human weakness meeting institutional humility, not stories of the Church's Faith failing.
That distinction matters, and it's a very Catholic one. The Church has always taught that individual clergy, even bishops, can err in prudential judgment and governance while the Church's doctrine itself remains protected from formal error. These six saints lived that distinction out in their own flesh.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria (4th century)
Athanasius spent much of his priesthood in exile, fighting almost alone for the Church's teaching on the divinity of Christ against the Arian heresy, which at one point had the support of a majority of bishops. During a period when the reigning pope, St. Liberius, was himself in exile and under great political pressure, an excommunication was issued against Athanasius. Athanasius, trusting that the true mind of the Church could not be reduced to a decision made under duress, held his ground quietly. History and the Church's own veneration of him as a Doctor of the Church have long since settled the matter in his favor.
What it teaches: Fidelity to truth sometimes means enduring even the appearance of Church censure with patience, trusting that time and the Holy Spirit will vindicate what conscience already knows.
St. Columba of Iona (6th century)
An Irish synod excommunicated Columba over accusations tied to a war between Irish kings — accusations later judged, by the Church's own subsequent examination, to have been an abuse of the process. The charge was withdrawn.
What it teaches: Even ecclesiastical courts, run by well-meaning men, can move too quickly. The Church's willingness to later say "we got this wrong" is itself a sign of health, not weakness.
St. Arialdo of Milan (11th century)
Arialdo was actively working to reform genuine clerical abuses in Milan when the local bishop excommunicated him — and was overruled almost immediately by Pope Stephen IX, who reinstated Arialdo and later held the bishop responsible for his own failure to embrace reform.
What it teaches: Sometimes those calling for legitimate reform within the Church face resistance from the very authorities closest to the problem — and sometimes it takes the wider Church to set things right.
St. Joan of Arc (15th century)
Perhaps the most well-known case: Joan was tried and excommunicated by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, presiding over a tribunal effectively controlled by a wartime enemy government. Twenty-five years later, the Church herself reopened the case, formally nullified the verdict, and declared her innocent. The bishop responsible was later condemned by Pope Callixtus III for his role in the injustice. She was canonized in 1920.
What it teaches: Perhaps more than any of the others, Joan's story shows that a corrupted process, even one wearing the vestments of legitimate authority, does not have the final word. The Church's own later judgment restored what the world had tried to destroy.
St. Mary MacKillop (19th century)
In colonial Australia, a bishop excommunicated Mary MacKillop amid a dispute involving her religious community's governance — a dispute later understood to be entangled with her order's resistance to concealing misconduct by a priest. The same bishop lifted the sentence himself before his death, and decades later his successor publicly apologized on the diocese's behalf. She was canonized in 2010.
What it teaches: Even a saint quietly wronged by her own bishop did not respond with bitterness. She is remembered for speaking of him afterward with pity rather than resentment — a model of charity even toward those who had genuinely failed her.
A Word of Caution, and a Word of Hope
It would be easy to read these six stories as an argument that Church authority can simply be waved away whenever it becomes inconvenient. That is not what any of these saints did, and it is not the lesson their lives offer. Every one of them remained within the Church, submitted to her processes, and waited — sometimes for years, sometimes past their own death — for the truth to be recognized by the same Church that had, through human error, misjudged them. Their holiness was not found in defiance, but in patient, humble fidelity even under a cloud of unjust censure.
For any of us who have ever felt overlooked, misjudged, or caught in the friction between our conscience and the imperfect men entrusted with authority over us, these six saints are a genuine comfort. The Church that canonized them is the very same Church, working through fallible men, that once excommunicated them. Both facts are true, and both are part of the same story: a Church, guided by the Holy Spirit toward truth, made up of ordinary, fallible human beings along the way.
In the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, Cathy
0 comments