Archbishop Theodore McCarrick will reportedly be laicized this week, if he is found guilty of having sexually abused minors.
But what does it mean to be “laicized,” “defrocked,” or “dismissed from the clerical state?”
Ordination, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “confers a gift of the Holy Spirit that permits the exercise of a ‘sacred power’ which can come only from Christ himself through his Church.”
The Church says ordination marks a person with an irremovable imprint, a character, which “configures them to Christ.” Ordination, in Catholic theology, makes a permanent change that the Church has no power to reverse.
