“Self excommunication” is debatably worse because there’s no medicinal component. It just IS, and you keep doing whatever you’re doing that leaves you outside the fold, and maybe you never come back.
At least formal excommunication makes it almost certain that someone will have to stop and consider what they’re doing and why they’ve received this corrective action.
I think the Church is worried about opening up a Pandora’s Box of excommunications if they tackle it in earnest. i.e., if you excommunicate Nancy Pelosi, well, then you have to excommunicate Chris Dodd and joe Biden the Kennedys and then Tony Blair gets excommunicated three seconds after converting to the faith, and then you’ve got Silvio Burlosconi and now lets move over to Notre Dame and DePaul and Georgetown and now you have to go after the dissident convents and where does it end?
Benedict, above all, hates dissent, hates heresy, hates politicians who mock and denigrate the faith. But I think there’s a much larger issue - especially in this plugged-in age of communication, and that’s taking the Church - which is already a target - and turning it into an overt enemy of the state that must be crushed...
It’s really a hard situation, and ultimately, it’s a climate that politicians and high-profile people will regret creating, since they have deprived themselves of the medicine (formal excommunication) that will get them on the right path.
All that said - let me clarify one thing. The Church, I believe, absolutely needs to publicly censure Jenkins and any other clergy who facilitate such an abomination as this story presents. In that sense, I am disappointed in the lack of response from Rome. Granted, Notre Dame is only one university in the world that the Church ministers to, but Obama’s visit made it the Vatican’s business, not just the local ordinary’s. D’Arcy can only do so much - he needs the weight of the Vatican behind him to take the kind of corrective action we envision...
Rom 1:32 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.