I am not competent to give an official answer. But I'll bet a dime no official would call me on it.
I'm thinking maybe you are thinking of the whole heretic barbecue thing. I don't know what to say about that except to say we tend to discourage that these days. And usually it was done by the secular folks, with admittedly varying levels of support from the ecclesiastical folks.
Then there's excommunication, as Bishop Tobin of the Church of Providence recently did to that Kennedy thug, and as many of us wish would be done to Stretch Pelousy. Excommunication is, I believe, usually thought of as "medicinal." Of course, in the extremer cases, it is done to protect the Church by making very clear that the behavior or teaching in question is a grave wrong.
But also, we hold that to receive the Blessed Sacrament while on is in a state of mortal sin is perilous. So IF somebody like Stretch has been told by competent authority more than once that she is misrepresenting Catholic thought and doing and supporting stuff that is REALLY bad,
AND
IF she persists, now advisedly, in the doing and the teaching,
THEN for HER good, somebody, some bishop somewhere with something resembling a spine (but, it would have to be HER bishop, really, and I suppose she "belongs" to San Francisco) has got to say, "Stretch, honey, no sacrament for you until you straighten up and show me you've straightened up.
I think part of the problem with actually doing this is that there are priests who wouldn't mind defying their bishop and supporting Stretch. So it comes down to how big a fight the bishop is ready to have.
IMHO the longer the bishops dither, the more they seem to say to the moral heretics that it's really okay. That's unfair to them and IMHO bad pastoring.
But it's not my job so I don't know all the issues.
Ah, yes. Like in the case of, say, Roman Catholic Adolph Hitler.
Oh, wait. My bad. He wasn't excommunicated. Apparently the RCC didn't consider his "behaviour in question" to be "a grave wrong."
In that case "the church" didn't need "protecting." Only the Jews.
”I am not competent to give an official answer.”
Mad Dawg, I didn’t suppose you to be a church official, but I thought you sufficiently conversant with Church Doctrine to provide a reasonably authoritative, if albeit layman’s, reply. My fault surely; a poor choice of terms.
”I'm thinking maybe you are thinking of the whole heretic barbecue thing.”
I prefer backyard barbecues, whether it be Texas style or KC style. If you’ll take the trouble to briefly examine my posting history (an exercise I don’t particularly recommend), you will see that I’ve consistently sought to defend the Judeo-Christian tradition of Western Civilization by observing (among other things) that, unlike Islamic lunatics and Marxist Atheists, we’ve learned to develop more civilized methods of persuasion than inquisitions, water dunking, and branding irons. But you apparently don’t consider me a part of “we,” and there really doesn’t seem to exist a “we” from your perspective.
What I sought from both of you was a confirmation that my thesis is reasonably correct. I suppose, to some degree, I have received that confirmation, but your remarks leave me with the impression that my participation is not welcome, since you obviously do not appear to consider ‘Protestants’ (spit) to be Christians, and consider Jews, likewise, beyond the pale. I really had not considered the proposition before perusing this thread, but apparently you do not recognize the existence of a Judeo-Christian tradition, much less exhibit a desire to defend it.