Can you reverse an excommunication? Does excommunication affect your afterlife?

Excommunication is a penalty of law and thus only relates to the living. There is no way to remove an excommunication for someone who has died because there is no need -- excommunication in effect ceases at death.

Excommunication doesn't directly affect one's salvation; it might have an indirect effect. One of the effects of excommunication is the inability to receive any sacraments until the penalty is lifted. Since this includes the sacrament of confession, it becomes very difficult for the excommunicate to receive absolution for mortal sins unless they also repent of the act, which resulted in the excommunication (or otherwise had the penalty lifted, for example, appealed to a higher authority on grounds the penalty was unjustly imposed, etc).

A perfect act of contrition remains possible for the excommunicated if they resolve to go to confession at their earliest convenience (which necessarily includes the intention to resolve their excommunication).

The larger effect on one's salvation would be the willful abandonment of the Church. Attendance at Mass remains obligatory for the excommunicated.

Can you reverse an excommunication? Does excommunication affect your afterlife?

Generally the answer to the first question is no.

The answer to the second question is no.

First of all what is an excommunication according to Catholicism?

Excommunication

An ecclesiastical censure by which one is more or less excluded from communion with the faithful. It is also called anathema, especially if it is inflicted with formal solemnities on persons notoriously obstinate to reconciliation. Some excommunicated persons are vitandi (to be avoided), others tolerati (tolerate). No one is vitandus unless that person has been publicly excommunicated by name by the Holy See, and it is expressly stated that the person is "to be avoided," Anyone who lays violent hands on the Pope is automatically vitandus.

In general, the effects of excommunication affect the person's right to receive the sacraments, or Christian burial, until the individual repents and is reconciled with the Church. In order for an excommunication to take effect, the person must have been objectively guilty of the crime charged.

Excommunicated individuals may always have recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation, thus lifting the excommunication, providing the priest has the faculties to do so. In danger of death any priest may do this.

The excommunicated Catholic can always make a perfect act of contrition before dying, if he finds himself unable to get to a priest.

We can never absolutely say that excommunication directly affects the state of the soul. It is a penalty for committing some serious sin.

The Catholic church does not keep a records of excommunications, in the sense of compiling a list. Many excommunications are incurred at the moment the offence is committed. Most of these would be known to the individual only!

Latæ and Ferendæ Sententiæ

Excommunication, especially a jure, is either latæ or ferendæ sententiæ. The first is incurred as soon as the offence is committed and by reason of the offence itself (eo ipso) without intervention of any ecclesiastical judge; it is recognized in the terms used by the legislator, for instance: "the culprit will be excommunicated at once, by the fact itself [statim, ipso facto]". The second is indeed foreseen by the law as a penalty, but is inflicted on the culprit only by a judicial sentence; in other words, the delinquent is rather threatened than visited with the penalty, and incurs it only when the judge has summoned him before his tribunal, declared him guilty, and punished him according to the terms of the law. It is recognized when the law contains these or similar words: "under pain of excommunication"; "the culprit will be excommunicated".

Generally speaking excommunications are not retroactively dismissed. Nevertheless, Pope St. Paul VI did halt and retroactively dismissed the automatic excommunications of divorced and remarried Catholics in the USA.

Pope Paul VI has agreed to halt, retroactively, the automatic excommunication of divorced and remarried Catholics in this country, it was announced yesterday.

The action was taken in response to the near unanimous request for the change made by American Catholic bishops at their semiannual meeting last May.

While suspension of the automatic excommunication for Catholics remarred after civil divorce does not change the church's traditional stand on the indissolubility of valid marriage, it does offer hope to tens of thousands of divorced Catholics for reconciliation with their church.

According to church law, divorced Catholics may retain their church standing after remarriage only if a tribunal, or church court, finds that the original marriage was not valid.

Along with the other changes that have swept the church in the last 15 years, the concept of what constitutes a valid marriage has undergone extensive changes. Aided by psychologists and sociologists as well as theologians, the church's canon lawyers, who constitute the tribunals, today recognize a vastly wider array of circumstances as ground for a decree of nullity, as the church divorce decree is called.

The action of the church hierarchy in lifting the automatic excommunication is expected to encourage many divorced and remarried Catholics to seek regularization of their status through church tribunals, said the Most Rev. Thomas C. Kelly, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As for the question of removal of the womb (hysterectomy), the Church would possibly allow this in certain serious circumstances. As you mentioned that your mother had a hysterectomy due to being medically necessary. Today, the Church sees that hysterectomy can be morally licit in limited situations. Thus we can not definitively judge the state of the soul of a woman who has had a hysterectomy for reason not involving sterilization!

The Catholic Church teaches that sterilization is morally unacceptable, but a hysterectomy could be morally acceptable if the uterus could not sustain a pregnancy, said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Affirming past indications as to when a hysterectomy would be morally acceptable, the doctrinal congregation, in a note published Jan. 3, said that "when the uterus is found to be irreversibly in such a state that it is no longer suitable for procreation and medical experts have reached the certainty that an eventual pregnancy will bring about a spontaneous abortion before the fetus is able to arrive at a viable state," it would be licit to remove the uterus with a hysterectomy.

"Removing a reproductive organ incapable of bringing a pregnancy to term should not therefore be qualified as direct sterilization, which is and remains intrinsically illicit as an end and as a means," it said.

The response and accompanying note by the congregation was dated Dec. 10 and signed by its prefect, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, and secretary, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi. Pope Francis approved the congregation's response and ordered its publication.

The congregation reaffirmed the three responses it gave in 1993 to questions concerning "uterine isolation" or tubal ligation and "related matters." - Hysterectomy can be morally licit in limited situations, Vatican says

Other medical conditions could possibly exist to make a hysterectomy morally licit. It is always a good practice to seek out information from good Catholic sources in this domain, such as a Catholic confessor or canon lawyer.

• CDF answers question about hysterectomy in certain cases