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Welcome back to the History of the Papacy podcast.

I am, as always, Steve, your host for this podcast about the history of the popes of Rome.

This is the second of the new sidetrack episodes.

As with the previous sidetrack episode on Ironaeus of Leone, this episode is meant to fill in a few necessary holes left in the main narrative and just let us have a little fun and really go off the official tour.

In this episode, we are going to look at an interesting topic in one that will come up time and time again, believe me.

Excommunication is a really interesting topic, and will come into play time and time again in papal history.

It will be a powerful tool that the church and the popes will use for spiritual and temporal reasons.

Plenty of temporal reasons.

Excommunication as such isn't exclusively a Roman Catholic idea or even a Christian one in general.

Every religious group has a way to exclude people who have done something that is completely

against the orthodoxy of that religion.

In Judaism, there is the harem, which is a form of shunning or banishment for people who have

somehow broken some of the laws of Moses or did some grave act against Judaism.

So excommunication at its basic level is a mechanism

...