excommunication

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act of excommunicating.
• noun The state of being excommunicated.
• noun A formal ecclesiastical censure that deprives a person of the right to belong to a church.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A cutting off or casting out from communication; deprivation of communion or the privileges of intercourse; specifically, the formal exclusion of a person from religious communion and privileges.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act of communicating or ejecting; esp., an ecclesiastical censure whereby the person against whom it is pronounced is, for the time, cast out of the communication of the church; exclusion from fellowship in things spiritual.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The act of excommunicating or ejecting; especially an ecclesiastical censure whereby the person against whom it is pronounced is, for the time, cast out of the communication of the church; exclusion from fellowship in things spiritual.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the state of being excommunicated
• noun the act of banishing a member of a church from the communion of believers and the privileges of the church; cutting a person off from a religious society