Excommunication’s power is proportionate to the offender’s closeness to the church

Evidence

Excommunication is meaningful only to those close enough to the church to mind. The average criminal would laugh at such a measure. It was presumably realizing this implicit blunder that Ugo Poletti, president of the Italian cardinals, “corrected” the “interpretation” of Giordano’s words (Repubblica, May 20, 1989). But in his sophistic repudiation he was simply choosing between two evils, for far from improving matters, he succeeded only in reminding everyone that mafiosi have never been subject to vigorous excommunication, whether automatic or otherwise. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 137

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The point that a sanction’s effectiveness is a function of the sanctioned party’s own valuation of the threatened good — the same social-capital logic as the mafia’s enforcement relying on its targets valuing reputation — is a genuinely transferable social insight.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s Gambetta/Milgrom framework: punishment mechanisms only bite where the target’s reputation matters — same logic as bourse exclusion from the diamond trade, or the Schelling credible-commitment point about hostages being valuable to both parties.