Good news. May God bless her.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/katie-holmes-catholic-church_n_1659466.html?ir=Religion

QUAERITUR: Returning to the Church after joining another church for many years

Posted on 9 July 2012 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
wdtprs.com/blog/2012/07/quaeritur-returning-to-the-church-after-joining-another-church-for-many-years-2/

From a reader:

If a person leaves the church and joins another faith for 10 plus years, what is required to return to good standing in the church?

This isn’t as hard as one might imagine.

Usually all a person has to do is make a sincere and complete confession of all mortal sins of commission or omission since the last confession, have whatever censures she incurred lifted (not hard), and then return to the proper life of a good Catholic! Easy Peasy.

In the case that a person made a formal act of apostasy (e.g., in Germany in order to avoid paying the Church tax), she – once upon a time – would have had to go though other steps before returning to the sacraments. However, in 2009 a document called Omnium in mentem was issued whereby the Church’s law about these formal acts was changed. Now, the Church no longer considers it possible to defect from the faith by formal act. Therefore, there are no canonical consequences from formal defection. Were a person to film herself signing a document and then publish the photos and take out ads in the newspaper, according to the Church they would not have formally defected from the Church.

Thus, people cannot now formally defect. They can, however, still incur a censure of excommunication – a spiritual and medicinal penalty – for heresy or schism or apostasy (cf. can 1364). In order to incur any censure she would have had to understand the consequences of the act. Therefore, if she joined another church without really understanding the canonical consequences (e.g., she married a Lutheran and started going to services with her spouse and then joins the Lutheran parish…) then it is likely that no excommunication is incurred.

So, in order to return to the light and grace of the Church and leave the darkness of soul endangering heresy and schism, in most cases simply going to confession and getting any censure lifted is all one has to do to.

* * *

An interesting side note http://spiritdaily.com/A79cruise.htm. Sad, Cruise went to Catholic School,

Sounds like the parish she allegedly has registered at is questionable. Do keep in mind this article is from HuffPost, trash journalism at its very best.

No. It's been in NYC for 165 years.

Questionable in its orthodoxy was what I was implying in my post. The fact that the parish has been around for 165 years does not mean a thing to me. The notorious Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco is also an old parish.

At least she's trying. No telling what sophistries of Scientology remain bubbling, popping, hissing and snapping in her psyche. She deserves credit for that and I think we owe her our prayers. Retuning to the Catholic or Orthodox Church following a voyage into the never-never lands of erroneous religion might be really tough, even for people who really do want to return.