A defrocked Catholic priest can still perform valid sacraments
Removing a priest from the clergy does not, in Catholic teaching, erase what ordination gave him. Sacraments he performs afterwards count as valid, though forbidden. Some Orthodox theologians see it the opposite way, and the Church of England says an ordained person can never shed the character of the order at all.
The word itself recalls a vanished ritual: stripping the frock-like robes off a disgraced cleric. In the medieval and Renaissance church this public degradation was meant to humiliate. John Foxe recorded the 1556 degradation of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for heresy, in which his vestments were taken off one by one in the reverse order they had been put on, his hair was clipped, the anointed tips of his fingers were scraped, and he was handed over dressed in a threadbare beadle's gown. Cranmer objected that mere bishops, being his inferiors, could not remove an archbishop's pall; he was told they acted as the pope's delegates.
Today's procedures are paperwork, not pageantry. The Catholic Church speaks of laicization, a permanent change by which a cleric is treated in law as a layman. It can be imposed as a punishment or granted as a favour when a priest asks, and it differs from suspension, a censure meant to end once the cleric repents. Rules introduced in 2009 made it easier for bishops to laicize priests who have abandoned ministry for more than five years and cause serious scandal, even if the priest objects.
Eastern Orthodox practice treats a laicized man's later sacred acts as normally invalid. A cleric may request laicization, often to remarry after divorce or widowhood, and stay in good standing; or a bishop may impose it for heresy or breaking vows, sometimes with excommunication. Only a holy synod can laicize a bishop.
Anglicans rarely defrock in the strict sense; their 39 Articles hold that even unworthy ministers administer valid sacraments. Instead, bishops withdraw licences, and the Church of England's Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 allows penalties up to a lifelong ban from ministry. United Methodist elders and deacons, by contrast, lose their credentials only by surrendering them or through a church trial, never by a bishop's word alone.
Source: Defrocking
