Mike :)

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Note added at 4 mins (2007-09-06 04:01:45 GMT)
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The meaning from the Harper Collins Dictionary that fits the context.

I think "demotion" works perfectly.

de·motion n.
Synonyms: demote, break, bust2, degrade, downgrade, reduce
These verbs mean to lower in grade, rank, or status: was demoted from captain to lieutenant; a noncommissioned officer broken to the ranks; a detective who was busted to uniformed traffic patrol for insubordination; a supervisor degraded to an assistant; a popular author downgraded by critical opinion to a genre writer; was reduced from a command post to a desk job.
Antonym: promote

Good luck, Jane :)

Sugiero esta otra alternativa, que es la mencionada acá:

Excommunication was then the generic term for all coercive remedies used against delinquent members of the Church, and there were as many kinds of excommunication as there were grades of communion in the Christian society, either for the laity, or for the clergy. Thus some of the grades of the laity in the Church were the expiatores and pænitentes, again subdivided into consistentes, substrati, audientes, and flentes or lugentes. Then also, as now, some goods of the Church were common to all its members e.g., prayer, the sacraments, presence at the Holy Sacrifice, and Christian burial. Other goods again were proper to the various grades of clerics. Whoever was deprived of one or all of these rights, came under the general designation of excommunicated, i.e., one placed outside the communion to which his grade in the Church entitled him, either wholly or in part. (Bernardi, Com. in Jus Eccl., II, pt. II, diss. 3, cap. 5.) In earlier ecclesiastical documents therefore, excommunication and similar terms did not always mean censure, or a certain species of censure, but sometimes meant censure, sometimes poena, as explained below, and very often penance. In the later Roman legal terminology (Codex Theod. I tit.I, 7 de off. rector. provinc.) we find the word censure used in the general sense of punishment. Accordingly the Church, in the early ages, used this term to designate all her punishments, whether these were public penances, excommunications, or, in the case of clerics, ***suspension or degradation***. In her ancient penal legislation, the Church, like the Roman State, looked on punishment as consisting, not so much as the infliction of positive suffering, as in the mere deprivation of certain goods, rights, or privileges; these in the Church were spiritual good and graces, such as participation with the faithful in prayer, in the Holy Sacrifice, in the sacraments, in the general communion of the Church, or, as in the case of clerics, in the rights and honours of their office.



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Note added at 17 mins (2007-09-06 04:14:39 GMT)
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El mismo texto vuelve a mencionarlo:

Such are corporal and pecuniary punishments, imprisonment and seclusion for life in a monastery, deprivation of Christian burial, also the ***deposition and degradation of clerics as well as their suspension for a definite period of time.*** (Suspension latæ sententiæ, e.g., for one or for three years, is a censure, according to St. Alphonsus, Th. Mor. VII, n. 314.) Confession penances are vindictive punishments, their chief purpose being, not reformation, but reparation, and satisfaction for sins. The irregularity arising from a crime is not a censure, nor is it a vindictive punishment; in fact, it is not a punishment at all, properly speaking, but rather a canonical impediment, an inability to support the honour of the sacred ministry, which forbids the reception of orders, and the exercise of those received.