USA: Excommunicated Archbishop Milingo plans to ordain more married men as priests

The Roman Catholic Church must modernize and cannot order priests to continue the act of celibacy, excommunicated African Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo said on Friday (December 08) ahead of a summit of married priests. The former Vatican official, excommunicated in September after he ordained four married men as priests, said he would grow his group, Married Priests Now!, as a church within a church and accused the Catholic Church of driving away men from the priesthood. "What does the Catholic Church want? Does it want to be alone in the whole world? Sending away the children of God who meant to remain in the church, and the Catholic church is there to scatter them," said 76-year-old Milingo, who has rejected his excommunication. More than 200 married priests, who had to leave the church when they wed, are due to attend the New Jersey meeting this weekend organized by Married Priests Now!, ending with Milingo ordaining three married men on Sunday (December 10). Priests were permitted to marry during the first millennium, but marriage was condemned by the Church at the Second Lateran Council in 1139. Milingo said that allowing priests to marry would return the church to its original origins. He said, "The original priesthood is the priesthood of the married priest. That's the original priesthood. This celibacy had been added, the word added. And so why was it added? By the will of man and exaggerated its value. It has proven, as a matter of fact, that it has done a lot of harm." Milingo, the archbishop emeritus of Lusaka, Zambia, addressed the press with his Korean wife, Maria Sung, by his side. Milingo and Sung married in a mass ceremony in 2001 held by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, but the Vatican never recognized the union. Milingo later left Sung to live in near seclusion for several years at a convent near Rome. But then he disappeared in June and turned up in Washington in July to unveil his group Married Priests Now! Archbishop Peter Paul Brennan, Milingo's deputy in Married Priests Now! and one of the four priests ordained by Milingo in September, said the group had written to Pope Benedict to ask him to work with them, but were yet to receive a response. Said Brennan, "We think the answer is very simple. It's simply to ordain married men, and to receive back the married priests who were actually thrown away from the church. Here are educated men, qualified men, who have years of experience, and they were just automatically dismissed from the church because they're married. I think there has to be a way of reconciling that, by possibly having the church apologize for the way they've treated married priests, and having married priests apologize for any harm or disturbance they may have brought to the church." Brennan said that during the past 30 years up to 30,000 priests in the United States and 150,000 priests worldwide -- a third of priests -- had left the active ministry because they got married.

ITN Source | December 9, 2006

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