Archbishop Milingo excommunicated
On September 26, a communiqué from the Press Bureau of the Holy See announced: “The Holy See watched with great apprehension the recent activity of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, former archbishop of Lusaka (Zambia), with a new association of married priests, spreading divisions and confusion among the faithful.” (…) “Personalities at different levels in the Church tried to contact Archbishop Milingo to dissuade him from carrying on actions which were causing scandal, especially among the faithful who had followed his pastoral ministry in favor of the poor and the sick.” The Holy See “waited with a vigilant patience to see how things would evolved (…) taking into account the understanding recently manifested towards this aged pastor of the Church by the successor of Peter himself.” But Mgr Milingo has settled into a situation of irregularity and of progressively open rupture of the communion with the Church, first with his attempted marriage, then with the consecration of four bishops in Washington D.C. on Sunday September 24.
“By reason of this public act, it is specified, Mgr Milingo and the four bishops consecrated by him have incurred excommunication latæ sententiæ foreseen by canon 1382 of the Code of Canon Law.” “The Church does not recognize and does not want to recognize in the future these consecrations and all the ordinations which will issue from them, and it maintains that the canonical status of the four presupposed bishops (George Augustus Stallings, Peter Paul Brennan, Patrick Trujillo, and Joseph Gouthro) is that in which they were before the consecration.”
The 76 year-old Zambian archbishop, had “married” the Korean Maria Sung, an MD and adept of the Moon Sect, in New York in 2001. After having made amends, Archbishop Milingo, came back into the Catholic Church, and was sent in “retirement under surveillance” in an Italian village. He disappeared a few months ago and reappeared in Washington in company of his “spouse” in July.
“We have only one objective, the restoration of a married clergy in the Western Catholic Church,” declared Mgr Milingo on September 27. Let “Benedict XVI reconsider the excommunication and join us to call upon married priests to minister again.” “We do not accept this excommunication and we lovingly send it back to His Holiness,” he concluded.