African archbishop's Moonie wedding stuns the Church

From Bruce Johnston in Rome
THE VATICAN was this week assessing the damage caused by the marriage of a controversial African archbishop to a Korean Moonie.
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, 71, was married by the Rev Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church founder, to Maria Sung, a 43-year-old acupuncture doctor, in a group ceremony in a New York hotel on Sunday.
Archbishop Milingo, the Rome-based emeritus Archbishop of Lusaka, had been "cast out of the Church" because of his gesture, the Vatican said.
But while this was taken to mean he had been excommunicated, the reason was not because he had married but because of apostasy since he taken part in a public ceremony of a sect which was seen as a "betrayal of faith".
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls said Mgr Milingo had dealt a "serious injury to the communion that bishops must above all others show to have with the Church".
He could thus no longer be considered a bishop of the Catholic Church, and could now expect Canon Law sanctions. The Vatican did not mention a fear that Archbishop Milingo could return to Africa to found his own church with Rev Moon's financial help.
Archbishop Milingo said after his marriage: "With my companion Maria, I will return to Africa, a continent suffering from the scourge of AIDS, and which lives in political, economic, and social confusion, but which still has a rich heritage of traditional values."
He said he now wanted to return to create "an African movement" that would be focused on his alleged powers as a healer and exorcist.
A media star with his televised exorcisms, and a singer and dancer who has cut a rap CD, the archbishop is popular with Africans and a cause for concern for Africa's bishops.
Archbishop Milingo founded two chanties, and also two religious orders the Brothers of St John the Baptist, and the Daughters of the Redeemer.
In Lusaka, before he was forcibly transferred to Rome in 1983. thousands of people thronged into his palace seeking his intervention after he learned one day in 1973 "that God had given me the power to heal and to exorcise".
The hierarchy, he said, was "frightened that a personality cult was being born, and that I was becoming a kind of African Messiah".
He was sent to Rome on the pretext that he was going to work with the Pope. "But the Pope didn't even see me once for the first 14 months," he complained this week.
He was later barred from saying Mass at all. A fellow exorcist Fr Gabriel Amorth said that the archbishop had been "brainwashed".
Archbishop Milingo himself explained his decision to marry, by saying: "Twenty years of being humiliated by the Church of Rome has forced me to search more carefully for the truth."
This he said he had found in the teachings of the Rev 9
Moon, even though he insists he has not departed from the Catholic faith.
His growing proximity to the Rev Moon led to his presence as an "observer" at a ceremony in which 10,000 couples were wed by the Rev Moon in a Seoul stadium. After complaints from leaders of the Korean Church, the Vatican punished the archbishop first by removing his curial post, and then, several months ago, by evicting him from his Vatican quarters, where he performed exorcisms and healings.
Born in a poor village in Zambia, Milingo was made a bishop by Pope Paul VI in 1969, when only 39. He became famous for mass exorcisms and healing sessions during the celebration of the Eucharist — often with African chanting throughout.
In the 1970s, he was falsely accused of being a witchdoctor. Later, in Rome, he worked as special delegate to the Pontifical Council for Migrants.
In a short time, he resumed his sessions, including in his own home — on Vatican property — and in Zagarolo, a nearby town, during which people regularly fell to the ground in trances.