Saturday, 1 September 2001
01/09/2001
Milingo in a marriage knot
David Willey
01/09/2001
Milingo in a marriage knot
David Willey
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?tablet-00558
Anxiety is increasing in the Vatican as the wife whom Archbishop Milingo married in a mass ceremony conducted by the Revd Sun Myung Moon continues her hunger strike. Maria Sung says she will not stop until her husband meets her. The BBC's correspondent in Rome has been following the romance and separation. As dusk fell in Saint Peter's Square one torrid night last week, a small crowd of about 200 people, many of them carrying candles, gathered outside the barriers which close off the piazza from public access after hours. A car swept into view, and a pale-faced slightly dumpy Korean woman stepped out, supported by friends as she could barely walk. She was weakened by a hunger strike, having taken only water for the past fortnight. Television cameramen and journalists jostled for a place as she joined protesters standing behind a banner which asked, "Where is Archbishop Milingo"? Led by the Revd T.L. Barrett, a black American evangelical pastor, and the Revd Philip Schanker, vice-president of the Unification Church of the Revd Sun Myung Moon, they sang "Amen" and "When the Saints Go Marching In". If the Pope had been watching from his study window overlooking the piazza (he is in fact staying at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome), he might well have been puzzled as to what was going on below. The lady was Maria Sung Milingo, a Korean acupuncturist whose picture has appeared on the front pages of every Italian newspaper this holiday season. She has been coming to Saint Peter's Square each day at dawn to pray that God (and the Pope) might save her controversial marriage to Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, an African faith healer who for two decades has been an embarrassing thorn in the side of the Vatican. I first met Milingo in Rome in April 1982 when an African student arrived in my office bearing a scribbled handwritten note from the archbishop asking for my help. Milingo explained he was being held against his will in the convent of the Passionist fathers just behind the Colosseum. He had been summoned to Rome by his ecclesiastical superiors after incurring the displeasure of the Vatican on account of the healing ministry which he was exercising in the football stadium in Lusaka. His healing sessions attracted huge crowds, but he had been accused of "witchcraft" by some of his fellow clergy. He was sacked virtually overnight and ordered to Rome to undergo psychiatric tests. The story the archbishop told me when I visited him in his monastic cell - where he was indeed a virtual Vatican prisoner - suggested that the truth was not perhaps quite so simple. "You in the West have your psychiatrists", he said, "and we in Africa have our belief in spirits. I am only following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ when I cast out evil spirits." Consecrated bishop at the age of only 39 by the late Pope Paul VI during his historic visit to Uganda in 1969, Milingo related how he felt betrayed by the Church which he felt he had served faithfully all his life. He made it clear he had no ambition to found a schismatic African Church. But he was deeply hurt by the lack of understanding he had encountered in Rome. "I don't expect any ecclesiastical coup détat in Africa against Rome", he remarked. "I simply say, âI have got some different kind of flowers'. Instead of saying, âHow beautiful those flowers are!', the Vatican says, âOh, no! those flowers are pois-onous!'" Fast forward to 2001. Today the Vatican believes that Milingo's "poisonous flowers" are the more dangerous because of his affiliation with the Unification Church of the Revd Sun Myung Moon. The Moon organisation is relishing its role as guardian and press agent of Mrs Milingo. The archbishop's wife, who speaks only Korean peppered with a few halting words of Italian, remains determined to have a private meeting with her husband to discuss their future. Philip Schanker told me he had been appointed by Archbishop Milingo this summer to be his adviser as well. The vice-president of the Unification Church accused the Vatican of using the same brainwashing techniques which critics of the Moon organisation claim they use upon their members. Schanker rejected the statement put out by the Vatican which quoted the words of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, to the effect that Archbishop Milingo's "marriage" performed by the Revd Moon in a New York hotel last May "had nothing to do with true marriage and still less to do with Christian marriage". While McCarrick would consider only a Catholic marriage valid, Schanker said, he himself took a more ecumenical view. "Milingo himself has said his parents were married according to traditional African rites. Does that mean their marriage was also invalid?" In an interview from New York with the BBC's Sunday programme, Milingo explained the reasons for his marriage before his return to Rome and his meeting with the Pope: "Marriage is a natural state for a man. I myself have served the Church for so many years and then at a certain moment have understood the importance of marriage, that it is so important to restore family values. Unless we do that, we cannot bring peace to the world. The church authorities must listen to the people. Vox populi, vox Dei. At this time there are 120,000 priests who don't want to be called ex-priests but married priests." Archbishop Milingo arrived in Milan from New York on 6 August with his new wife and members of the Moon organisation. After checking in at an airport hotel, he managed to give them the slip and turned up at the Pope's residence at Castel Gandolfo on the evening of the following day asking for an audience. He was granted this the next day, since when he has disappeared from public view. He gave one brief interview to Italian TV and to a handful of Italian newspapers publicly bidding farewell to his wife, whom he referred to as his "sister" - and for whom, he promised, he would always offer his prayers. The Vatican says merely that the archbishop is on a spiritual retreat and that he will fix the details of his final meeting with Maria Sung himself when he feels ready to do so. Meanwhile some Italian bishops are beginning to feel uneasy about the cavalier attitude of the Vatican towards Mrs Milingo after her husband appeared to do a U-turn in his views on the right of priests to marry, following his meeting with the Pope. Alessandro Maggiolini, Bishop of Como and moral theologian, chosen by the Pope as the only Italian representative on the commission which wrote the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, has strongly criticised his brother bishop for the way in which he has treated Maria Sung. "Sung has been abandoned and humiliated. Her dignity has been abused. After suddenly abandoning her, someone must compensate her, not only with more or less sincere mea culpas but with something more concrete and lasting. Someone must safeguard her rights. And that someone can only be Mgr Milingo." The archbishop in his rather strained appearance on Italian TV seemed to rule out further husband-and-wife relations with Maria. But Mrs Milingo, sounding ever more as if she was reading extracts from a Mills & Boon love story, has been waxing lyrical about her brief love affair in innumerable interviews given from her hotel room near the Vatican, or after praying in Saint Peter's Square. She told the correspondent of Turin's La Stampa: "The love that he has always shown towards me will break the ice and cause the chains which keep us apart to fall away. They know in the Vatican that ours is a true relationship, a fusion of body and soul. That's why they don't want us to be alone face to face. They fear that the spark will revive our immense love for each other. . . . "He was forced to say he would love me like a sister. For 40 days after our marriage we lived a period of purification which demands complete abstinence from sexual relations. We exchanged a kiss and slept in separate beds, in order not to give way to temptation. "But afterwards there was a progressive increase in our intimacy. He used to call me âlittle one' and we exchanged sweet words all the time. "I have been looking at the videos of our news conferences in the United States. There Emmanuel has a serene and decisive expression on his face, quite different from the prostrated and weakened figure who appeared on Italian TV reading a letter addressed to me but certainly not written by him. I seemed to be in front of a person who was mechanically repeating meaningless words. "As soon as we see each other again, our love will break all boundaries like a river in flood. And everything will begin again with a kiss." In Catholic clerical culture, when a priest goes astray with a woman and later repents, she is generally expected to fade into the background while the priest wrestles with his interior demons. The woman is seen as an occasion of sin rather than a party to the conversation. Maria Sung, however, who this week repeated that she is prepared to fast till death, seems determined not to go down in history as the meek victim of a priest's sin. She has successfully projected her story as that of a wife's desperate struggle to reclaim her husband - who, she has said repeatedly, is a man before he is an archbishop. Why has the Vatican vacillated so much in its treatment of their errant bishop? He was originally given a deadline of 20 August to recant or to be formally excommunicated, but after his audience with the Pope this threat was discreetly withdrawn. One explanation could be the forthcoming Synod of Bishops which is due in Rome to discuss the whole role of the Catholic bishop in the modern Church. Unless the Milingo affair is settled quickly and in private, this soap opera could continue for weeks, filling the columns of newspapers with a juicy Vatican story. Another is that there is a real problem about celibacy for African clergy. In a continent where polygamy has for centuries been the cultural rule rather than the exception, and where celibacy is often seen as an eccentric European import, the spectacle of an African bishop standing up openly for married priests could add fuel to the growing demand among Catholics in other parts of the world for the Pope to abandon his veto on even discussing such a revolutionary change. And, finally, is Archbishop Milingo once again the virtual prisoner of the Vatican? Shall I receive another scribbled note shortly saying, "Help!"? More by David Willey Contents Page More on Africa More on International Church More on Other Faiths More on Personalities More on Vatican Affairs
© The Tablet Publishing Company
Anxiety is increasing in the Vatican as the wife whom Archbishop Milingo married in a mass ceremony conducted by the Revd Sun Myung Moon continues her hunger strike. Maria Sung says she will not stop until her husband meets her. The BBC's correspondent in Rome has been following the romance and separation. As dusk fell in Saint Peter's Square one torrid night last week, a small crowd of about 200 people, many of them carrying candles, gathered outside the barriers which close off the piazza from public access after hours. A car swept into view, and a pale-faced slightly dumpy Korean woman stepped out, supported by friends as she could barely walk. She was weakened by a hunger strike, having taken only water for the past fortnight. Television cameramen and journalists jostled for a place as she joined protesters standing behind a banner which asked, "Where is Archbishop Milingo"? Led by the Revd T.L. Barrett, a black American evangelical pastor, and the Revd Philip Schanker, vice-president of the Unification Church of the Revd Sun Myung Moon, they sang "Amen" and "When the Saints Go Marching In". If the Pope had been watching from his study window overlooking the piazza (he is in fact staying at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome), he might well have been puzzled as to what was going on below. The lady was Maria Sung Milingo, a Korean acupuncturist whose picture has appeared on the front pages of every Italian newspaper this holiday season. She has been coming to Saint Peter's Square each day at dawn to pray that God (and the Pope) might save her controversial marriage to Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, an African faith healer who for two decades has been an embarrassing thorn in the side of the Vatican. I first met Milingo in Rome in April 1982 when an African student arrived in my office bearing a scribbled handwritten note from the archbishop asking for my help. Milingo explained he was being held against his will in the convent of the Passionist fathers just behind the Colosseum. He had been summoned to Rome by his ecclesiastical superiors after incurring the displeasure of the Vatican on account of the healing ministry which he was exercising in the football stadium in Lusaka. His healing sessions attracted huge crowds, but he had been accused of "witchcraft" by some of his fellow clergy. He was sacked virtually overnight and ordered to Rome to undergo psychiatric tests. The story the archbishop told me when I visited him in his monastic cell - where he was indeed a virtual Vatican prisoner - suggested that the truth was not perhaps quite so simple. "You in the West have your psychiatrists", he said, "and we in Africa have our belief in spirits. I am only following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ when I cast out evil spirits." Consecrated bishop at the age of only 39 by the late Pope Paul VI during his historic visit to Uganda in 1969, Milingo related how he felt betrayed by the Church which he felt he had served faithfully all his life. He made it clear he had no ambition to found a schismatic African Church. But he was deeply hurt by the lack of understanding he had encountered in Rome. "I don't expect any ecclesiastical coup détat in Africa against Rome", he remarked. "I simply say, âI have got some different kind of flowers'. Instead of saying, âHow beautiful those flowers are!', the Vatican says, âOh, no! those flowers are pois-onous!'" Fast forward to 2001. Today the Vatican believes that Milingo's "poisonous flowers" are the more dangerous because of his affiliation with the Unification Church of the Revd Sun Myung Moon. The Moon organisation is relishing its role as guardian and press agent of Mrs Milingo. The archbishop's wife, who speaks only Korean peppered with a few halting words of Italian, remains determined to have a private meeting with her husband to discuss their future. Philip Schanker told me he had been appointed by Archbishop Milingo this summer to be his adviser as well. The vice-president of the Unification Church accused the Vatican of using the same brainwashing techniques which critics of the Moon organisation claim they use upon their members. Schanker rejected the statement put out by the Vatican which quoted the words of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, to the effect that Archbishop Milingo's "marriage" performed by the Revd Moon in a New York hotel last May "had nothing to do with true marriage and still less to do with Christian marriage". While McCarrick would consider only a Catholic marriage valid, Schanker said, he himself took a more ecumenical view. "Milingo himself has said his parents were married according to traditional African rites. Does that mean their marriage was also invalid?" In an interview from New York with the BBC's Sunday programme, Milingo explained the reasons for his marriage before his return to Rome and his meeting with the Pope: "Marriage is a natural state for a man. I myself have served the Church for so many years and then at a certain moment have understood the importance of marriage, that it is so important to restore family values. Unless we do that, we cannot bring peace to the world. The church authorities must listen to the people. Vox populi, vox Dei. At this time there are 120,000 priests who don't want to be called ex-priests but married priests." Archbishop Milingo arrived in Milan from New York on 6 August with his new wife and members of the Moon organisation. After checking in at an airport hotel, he managed to give them the slip and turned up at the Pope's residence at Castel Gandolfo on the evening of the following day asking for an audience. He was granted this the next day, since when he has disappeared from public view. He gave one brief interview to Italian TV and to a handful of Italian newspapers publicly bidding farewell to his wife, whom he referred to as his "sister" - and for whom, he promised, he would always offer his prayers. The Vatican says merely that the archbishop is on a spiritual retreat and that he will fix the details of his final meeting with Maria Sung himself when he feels ready to do so. Meanwhile some Italian bishops are beginning to feel uneasy about the cavalier attitude of the Vatican towards Mrs Milingo after her husband appeared to do a U-turn in his views on the right of priests to marry, following his meeting with the Pope. Alessandro Maggiolini, Bishop of Como and moral theologian, chosen by the Pope as the only Italian representative on the commission which wrote the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, has strongly criticised his brother bishop for the way in which he has treated Maria Sung. "Sung has been abandoned and humiliated. Her dignity has been abused. After suddenly abandoning her, someone must compensate her, not only with more or less sincere mea culpas but with something more concrete and lasting. Someone must safeguard her rights. And that someone can only be Mgr Milingo." The archbishop in his rather strained appearance on Italian TV seemed to rule out further husband-and-wife relations with Maria. But Mrs Milingo, sounding ever more as if she was reading extracts from a Mills & Boon love story, has been waxing lyrical about her brief love affair in innumerable interviews given from her hotel room near the Vatican, or after praying in Saint Peter's Square. She told the correspondent of Turin's La Stampa: "The love that he has always shown towards me will break the ice and cause the chains which keep us apart to fall away. They know in the Vatican that ours is a true relationship, a fusion of body and soul. That's why they don't want us to be alone face to face. They fear that the spark will revive our immense love for each other. . . . "He was forced to say he would love me like a sister. For 40 days after our marriage we lived a period of purification which demands complete abstinence from sexual relations. We exchanged a kiss and slept in separate beds, in order not to give way to temptation. "But afterwards there was a progressive increase in our intimacy. He used to call me âlittle one' and we exchanged sweet words all the time. "I have been looking at the videos of our news conferences in the United States. There Emmanuel has a serene and decisive expression on his face, quite different from the prostrated and weakened figure who appeared on Italian TV reading a letter addressed to me but certainly not written by him. I seemed to be in front of a person who was mechanically repeating meaningless words. "As soon as we see each other again, our love will break all boundaries like a river in flood. And everything will begin again with a kiss." In Catholic clerical culture, when a priest goes astray with a woman and later repents, she is generally expected to fade into the background while the priest wrestles with his interior demons. The woman is seen as an occasion of sin rather than a party to the conversation. Maria Sung, however, who this week repeated that she is prepared to fast till death, seems determined not to go down in history as the meek victim of a priest's sin. She has successfully projected her story as that of a wife's desperate struggle to reclaim her husband - who, she has said repeatedly, is a man before he is an archbishop. Why has the Vatican vacillated so much in its treatment of their errant bishop? He was originally given a deadline of 20 August to recant or to be formally excommunicated, but after his audience with the Pope this threat was discreetly withdrawn. One explanation could be the forthcoming Synod of Bishops which is due in Rome to discuss the whole role of the Catholic bishop in the modern Church. Unless the Milingo affair is settled quickly and in private, this soap opera could continue for weeks, filling the columns of newspapers with a juicy Vatican story. Another is that there is a real problem about celibacy for African clergy. In a continent where polygamy has for centuries been the cultural rule rather than the exception, and where celibacy is often seen as an eccentric European import, the spectacle of an African bishop standing up openly for married priests could add fuel to the growing demand among Catholics in other parts of the world for the Pope to abandon his veto on even discussing such a revolutionary change. And, finally, is Archbishop Milingo once again the virtual prisoner of the Vatican? Shall I receive another scribbled note shortly saying, "Help!"? More by David Willey Contents Page More on Africa More on International Church More on Other Faiths More on Personalities More on Vatican Affairs
© The Tablet Publishing Company