VATICAN CITY: Emmanuel Milingo, the African Catholic archbishop and faith healer who married in the Rev Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2001 but later returned to the fold, has scandalised the Vatican yet again.
Dr Milingo went missing last month from a convent south of Rome where he had been living in near-seclusion for the past four years. He resurfaced in Washington on Wednesday and held a surprise news conference announcing that his new mission was to persuade the Vatican to allow priests to marry.
A Vatican source said Church officials were "shocked" by Dr Milingo's new outburst and said disciplinary measures could be announced. Sanctions could be as severe as excommunication.
A brief statement yesterday said the Vatican was still "waiting for precise information" about Dr Milingo's trip to the United States, but it added: "If the statements attributed to him about priestly celibacy are true, we would have no choice but to deplore them because the Church's discipline on this is well known."
In 2001, the former archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia, stunned the Vatican when he disappeared. He showed up in New York where, in a mass wedding, he married Maria Sung (43), a Korean woman chosen for him by controversial South Korean-born evangelist Moon.
Dr Milingo and Ms Sung went back to Italy separately. He said he wanted to return to the Church. She went on hunger strike, gave bedside interviews in her hotel room and claimed the Vatican had kidnapped her husband.
The Vatican never recognised the marriage and threatened Dr Milingo with excommunication, but the late Pope John Paul showed leniency and ordered his aides to try to bring him back into the fold. Dr Milingo left Sung, rejoined the Church and went into seclusion for a year of rehabilitation in South America before he returned to Italy and moved into a convent near Rome.
A Vatican source said he did not expect Pope Benedict to be as kind now that Dr Milingo had scandalised the Church for a second time.