An archbishop excommunicated for marrying in a cult ceremony believes he is on a divine mission, writes Tom Henniganin São Paolo.
It is a fair bet that, of all the Masses celebrated in Christendom last Sunday, the strangest was one particular ceremony in São Paulo, Brazil's industrial capital.
The congregation was made up of about 1,000 members of the Revd Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church - better known as the Moonies - who had to be instructed on what to expect at a Catholic Mass.
The chief celebrant was Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the excommunicated former head of the Catholic Church in Zambia and perhaps the Vatican's most notorious rebel of recent years.
The ceremony itself was a four-hour freewheeling improvisation and, while mainly Catholic in nature, it mixed in elements of Unificationism.
Milingo is no stranger to controversy. A charismatic preacher with a large following in several countries, he shocked Rome when he announced in 2001 that, at 71, he had been married in a Unification wedding ceremony conducted by Moon.
Summoned by Pope John Paul II, he quickly disowned his actions and for five years lived in relative seclusion in Italy, only to flee last year to the US and back to his wife.
He then founded Married Priests Now! - four of whose members joined him at the altar on Sunday - and he now leads a campaign for an end to celibacy for Catholic priests. When he consecrated four married priests as bishops in September 2006, Rome finally excommunicated him.
Now, with the aid of Moon's church, Milingo travels the world on what he says is a divinely ordained mission to reconcile the Catholic Church with married priests, of whom there are an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 worldwide.
"The Virgin Mary sent me a message saying, 'The situation of the priests in the Catholic Church is disastrous and if you do not do something the consequences will be terrible,'" he says. "At first I wept and felt helpless but then I undertook this mission."
It is just the latest twist in the remarkable career of one of the church's star African leaders. Ordained in 1958, he became a bishop in 1969 after two spells of study in Dublin.
A radio ministry and a reputation for casting out demons made him Zambia's best-known churchman. But Rome became concerned about reports that he was incorporating native African beliefs into his preaching and, in 1982, the Vatican summoned him to explain. After a private audience, Pope John Paul II assured him that he would be allowed to continue preaching. But it would have to be in Italy instead of Zambia, as he was given a desk job in the Curia.
But if the job was meant to shunt Milingo into obscurity, it failed. Within a couple of years his reputation as a healer and exorcist made him a star in Italy as well.
But, despite the personal protection of the Pope, many in the Vatican
remained suspicious of this African exorcist, and Milingo chafed under what he felt were the increasing restrictions that the Vatican's bureaucracy placed on him.
In 1996 he angrily claimed that Satanism was being practised at the highest levels of the Vatican. By the late 1990s he had come into contact with Moon's followers, which led to his decision to marry Maria Sung, a Korean acupuncturist selected for him by Moon.
Rome accused Moon of luring Milingo into marriage and hinted that his plan was to foment a schism in the African church and control a breakaway group through Milingo. Milingo lent his support to this version of events after he recanted, but now says it was invented by Vatican bureaucrats who surrounded him with "spies" in a form of house arrest.
His decision to return to his wife and his subsequent full-scale assault on celibacy seems to mark a final break with Rome. Interviewed after Sunday's Mass, the soft-spoken Milingo is adamant that celibacy is the biggest threat to the Catholic Church today.
"Celibacy has become an idol," he says. "But celibacy is an appendix of ordination. It cannot become the essence. In history the Catholic Church had married priests, married popes, even some apostles. Jesus never insisted on celibacy."
This last statement probably explains the Unificationists' support for Milingo. They believe that Jesus was murdered before he could complete his mission - to marry and have children - and that mission instead passed to Moon, one of whose titles is "Lord of the Second Advent".
Moon preaches that, by sinning, Adam and Eve became "evil parents" and that mankind can only leave behind their "evil lineage" and move to "true lineage" by means of marriages blessed by the "true parents", ie Moon and his wife.
For Unificationists, whose cultish notoriety stems in large part from their mass arranged wedding ceremonies, matrimony is at the centre of their faith, and a Catholic archbishop married in one of their wedding ceremonies was a publicity coup for Moon's church.
But, while it seems clear that Moon is bankrolling Milingo's anti-celibacy campaign, the rebel archbishop says he is still a Catholic and that his relationship with Moon is based on a desire to promote ecumenism.
"A real Christian is one who knows how to love without distinction," he contends. "There are many shared points on which Revd Moon and I can build in order to work together. If we go on with exclusion against Moonies or Muslims or whoever, then we contradict what we call ecumenism."
All involved seemed happy with Sunday's "ecumenical" encounter in São Paulo. Unificationists eagerly participated in the Catholic Mass, singing their own hymns and partaking in communion.
The local Unification leadership, directed by Moon since the mid-1990s to start reaching out to other religions, looked pleased with proceedings.
Sitting in the sacristy afterwards, Milingo looked tired from the marathon service.
His wife brought him a glass of water and helped rearrange his chair. But, however tiring or improbable his mission seems, he remains convinced of its divinely ordained success.
"I receive regular messages from the Virgin Mary saying 'do this, do that', and also messages from John Paul II. So this is how I am encouraged in this particular mission."