Excommunicated Archbishop Milingo Condemns Catholic Church for Priests' Celibacy

Vatican excommunicated Zambian Archbishop Emanuel Milingo conducted a press conference on Wednesday, following the Vatican announcement of his excommunication for religious hazardous practices, in which he virulently condemned the Catholic Church for the fact that it continues to promote the celibacy rule for ordained priests, highlighting that a change in this department would make the institution a "healthier" one.

"The current priest shortage calls for emergency action", he declared during the conference. "I believe that the Catholic Church as a mother cannot be indifferent to the situation of married priests who have much suffering and are abandoned", he added, speaking both in English and in Italian, advocating for the idea that the Catholic Church should accept around 150,000 married priests around the world in order both to solve the clergy shortage and to endorse the institution of marriage.

While Vatican officials blamed Milingo for unorthodox practices such as mass exorcisms and ceremonial healings, but also for the fact that he married a South Korean woman in 2001, the latter accused the Vatican for the numerous sexual abuses' allegations that had been brought against it, especially against priests in the United States, highlighting that these represent proof for the fact that "something is wrong" and must be changed.

"We are well aware of the sexual misconduct within the Church. We believe that marriage is a way to heal the Church and to make it whole", Rev. George Augustus Stallings, a former religious official in the Washington Archdiocese, who founded the African American Catholic Congregation in 1989, after leaving the Roman Catholic Church, highlighted at the same press conference on Wednesday.

Milingo's comments were also joined by those of Rev. Patrick E. Trujillo of the Old Roman Catholic Church in Newark, New Jersey: "Conscience demands that this seriously unjust law of celibacy be broken".

The African Archbishop was excommunicated by the Vatican on Tuesday, following the ordination of four married men as priests, a ceremony which had not been allowed by the Vatican and which represented the last of the prelate's activities to be accepted by the Catholic Church. "The act of consecrating someone a bishop without papal mandate is one of the most serious canonical crimes that you can have. Breaking communion with the Church in this particular fashion is so serious because what it leads to is a schismatic church", Monsignor Brian Ferme, dean of The Catholic University of America's School of Canon Law stated.