It would seem that Roman Catholics challenging the ban on married priests have found a leader in former Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo. He’s defiantly appeared with his bride from a 2001 Unification Church wedding at which hundreds of couples tied the knot. He stood his ground last month after being excommunicated for installing four married men as bishops. But the 76-year-old prelate from Zambia finds himself more shunned than celebrated, even by his ideological allies.

A Roman Catholic archbishop dismissed from the Church on Tuesday for consecrating four married men as bishops said yesterday that he does not accept his excommunication and will work to have the Vatican lift its requirement that priests be celibate. “We do not accept this excommunication and lovingly return it to His Holiness, our beloved Pope Benedict XVI, to . . . withdraw it and join us in recalling married priests to service once again,” Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo said in a written statement read for him at a news conference at Imani Temple in Northeast Washington.

At a time when the Roman Catholic church, like other traditional Christian denominations, needs all the believers it can get, the Vatican does not turn lightly to excommunication. Yet earlier this week Pope Benedict decided the time had come to throw bell, book and candle at one of the most trying members of his flock – not just any rebel Catholic, but an archbishop, no less. Emmanuel Milingo, once the archbishop of Lusaka in Zambia, has been in and out of trouble for more than 20 years now.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the Zambian prelate who angered the Vatican by getting married in 2001, has been excommunicated for again defying the Holy See by installing four married men as bishops, the Vatican said Tuesday.

An African archbishop who wants to make celibacy optional for priests installed four married men Sunday as Roman Catholic bishops. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo – whose marriage to a woman chosen by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon scandalized the Roman Catholic Church – performed the ceremonies at a Capitol Hill church.

African archbishop Emmanuel Milingo – whose marriage to a woman chosen by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon scandalized the Roman Catholic Church – says the Vatican is demanding that he end his new campaign for optional celibacy or lose his authority in the church.

Archbishop Milingo has gone off the rails again. But this extraordinary Zambian prelate seems to have spent more time off than on the rails over the past 25 years. He must qualify as one of the world's great eccentrics.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo says he has no intention of launching a new sect in Africa funded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon as a rival to Roman Catholicism, and charged that his latest break with the Vatican is the result of "intolerable restrictions" imposed on him over the last five years, as well as a deep "lack of appreciation" for his spiritual gifts as an exorcist.

Kenyan rebel Catholic priest, Fr Godfrey Shiundu, has welcomed controversial former Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo’s latest call on the Catholic Church to allow its clergy to marry.

The Vatican showed deep concern Thursday over a possible new scandal set off by an African archbishop after he announced he was championing the cause of married priests in the Roman Catholic Church.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Emmanuel Milingo, the African Catholic archbishop and faith healer who married in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2001 but later returned to the fold, has scandalised the Vatican yet again.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, whose 2001 marriage caused an international scandal within the Roman Catholic Church, set out on a new mission Wednesday to override church rules and let married priests continue their ministries.

Government has asked Zambia's High Commissioner to Britain, Anderson Chibwa who is also accredited to the Vatican to urgently seek clarification on the whereabouts of Roman Catholic Archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo who has been missing from his Zagarolo residence.

Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has disappeared from his Zagarolo residence outside Rome in bizarre circumstances.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the African faith healer and exorcist who shocked Catholics by marrying in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2001, returned to the Vatican Wednesday.

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