Any question as to whether Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has been excommunicated has been settled because this past weekend he ordained four married men as Catholic bishops. While the Archdiocese of Washington tries to wish this away by saying, “This means nothing within the church,” according to spokesman Susan Gibbs, the fact is that these are valid, if illicit, ordinations. (Unlike the women who attempted ordination as priests this past summer; those were clearly invalid and illicit.)
It’s amusing that one of the four is George Stallings, a schismatic Catholic priest who was calling himself archbishop before. Apparently Milingo’s ordination of him as bishop is a demotion. All five of them claim affiliation with the schismatic Old Catholic Churches.
What’s not amusing is that these five men are now officially excommunicated, if they had not been before, according to Ed Peters. Make no mistake that this is a very serious matter that can and probably will lead many well-meaning Catholics into schism.
I don’t think we can blame Rome for this one, except to ask how this guy got ordained to the episcopacy in the first place. Other than that, you have to ask what could have been done short of locking him up in Castel Sant’Angelo for the rest of his life. He is a loose cannon with no regard for what’s right, obviously an egomaniac with a dubious grip on reality.
Pray for him and for the four men he ordained and their wives that they can repent and avoid the fires of hell.
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The link to the ordination story is broken, but here’s the link Ed Peters referenced.
The four guys the Archbishop consecrated all have been claiming to be bishops for some time, with consecrations obtained through “independent Catholic” sources. They belong to four different sects.
I wonder whether Abp. Milingo knows that a Washington Post series accused “His Holiness, Patriarch” Stallings of multiple homosexual relationships, including with a 16-year-old altar boy.
Anyway, here are two websites of Milingo’s movement, one claiming absurdly to be a personal prelature.