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Catholic World News News Feature

Archbishop Milingo to team with Dan Brown? August 23, 2006

Vatican officials fear that the renegade Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo may join forces with Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, the Universe newspaper has reported.

The troubled African prelate was reported to have reached a tentative agreement to assist Brown with a future novel about exorcism.

The Zambian prelate, who was appointed in 1969 to head the Lusaka diocese, first caused concern at the Vatican because of his unorthodox "healing services," at which he reported performing exorcisms as well as healing physical ailments.

Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code is based on a premise-- which the author contends is factual-- that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and their descendants are alive today. The novel depicts the Catholic Church as a brutal conspiracy to suppress this knowledge. The Da Vinci Code, which has sold over 40 million copies, has been roundly denounced by Church leaders as a vicious assault on Christian beliefs.

Vatican officials have been intensely concerned about Archbishop Milingo's behavior since the mercurial prelate disappeared from his residence outside Rome in June. The report that he would collaborate with the author of an anti-Catholic best-seller-- thus lending greater credence to Brown's conspiracy theories-- heightens that concern.

Archbishop Milingo's healing services drew widespread attention in Zambia, but also provoked complaints that he was acting as a "witch doctor," and eventually Vatican officials were convinced that he should be replaced. In 1982 he was summoned to Rome, and eventually pressured to resign as Bishop of Lusaka. Since that time he has been living in Italy, without a pastoral assignment. In 1996, new complaints from Italian bishops about his impromptu "healing services" in various diocese prompted a new disciplinary caution from the Vatican, instructing him not to hold services without the approval of the local bishop.

Archbishop Milingo's most spectacular departure from orthodoxy came in 2001, when he announced his adherence to the Unification Church, led by the self-proclaimed Korean messiah, Sun Myung Moon. In a mass wedding ceremony in New York, he took a Korean bride, chosen for him by Rev. Moon. In August of the same year a repentant Archbishop Milingo returned to Rome for a personal meeting with Pope John Paul II, renounced his attempted marriage, reaffirmed his Catholic faith, and disappeared for a year of reflection and prayer.

This year, after his disappearance in June, the archbishop surfaced in Washington, DC, on July 12, in the company of the self-proclaimed Archbishop George Stallings, a former Catholic priest who now heads a sect known as the African-American Catholic Congregation. In an appearance with Stallings at the National Press Club, Archbishop Milingo called for an end to priestly celibacy. The African archbishop later revealed that he had returned to the Korean woman he sought to marry in 2001.